Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

The post The Border Propagandist appeared first on Coda Story.

As early as the afternoon of October 7th, when word first broke of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Abu-Jamei had a troubling sense of what might follow. His house sits not far from the Israeli border, and he and his family fled on that very day with little more than the clothes they were wearing. After a short stay in a school in Rafah, they went in search of a better place to live. They ended up dropping their belongings on a piece of empty land near a bit of running water. Under the circumstances, this amounted to a luxury.

Despite Israel’s monthslong attacks on Gaza, the house that Abu-Jamei and his family left behind remained untouched all through the long months they stayed in the tents. The home was still standing the day they arrived safely in Egypt, the war far behind them.

But as Abu-Jamei knows better than most people, one cannot simply leave a war behind, and attempting to will away its psychic effects is an illusory trick. He has spent his career studying trauma, war, and the psychological damage caused by violence. As a psychiatrist, he began working with patients scarred by Israel’s 2014 war with Gaza. For the past decade, he has been the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, a mental health service provider in Palestine that affords counseling and resources to countless patients in the region.

During his first night in Cairo, sleeping quietly in a bed far from the cold night air and the flapping of the tent, the fact that he was safe provided only so much comfort. He could not help but think of his uncles and cousins who were still in tents. “I could not split both feelings,” he said. “I felt ashamed that I was out. I still feel guilty. There is survivor guilt. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling, you know?”

Abu-Jamei’s own work taught him not to be surprised by the intrusion of such thoughts. Over the years of conflict in Palestine, he’d spent many hours working with children and adults who were traumatized. Adults, he explained, could talk through their feelings and thoughts, but children often didn’t have the language or understanding for such conversations, even if they had the very real need. So, he and his colleagues would use puppets for them to act out their emotions. When words failed, they used toy planes and tanks to allow the children to construct physical scenarios. At times, however,  during the most recent bombings it was almost impossible to find toys for this work.

Abu-Jamei explained how, paradoxically, it was often when the worst bombing was over that people began reacting to the trauma. In moments like this, there was time to reflect rather than simply revert to survival instincts. That is when Abu-Jamei’s work was most important and most sought. Now that he is in Egypt, he plans to implement a telephone help line that his center has run for years but was routinely rendered useless during the war by a lack of electricity and Wi-Fi. The hope is to establish a secure phone line to psychiatrists outside of Gaza who can answer calls and work with patients stuck in the war zone.

Most people in Gaza have not been as fortunate as Abu-Jamei in finding the means to flee the war. He is the first person to recognize his privilege in being able to pay the steep price to leave, and although he is better off than many, it was still a considerable burden for him. During the ongoing bombardment of Palestine, the Rafah border crossing has emerged as the sole route out of the country. But only the fortunate few with money, foreign passports, or approved medical reasons have managed to cross this border into Egypt. The fees to cross are roughly $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child—a sum that is out of reach for most. The “travel bureau” tasked with facilitating crossing is Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company with reputed ties to the Egyptian security services. Once the fee is paid, a name is added to a list. Every night, those who have paid check the list on Facebook pages and Telegram channels to see who will be able to cross into Egypt the following day. If you’re lucky, you’ll be among the hundreds that cross the border every morning at Rafah.

It wasn’t until he arrived in Cairo that Abu-Jamei learned that his house had, in fact, just recently been destroyed. He and his wife spent 17 years carefully building and decorating their home. Whenever they had a bit of extra money, they put it toward a new improvement on the building—a second bathroom, a new sofa, a special refrigerator. Like many other Gazans, he kept tabs on his neighborhood during the war by looking at videos that Israeli soldiers posted on TikTok. He pulled out his phone as we talked and showed me a TikTok posted by a member of the Israel Defense Forces. It shows a truck barreling down a dirt road, empty lots and homes on either side. “See, there,” he says, pausing the video. “That’s our house.” On that day, at least, he knew because of the timestamp of the video that his home was still standing.

But the next series of photos he shows me are of rubble. His cousins can be seen walking across a pile of cinder blocks that had once been his house. “They went to search to see if they could find anything worth salvaging,” he said. But all they were able to find were one or two mismatched earrings and a brooch—“presents I’d bought for my daughters over the years” when he’d traveled abroad to give a lecture or attend a conference. “I traveled often for a Gazan, maybe twice a year, and I always brought them back gifts.”

It’s late, and Abu-Jamei and I have been speaking for several hours. The café had filled with young people clustered around tables, talking animatedly. Downtown Cairo was full of life: strolling shoppers, fashionable women walking next to young religious scholars, exuberant soccer fans watching the latest match at packed sidewalk cafes. We stepped outside to say our goodbyes on the street. Abu-Jamei stood still as the traffic of Cairo swerved by and the florescent lights of downtown shops blinked behind him. A calm man amid the noise. He stayed there on the sidewalk, talking as if he were in no hurry to say goodbye, even though I imagine he had a hundred obligations, a thousand things to do. Among them were things to buy: basic household items and new clothing for his wife and children, who were still wearing  clothes from the tents. And there were people back in Gaza relying on him for assistance. Finally, he shrugged, smiled gently and stepped out into the street to walk home. Or, what serves as home for now.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Yasser Abu-Jamei as told to Kira Brunner Don

Most of the population is severely affected psychologically and have physical ailments, but their main concerns at the moment are their basic needs. It’s reported now that in the Gaza Strip one third of the population faces level three famine—this means that there is an urgent need for food support. No one can sleep without food, but now everyone in the north of Gaza—600,000 people—are basically starving. 

I lived in a shelter for three weeks, and then moved to a tent, where I stayed with my children and my family for about three months. Tents do not have privacy. Whenever you talk, everyone listens. We were in a place with tents for my uncles and my cousins, we were all next to each other—maybe 15 families together. There is no variety of food; no fruit, for example, and vegetables are very rare and expensive. In December and January we managed to buy chicken only once; fruit only once. One chicken was about 70 shekels or $20. Who can afford that? Since there was no variety of food items, I saw that my kids were losing weight. The whole Gaza Strip was losing weight. You could see it in your friends when you meet them after two or three weeks. And it was a problem, especially for the kids.

During war time, people rarely get mental health services, unless there is a clear instance of trauma. Everyone is preoccupied with safety and finding food. But a couple of weeks after a ceasefire takes place, people notice something is wrong with their kids or themselves, and then they would start to seek mental health intervention. That’s why we usually see an influx of patients or clients two or three weeks after a ceasefire. 

I’ll give you a very clear example. A lot of people are always trying to hear news about their loved ones, about their homes, their houses, their neighborhoods—whether people that are missing have been killed, whether they have been detained, whether they are in the rubble. And they hope for the best, of course. So people are between frustration and hope all the time. When a ceasefire takes place, everyone starts to move around and go back to their homes to find out what happened, then they start to face the reality. They lost their house. They lost their loved one. You end up not only homeless but also broken. There is no place to go to. Aid takes ages to come. What can you do? And then people start to show symptoms and they start to come and visit us. 

One of the main services we offer is telephone counseling. It’s a toll free line. We were not sure that our colleagues would be able to answer the phones because of the lack of power, so that’s why we have partner organizations in the West Bank we forward our telephone line to so that their psychologist can help our people. It’s a relief.

For the last two months, we sent our psychologist to provide psychological first aid. They go to the shelters, they identify the main issues. The issues that adults and children have are a little bit different—at the moment, adults show anxiety about the future; what might happen at any moment; the bombardment, tanks. They are between desperation and depression. Others feel that there is no way out or that an end is coming close. There are a lot of family quarrels and social issues because of the pressure and the stresses and the lack of resources. A lot of disputes happen in the community. And then there are also sleep difficulties.

Children have different symptoms. Their main thing is fear. They’re just afraid and they long for their normal life. They ask when are we going to go back to school, their neighborhoods, their homes. And there is no answer to that. Then there are behavioral changes. A lot of children, especially the younger ones, become more irritable, more hypervigilant. They are more worried and agitated. They can’t stand still. And they start to be disobedient. They fight more, they become more angry, they become more aggressive. And with the night terrors and nightmares, they wake up in the middle of the night screaming. 

My youngest child is two and a half. She used to scream in the middle of the night. The conditions were really terrible. But when we moved to Rafah, the bombardment was less frequent and the nights were calmer, but it was still terrible. The good thing is that there were a lot of children in the community in those fifteen tents where we stayed. So children were spending a lot of time together playing with the sand. My wife used to joke and say that during the day, the tent was like an incubator, and sometimes she called it a greenhouse. It was extremely hot so it was good the kids could stay outside. And in the night, the tents were freezing cold.

And who are the most affected? It’s the vulnerable groups—women, children, disabled people, people with chronic illnesses. As a mental health professional, my eyes are always on the most vulnerable groups because they are more impacted and the psychological implications are more apparent. My team and I try to do our best. 

If a ceasefire happens tomorrow, it will take two or three months for caravans to come. And then the authorities, whether local or national organizations—will they prioritize mental health, or are they going to prioritize housing? We are in this struggle all the time. We feel that mental health is not prioritized compared to other health issues like emergency health. 

I do think there will be a ceasefire, but look. We live in the least transparent area in the world. You never know what’s happening. You never know what’s on the table. What’s below the table? You never know what the negotiations are really about. And even when a ceasefire is reached, you don’t know what the deal is. That’s historically what I feel. I lead one of the main civil society organizations in Gaza Strip, we’re quite known locally, internationally, quite respected for our work, and we never know what’s happening. So given that, what we have is just hope. And we do have hope, sometimes it’s stupid hope, but what else is there to do? That’s the thing that keeps you running. There is no other way.

The post Fear and hope in wartime Gaza appeared first on Coda Story.

“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.

More than 300 square miles of land along Greece’s border with Turkey have been devastated by the blaze, which is the worst wildfire ever recorded in Europe. Lightning strikes were suspected to be the cause, but the arrests of 160 people across Greece on charges of arson — 42 for deliberately starting fires and the rest for negligence leading to fires — have heightened local anger.

Speculation that foreigners ignited the fires was also linked to the charred remains of 18 suspected migrants, two of them children, found on August 22. The deceased, sheltering in the forest, appear to have been trapped as gale-force winds spread the blaze with devastating speed. One group was found huddled together, appearing to have clutched each other as the fire claimed their lives. Earlier this month, the Greek authorities said they had rescued a group of 25 migrants who were trapped in the Dadia Forest, where fires blazed for more than two weeks.

A few days after the video began circulating on social media, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis stood in front of parliament to defend his government’s performance in the face of mounting cries of incompetence. 

“It is almost certain,” Mitsotakis claimed, “that the causes were man-made.” He added: “It is also almost certain that this fire was started on routes that are often used by illegal migrants who have entered our country.”

Mitsotakis didn’t present any evidence to back up his certainty. Indeed, the only thing he conceded he didn’t know was if the fires were caused by negligence or if they were “deliberate.”

Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.  

For decades, migrants have crossed through the forests and the cold, fast-moving Evros River to get from Turkey to Greece. Sometimes, they find themselves in no-man’s land, trapped on islets that appear to be controlled by neither Greece nor Turkey. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that migrants, if they make it over to the Greek riverbank, are sometimes turned over by the authorities to “men who appear to be of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin,” who are tasked with forcing the migrants onto rubber dinghies and leaving them in the middle of the Evros River. From there, the migrants either take shelter on an islet or wade back to the Turkish side where they are also not welcome.

Political scientist Pavlous Roufos, who has written extensively about Greek social movements and the 2010 economic crisis, told me, “There’s a kind of dehumanization of the migrant situation happening in Greece at the moment.” Now a professor at the University of Kassel, in central Germany, Rouflos monitors both the physical violence migrants face and the disinformation being spread online about their responsibility for the wildfires in Evros. 

“What we are seeing online,” Roufos told me, “is just a fraction of what’s happening in these communities. You can multiply those videos by 20 or 30 to get the real picture.”

Local antipathy towards migrants in Evros shows, Roufos suggests, how little has changed since February 2020, when Turkey announced that it would open its western borders for migrants and asylum seekers looking to go to Europe. In what became known as the “Evros Crisis,” Greece responded by shutting its borders, suspending asylum laws and violently arresting and pushing refugees back over the border toward Turkey. Armed citizen groups, similar to those who rounded up migrants in Evros last month, stood shoulder to shoulder with Greek border guards to repel asylum seekers trying to enter Greece.

In September 2020, when fires tore through the Moria camp, a squalid housing unit for 13,000 refugees in a village in the northeastern Greek island of Lesvos, anti-immigrant groups helped police block people from getting to safety in neighboring towns. Six Afghans were convicted on arson charges, though human rights lawyers familiar with the case have argued that the refugees were framed and that their jailing was a matter of political expediency rather than justice.

During both events, there were huge surges of activity in online groups promoting extremist and anti-migrant narratives, according to a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The researchers tracked nearly 2,000 Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted harmful rhetoric around the incident: They pushed the narrative that refugees deliberately started the Moria fires and were, in some cases, burning their children to elicit sympathy. The accounts also pushed white supremacist campaigns like #TheGreatReplacement, which refers to a conspiracy theory that foreigners are seeking to culturally and demographically replace the white race. 

The researchers wrote that their work “makes clear that the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for mobilizing a transnational network of actors, including far-right extremists and elements of the political right, who often share common audiences and use similar tactics.”

After the German government promised to accommodate 1,500 asylum seekers from Moria, German far right groups were also set off, with accounts linked to far right political parties, like the Alternative for Germany, spreading new rounds of hate and disinformation targeting migrants. 

The spread of these narratives has coincided with the rise of the far right in Europe, where populist movements are uniting across borders and merging with previous center-right factions over issues like migration, identity and Islamophobia. Similar to Austria and Italy, Greece is seeing a shift to the right. Three ultranational parties won 12% of the seats in parliament in recent elections, and the ruling conservative New Democracy party has been accused of pandering to extremist agendas to keep poll numbers up.

“The toxic narrative against migrants has been going on for a long time,” Lefteris Papagiannakis, the head of the Greek Refugee Council, told me. “The violence was to be expected as we have already seen it in Lesvos in 2019,” he added, referring to racist attacks against migrants housed on the Greek island. Attacks in the past have targeted not just migrants but also rights activists and NGOs assisting refugees. Lefteris says he and his colleagues are “worried, of course.”

But the wildfires and the damage they have caused have catalyzed a fresh wave of anti-migrant anger. By implying that migrants might be arsonists, Greek politicians, including the prime minister, appear to have the backs of the vigilantes.

The post While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants appeared first on Coda Story.

I came to the U.K. with my family when I was a young kid, fleeing a civil war. I went to preschool, high school and college here. I’m in my thirties now and have a kid of my own. I don’t know anything about the country I was born in — England is all I know. 

I got my permanent residency when I was little. I remember my dad also started applying for our British citizenship when I was younger but never quite got his head around the bureaucracy. 

When I got older, I got into a lifestyle I shouldn’t have and was arrested and given a criminal sentence and jail time. The funny thing is, just before I was arrested, I had finally saved up enough to start the process of applying for citizenship myself but never got around to it in time.

In the U.K., if you’re not a citizen and you commit a crime, the government has the power to deport you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life. So now, I’m fighting the prospect of being kicked out of the only country I’ve ever known. 

When I finished my sentence, they kept me in prison under immigration powers. When I finally got bail, they said I’d have to wear a GPS-powered ankle tag so that I didn’t disappear. I couldn’t believe it. If I had been a British citizen, when I finished my sentence that would be it, I’d be free. But in the eyes of the government, I was a foreigner, and so the Home Office — immigration — wanted to keep an eye on me at all times. 

My appointments with immigration had a strange quality to them. I could tell from the way we communicated that the officers instinctively knew they were talking to a British person. But the system had told them to treat me like an outsider and to follow the procedures for deporting me. They were like this impenetrable wall, and they treated me like I was nothing because I didn’t have a passport. They tried to play dumb, like they had no idea who I was or that I had been here my whole life, even though I’ve always been in the system.

I tried to explain there was no need to tag me and that I would never abscond. After all, I have a child here who I want to stay with. They decided to tag me anyway.

The day came when they arrived in my holding cell to fit the tag. I was shocked by its bulkiness. I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to cover this up under my jeans?’ I love to train and keep fit, but I couldn’t imagine going to the gym with this thing around my ankle. 

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to wear that thing. When I was first released — after many months inside — it felt amazing to be free, to wake up whenever I wanted and not have to wait for someone to come and open my door.

But gradually, I started to realize I wasn’t really free. And people did come to my door. Not prison guards, but people from a private security company. I later learned that company is called Capita.  When things go wrong with the tag, it’s the Capita people who show up at your home.

The visits were unsettling. I had no idea how much power the Capita people had or whether I was even obliged, legally, to let them in. The employees themselves were a bit clueless. Sometimes I would level with them, and they would admit they had no idea why I was being tagged.

It soon became clear that the technology attached to my ankle was pretty glitchy. One time, they came and told me, ‘The system says the tag had been tampered with.’ They checked my ankle and found nothing wrong. It sent my mind whirring. What had I done to jolt the strap? I suddenly felt anxious to leave the house, in case I knocked it while out somewhere. I began to move through the world more carefully. 

Other times, Capita staff came round to tell me my location had stopped registering. The system wasn’t even functioning, and that frustrated me. 

All these issues seemed to make out like I was the one doing something wrong. But I realize now it was nothing to do with me — the problem was with the tag, and the result was that I felt harassed by these constant unannounced visits by these anonymous Capita employees. 

In theory, the Home Office would call to warn you of Capita’s visits, but often they just showed up at random. They never came when they said they would. Once, I got a letter saying I breached my bail conditions after not being home when they came around. But I’d never been told they were coming in the first place. It was so anxiety-inducing: I was afraid if there were too many problems with the tag, it might be used against me in my deportation case. 

The other nightmare was the charging system. According to the people who fit my tag, the device could last 24 hours between charges. It never did. I’d be out and about or at work, and I’d have to calculate how long I could stay there before I needed to go home and charge. The low battery light would flash red, the device would start loudly vibrating, and I’d panic. Sometimes others would hear the vibration and ask me if it was my phone. Being around people and having to charge up your ankle is so embarrassing. There’s a portable charger, but it’s slow. If you want to charge up quicker, you have to sit down next to a plug outlet for two hours and wait. 

I didn’t want my child to know I’d been tagged or that I was having problems with immigration. I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain why I was wearing this thing around my ankle or that I was facing deportation. Whenever we were together I made sure to wear extra-loose jeans. 

I couldn’t think beyond the tag. It was always on my mind, a constant burden. It felt like this physical reminder of all my mistakes in life. I couldn’t focus on my future. I just felt stuck on that day when I was arrested. I had done my time, but the message from the Home Office was clear: There was no rehabilitation, at least not for me. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand, being pulled down into the darkness. 

My world contracted, and my mental health went into freefall. I came to realize I wasn’t really free: I was in an outside prison. The government knew where I was 24/7. Were they really concerned I would abscond, or did they simply want to intrude on my life? 

Eventually, my mental health got so bad I was able to get the tag removed, although I’m still facing deportation.

After the tag was taken off, it took me a while to absorb that I wasn’t being tracked anymore. Even a month later, I still put my jeans on as if I had the tag on. I could still kind of feel it there, around my ankle. I still felt like I was being watched. Of course, tag or no tag, the government always has other ways to monitor you. 

I’ve begun to think more deeply about the country I’ve always called home. This country that says it no longer wants me. The country that wants to watch my every move. I’m fighting all of it to stay with my child, but I sometimes wonder if, in the long term, I even want to be a part of this system, if this is how it treats people.

The post For migrants under 24/7 surveillance, the UK feels like ‘an outside prison’ appeared first on Coda Story.

From ankle monitors to smartphone apps to the new Fitbit-esque smartwatch, the Biden administration has overseen a dramatic expansion of the technological toolbox used to surveil immigrants awaiting their hearings in the U.S. White House officials say these measures, all part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, are more humane than traditional detention. But critics argue that the system reproduces the dynamics of incarceration with a technocratic spin, compromising the privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers while leaving them with lasting psychological damage.

The program has also left migrants and human rights advocates with lots of questions about what exactly the government does with the substantial amounts of data that it collects. In a curious turn of events, less than a month before ICE announced its plans to pilot test the smartwatch, it unveiled its first-ever analysis of privacy risks that the Alternatives to Detention program carries.

All U.S. federal agencies are required by law to assess the potential privacy impacts of any technology they plan to use before actually deploying the software or tool. Although ICE first rolled out its electronic monitoring program in 2004, it didn’t get around to publishing an assessment of the program’s privacy-related risks until just last month.

Nearly two decades overdue, the assessment alludes to — but doesn’t answer — a number of key questions about the technologies that the agency uses to monitor immigrants to the U.S. 

Critics say the document does little to address the privacy civil liberties and human rights concerns they have long raised with the agency about the program. Instead, they say it presents red flags about ICE’s broad data collection and retention policies — indications that the agency is failing to meaningfully confront the long-term consequences of placing migrants under an invasive surveillance regime.

“These technologies represent an assault on people's bodily autonomy,” said Hannah Lucal, a technology fellow with the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology. Alternatives to Detention, Lucal added, “is not a departure from the system of punishment that ICE produces. It's really an extension of it.”

Although ICE’s e-monitoring program began two decades ago, the number of migrants subjected to electronic monitoring has exploded during Biden’s presidency. When he took office in January 2021, there were 86,000 people in the program. Now, over 280,000 migrants are enrolled in the digital surveillance system.

Migrants assigned to Alternatives to Detention are placed under one of three forms of electronic surveillance: a GPS ankle monitor with 24/7 location tracking, a phone reporting system that uses voice recognition to verify a person’s identity or a smartphone app that uses facial recognition software and GPS location tracking for check-ins. The smartphone app, SmartLINK, is responsible for the exponential growth in enrollment under the Biden administration. About 253,875 immigrants under ICE’s electronic monitoring system are on SmartLINK, according to the most up-to-date statistics from ICE. That’s up from 26,000 people on the app when Biden took office.

SmartLINK has been a focal point of concern for privacy experts. Despite the rapid addition of migrants to the app in recent years, ICE has provided little information about the data it collects and how it might be shared with other agencies. The app is operated by B.I. Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a private prison company, as part of a $2.2 billion contract with ICE. 

Last year, when I spoke with advocates who sued the federal government for more details about the app’s functionality and data collection policies (the lawsuit is ongoing), they posed some key questions about SmartLINK: Is the data collected by the app accessible to other government agencies? Does SmartLINK have the technical ability to gather location data about Alternatives to Detention enrollees beyond their designated check-ins? Does ICE provide adequate oversight of B.I.? Does B.I. have the ability to share the data it collects on Alternatives to Detention participants with third parties, such as other state agencies, or even other companies?

In 50 pages of explanation and assessment, the document does little to answer these questions. Chief among critics’ concerns are questions about location data tracking. The privacy assessment states that SmartLINK app is only able to collect GPS location data at the time of the program participants’ check-ins and when they log into the app. But a F.A.Q. about SmartLINK on ICE’s website complicates the picture. The page refers to another SmartLINK device — a B.I-issued phone with the app pre-installed — given to some program enrollees. According to the F.A.Q., this phone has the technical capability to monitor enrollees’ locations in real time, but “this is not a feature that ICE has elected to use for participants.” 

Lucal, from Just Futures Law, is skeptical. If the agency has the capacity to turn on continuous location monitoring, “there is absolutely no assurance that that is not happening or would not happen,” she told me. The absence of discussion in the privacy assessment about the B.I.-issued phone’s continuous location monitoring capabilities “seems like a gaping hole,” she added. “At any time, it could become active. And how would we know?”

‘Abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE’

Privacy experts also told me they feared the data collected through Alternatives to Detention could be disseminated to other databases. The privacy assessment acknowledges that there is a risk that the information from the electronic monitoring program could be stored in other databases run by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. It alleges that this risk, however, is “partially mitigated” by referring to a DHS policy that states that information is shared within the agency in accordance with the law and only for authorized purposes because officials “must have timely access to all relevant information for which they have a need-to-know to successfully perform their duties.” Jake Wiener, an attorney and surveillance expert with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says this portion of the policy ostensibly acknowledges that “instead of being mitigated, this risk is an open, ongoing, and harmful practice.”

This is no small matter, Wiener points out, given recent reporting from WIRED that found that ICE employees and contractors abused their access to internal databases to search for information about former partners and coworkers, provided their login information to family members and even shared privileged information with criminals in exchange for cash. The assessment, Wiener says, “fails to consider that abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE, and that putting that data in more hands by sending it to DHS’s far-reaching databases increases the likelihood of harm.”

The document also reveals that ICE agents and case managers employed by the contractor B.I. have access to the historical location data of migrants who used GPS ankle monitors. The document does not explain why officials would need access to participants’ historical location data — information that could be used to patch together a full picture of enrollees’ routine movements, including where they work and regularly spend time. Last year, a former SmartLINK participant told me he became anxious about the agency’s access to his location data after learning that ICE officers used data collected from workers’ GPS monitors to orchestrate a mass immigration raid at a poultry plant in Mississippi.

“A major concern is that ICE can use any of the data that it extracts to carry out location surveillance of not just the people they subject to these programs, but also anyone who might be in close proximity to them, like family members or people they live with or neighbors,” Lucal said. “There's just this massive scale of surveillance that's happening through this program. And the privacy assessment is trying really hard to obscure that, but it's coming through.”

There is also a glaring omission in the assessment. In an announcement last week, ICE touted its latest surveillance tech tool — GPS-enabled wristwatch trackers —  but there is no mention of the technology in the privacy assessment. One can only wonder how long it will be before ICE endeavors to assess the risks of its newest tool if the agency decides to deploy it en masse when the pilot testing period ends.

White House officials say these technologies are more humane than detention. But they still have adverse, real-world impacts on the people who use them. Migrants I interviewed last year described how the phone app and the agency’s other e-carceration technologies harmed their relationships and employment prospects and brought them emotional and physical distress. 

A 2021 report by the Cardozo School of Law found that 90% of people with ankle monitors said the device negatively affected their physical and mental health, causing everything from electric shocks to sleep disruption, social isolation and suicidal ideation. In interviews with me last year, people forced to use SmartLINK, meanwhile, expressed deep anxieties about the app’s technological glitches, fearing that malfunctions during the check-in process could lead to their deportation. Carlos, an immigrant placed on SmartLINK, described the app as a “shadow” hovering over his family. 

“Every time I get a call from an unknown number and they see it, they think that it’s from ICE asking me where I am.” He said no matter the technology used — from ankle monitors to smartphones — the outcome is the same: “Fear. The only thing that changes is the system.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post Immigrating to the US? ICE wants your biometrics appeared first on Coda Story.

The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as "deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country." Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

The post India reopens its Khalistan wounds appeared first on Coda Story.

Currently fraught with delays, deadlocks and difficulties, the AI Act has the potential to be as powerful as the EU’s landmark GDPR act, which regulates data protection in the European bloc. And there are many marginalized groups who could benefit from the new legislation or suffer disproportionately if certain amendments don’t make it through. 

For migrants crossing Europe in search of a safer and more dignified life, the law could have huge implications. Currently, Europe’s borders are a highly digitized, unregulated gray zone for tech companies and border agencies to test the latest developments in surveillance technology and predictive algorithms. 

Europe’s borders bristle with drones, tracking and predictive technologies designed to make efficient guesses at which routes migrants might take. AI-powered lie detectors are also being deployed on arriving migrants, along with a vast range of other technologies. The European border could be described as a “testing ground,” said Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre. I spoke to her about what AI regulation could mean for people on the move — and for all of us. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So why is the AI Act relevant for migrants crossing Europe?

Globally speaking, there are very few laws right on the books that can actually be used to govern tech. And currently, the border is a particularly unregulated space, and it’s become a testing ground for a lot of things, including tech. So the AI Act — if we can push through certain amendments — is a really unique opportunity to try and think through how we can create oversight, accountability and governance on all sorts of technologies at the border. 

This act touches on pretty much everything from toys to predictive policing and AI-powered lie detectors. We really want to get policymakers to think about whether the act goes far enough to regulate or even ban some of the most high-risk pieces of technology because currently, it really doesn't. But unfortunately, we don't have high hopes that the migration stuff is going to be taken up in the way that I think it should.

Why not?

If you zoom out from the AI Act and you look at just the way that the EU has been positioning itself on migration, then you can see that securitization, surveillance, returns and deportations, importation of technology and facial recognition have all been really normalized. The EU doesn't really have an incentive to regulate tech at the border, because it wants to test out certain things in that space and then potentially use them in other instances. And the same with the private sector. 

It’s also important to remember that there are vast amounts of money floating around to fund these tech projects. There’s money to be made on border tech — so that disincentivizes regulation. At the moment, it’s a free-for-all. And in an unregulated space, there’s a lot of room for experimentation. 

What do you mean by experimentation? What kind of things are being tested out in Europe right now that you would like to see the back of?

We are trying to get the European Union to think about banning, for example, predictive analytics used for border enforcement. It’s a tool to assist border guards with their operations to try to push back people on the move. The European Border agency Frontex has already signaled its willingness to develop predictive analytics for its own purposes. 

So how does predictive border policing work?

It works by using AI to predict which route a group of people on the move might take to cross a border, so that border enforcement can decide, for example, whether to station a platoon in a certain place. It helps them with their operations and can lead to pushbacks, which can potentially lead to rights-infringing situations. 

Can you explain what the difference is between border agencies using this kind of technology to try to predict where people are and just using their own brains?

So for the past few years, reports about pushbacks have been marred with allegations of human rights abuses. And we’re still having that baseline discussion and debate around the humanitarian side of pushbacks. But with predictive border analytics, it’s as if we’ve skipped a few steps in that discussion. Because this technology adds a layer of efficiency to basically make it easier for border agencies to meet their needs and their quotas. 

So we haven’t even properly talked about the humanitarian implications of these violent pushbacks and already they’re using technology to ramp up their operations. 

Right. There’s also very little transparency about what exactly is happening and what kind of tools are being used. There needs to be a complete rethink about why we’re even leaning on these tools in the first place. 

Can you talk a bit more about how the border is sometimes considered a separate space — and why it could be exempt from things like the AI Act?

So often the border gets conflated with national security issues. The space is already opaque and discretionary, but as soon as you slap on that national security label, it becomes very difficult to access information about what’s really happening. Responsibility, oversight and accountability are all muddied in this space — and that gets worse when you add tech on top of that. 

You’ve talked before about how the concept of the border is moving away from the physical frontier to much further afield — and even beginning to exist in our own bodies. Can you just explain that a bit?

There’s this idea of the “shifting border.” Sometimes people call it border externalization. It’s not anything super new: The U.S. has been doing it for a while. The basic idea is that it removes the physical border from its geographic location and pushes it further afield. Either kind of vertically up — like when you're talking about aerial surveillance, the border is now in the sky. Or creating a surveillance dragnet that starts thousands of miles away from the actual border. For instance, the U.S. border actually starts in Central America when it comes to data sharing and surveillance. And the European Union is really leading the way in terms of externalizing its border into North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Niger, for example, gets a lot of money from the EU to do a lot of border enforcement. If you can prevent people from physically being on EU territory, where international human rights laws and refugee laws kick in, then half your work is done. 

So basically someone is criminalized and marked out as a potential migrant before they’ve even tried to come to Europe?

Exactly. Predictive analytics and social media scraping tries to make predictions about who might be likely to move and whether they’re a risk. Like, ‘Oh, they happen to go to this particular mosque every Friday with their family, so let's mark that as a potential red flag.’ So the border as a physical space just becomes a performance. Even our phones can become a border. You can be tracked in terms of how you're interacting on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. So we have to actually move away from these rigid understandings of what constitutes a border.

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“It is an honor to be with Obrador!" 

"Women for AMLO!" 

"AMLO: best president ever!”

Hundreds of Mexicans living in the New York metropolitan area had come together to mark a historic moment — for the first time, they could vote in a referendum that would determine the country’s future. In this case, they would help decide whether President López Obrador would end his presidential term prematurely. Leading the Obradorista effort in this part of the U.S. is Morena New York Committee 1, an organization made up of fervent supporters of the president, his party and his ideals. They adhere to a political edict of social and economic progress known as the “Fourth Transformation” that imagines a future in which government employees no longer abuse their power in order to enrich themselves and protect their allies.

That Sunday in April, as Mexicans went to the polls, Morena New York Committee 1 staged three processions in New York City to show their support for the sitting president. At a rally in Union Square, an AMLO impersonator wore a larger-than-life papier-mache replica of the president’s head, shaking hands and bowing in front of the crowd. The committees encouraged those who didn’t or couldn’t register to vote to cast “a symbolic vote” during a ceremony scored with traditional music.

Since Morena’s inception in 2011 (and with the help of the president’s party), dozens of what are known as “affinity groups” have sprung up in the United States and organized ardent popular support for the Mexican president. Today, AMLO has a loyal base among Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. Most seem to perceive López Obrador as a restorative force in Mexican democracy, one who has put the most vulnerable communities first — including Mexican immigrants living abroad. For years, these groups have tried to amplify the voices of migrants through civic organizations and to exercise their voting rights in both Mexico and the United States.

“We are not fighting for ourselves, but for the next generations. [We] want to give them a better country full of opportunities so that they do not have to emigrate, like us who come here to suffer cold, hunger, political persecution and racial discrimination,” said Jose Luis Ramírez, a long-time supporter of the president at the rally in Corona, Queens. 

While some individuals have followed AMLO throughout his political career of nearly four decades, many only became active after years of living in the U.S. Empowered by AMLO’s critiques of “neoliberalism” and the “corrupt nature” of the governing parties before him, Morena sympathizers living abroad say they feel like they finally have representation in their country of origin. 

Guillermo Lucero, who joined the Morena New York committee in 2018, put it simply, “López Obrador has given us back our identity as Mexicans.”

But AMLO is not universally loved. Since he assumed the presidency in 2018, he has been criticized for gutting public institutions, lambasting the opposition and putting democratic institutions at risk. Most recently, critics have focused on López Obrador’s proposal to defund the National Electoral Institute that was created in an effort to clean up the electoral process in Mexico, which has seen its share of fraud. 

AMLO says that he wants to avoid expenses and the duplication of functions and claims that in its first year, the proposal will save up to $271 million in government expenses. But it is also well known that in 2006, AMLO lost the presidential election by a very small margin, and has since targeted the organization, accusing it of perpetrating fraud.

Last week, this proposal — known as “Plan B” — passed by a margin of 18 votes, though it will likely face a challenge before the Mexican Supreme Court. On February 26, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took to the historic center of Mexico City to protest AMLO’s Plan B, members of Morena Committees staged their own counter-protests across the U.S. Waving Mexican and American flags, from Placita Olvera and Huntington Park in California to Times Square and Brooklyn in New York City, hundreds of Mexicans once again rallied to support the president. 

Plan B also purports to expand voting access to Mexicans living abroad, allowing them to vote with a passport and a consular ID, in addition to their voting card. But it also will bring big cuts to the electoral watchdog’s budget and will remove 85% of its workforce. Critics worry that the elections will no longer be as supervised or safeguarded and that even basic voting services (like staffing at polling places) will be in short supply. Some view the electoral Plan B as a blow to Mexico's fragile democracy. 

“[Plan B] is not about access, it is a means of meddling with [the National Electoral Institute’s] powers and weakening it as an institution,” said Dr. Rafael Fernández de Castro, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. According to Fernández de Castro, the Mexican vote abroad has never determined an election and there is reason to believe that it won’t for many years. But now, some think otherwise.

Voting for Mexico, from the US

The number of Mexican individuals who are eligible to vote in the U.S. has doubled since 2005, and it’s a community that political parties in Mexico appear eager to tap into during the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. 

“Establishing the right to vote for Mexicans who left Mexico for any reason was extremely important,” said Claudia Zavala, an electoral councilwoman for the National Electoral Institute. “As Mexicans, we do not lose these rights regardless of where we are.”

Between the 1980s and 2007, the number of Mexicans living in the U.S. increased from 2.7 to 11.9 million people, though that figure has since plateaued to a little over 10 million. Today, nearly 10% of the Mexican population lives in the United States. But for most of that period, Mexicans living abroad were sidelined from politics altogether and unable to vote in federal or local elections, until 2005.

Today, only 2% of the foreign population holds voter identification cards. Less than 1% participated in the elections of 2018, according to a recent study co-authored by political scientist and former National Electoral Institute staffer Andrés Besserer Rayas. As of 2015, Mexicans can claim voting IDs in Mexican consulates at no cost. But even as officials have removed barriers to casting a ballot, for example by expanding Mexicans’ ability to vote online and by mail, participation remains low.

“There is very little information about partisan identity in the Mexican diaspora in the United States,” Besserer said, and, among migrants, there is a general distrust of authority figures. Mexican political parties and their candidates are also prohibited, by law, from campaigning abroad.

This has not stopped individual parties or presidential hopefuls from traveling to the U.S. to meet with Mexican migrants or from bolstering the creation of political affinity groups abroad, especially when elections are on the horizon.

In the late 1980s, presidential candidate Cuahtemoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Revolutionary Party famously visited migrant communities in Los Angeles. Vicente Fox, candidate for the National Action Party whose victory ended the 80-year single-party rule in Mexico in 2000, praised migrants as the "heroes of Mexico'' and promised them the vote.

Earlier this month, Ricardo Anaya, the presidential hopeful for the conservative National Action Party, visited Dallas, Texas to inaugurate his party’s first “Committee for Migrant Action,” along with the party’s president, Marko Cortés. They told a small crowd that they hoped to visit other states in the near future.

AMLO’s Morena party has proven increasingly popular among the diaspora living outside of Mexico. Voting registration figures for Mexicans abroad have almost quadrupled, from just over  40,000 voters in 2006 — when AMLO first ran for president, unsuccessfully — to over 180,000 in 2018 when he was elected. In 2006, he only won 34% of the foreign vote. In 2018, that number spiked to 64%. 

Now, there are dozens of groups sympathetic to Morena in the United States, especially in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Morena New York Committee 1 tops them all, boasting the largest digital footprint with a quarter-million followers on Facebook. The committee maintains a formidable presence online and broadcasts live events on its Facebook page.

‘We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries’

Since AMLO’s presidential victory in 2018, members of Morena New York Committee 1 have met regularly across New York City boroughs to celebrate new reforms or stage pro-AMLO demonstrations in parallel to events held in Mexico. Morena committees are also conceived as organizations to further voters’ political literacy. In the past year, Morena created the National Institute for Political Formation, an in-person and virtual academy that says it aims to provide a civic education to Mexicans everywhere. Course offerings include a primer on geopolitics, neoliberalism and the limits of capitalism. The Institute has held town halls in cities such as San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

According to Alina Duarte, who leads the Institute’s efforts abroad, Mexican citizens living in the U.S. have been celebrated for their financial contributions to the country but have otherwise been politically sidelined. In 2022, Mexican migrants living in the U.S. sent back $58 billion in remittances, a number that is often invoked by AMLO during his daily press briefings. 

“Our migrant communities have this double responsibility. Not only do they sustain two nations economically, but they also play a fundamental role in the politics of both,” said Carlos Castillo, a former Morena representative from Mexico City who attended a meeting of the Institute in New York City last November.

To some, there is reason to believe that Mexicans living in the U.S. can set the political agenda for two countries at once. In recent years, several non-partisan groups have formed a bridge between organizers and bi-national institutions, including Fuerza Migrante, a bi-national organization based in New York.

“We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries — it is simply a matter of organizing,” said Avelino Meza, the director of Fuerza Migrante. 

Many of these organizations have helped to enact legislation that pushes for greater representation of immigrant Mexican communities in the Mexican government. In 2021, Mexico’s electoral court introduced the migrant representative whose main function is to represent individuals from Mexico living abroad. Morena has three sitting representatives. Ironically, those living abroad were not able to vote for any of them.

Though new measures have been introduced to encourage migrant participation, such as setting up physical voting booths in places like Dallas for upcoming state elections, some claim these actions are insufficient. And with Plan B enacted, some processes intended to ensure the integrity of elections may falter or be eliminated altogether.
But Morena supporters are hopeful. A poll conducted in November 2022 reveals that the president’s party is favored to win in 2024. “There is a historical debt owed to Mexican migrants, which the electoral reform barely begins to address,” said Alina Duarte of the National Institute for Political Formation. “But there is reason to believe that the migrant vote in 2024 will be historic.”

With reporting assistance from Gustavo García.

The post Mexican expats are trumpeting the ruling party’s message and getting out the vote appeared first on Coda Story.

My parents moved from Bombay to Kuwait when I was six weeks old. We moved because the money was good, the living was easy, and it had none of the grime of India, the clamorous crowds in the cities we left behind. Their kids, my parents told themselves, would have better opportunities in the Gulf. Not that any of us had it all that hard in India. But India was not Kuwait.

Then, when I was 12, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, hardened by a ruinous, nearly decade-long war with Iran, annexed Kuwait.

I slept through the invasion, waking to the sound of the news on my shortwave radio, which my father had commandeered. This radio — an industrial slate-gray Grundig Satellit 650, stolid, weighty and unglamorous, “just like German girls” as my Calcutta-born, Germany-educated father would say — was a major presence in my life. 

This radio, or rather the hours I spent with my ear soldered to it, listening to the BBC World Service, was at fault for what my mother called my “Britification.” My Anglophilia had long made me the object of family scorn. Hobson-Jobson, or Suited-Booted, my dad would call me when he was feeling affectionate, “ingrej” (meaning Englishman, albeit spat contemptuously from the side of his mouth) when less so. 

Football was where my devotion to all things English was most manifest. I lived then for Saturday evenings, coming home from school — the weekend in Kuwait was Thursday and Friday — to coax from the radio’s bleeps and crackles the poetry of the classified football results, the sounds of those long lists of British provincial centers and market towns.

For all the evocative power of England’s various Wanderers, Rovers and Rangers, it was the Scottish teams that were unmatched for euphony. Cowdenbeath, Stenhousemuir, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South and, most stirring of all to my seven-year-old ears, Heart of Midlothian. Only the Scottish league could have produced, though it never did, such a scoreline as East Fife 5 - Forfar 4. Read it out loud for yourself.

My experience of football was more vivid because it was untainted by television coverage. What mattered to me were the stories, the lore and the private pleasures of the imagination rather than the community solidarity of following one’s local football club.

“Listen,” my father said, retaining, in the midst of crisis, the paternal imperative to needle his son, “it’s your prime minister.” Margaret Thatcher was denouncing the Iraqi invasion as “absolutely unacceptable,” her peremptory tone typical of the more fearsome teachers in my British school. 

My father thought the whole thing would blow over. “Bush and Thatcher won’t allow it. Saddam will pull out within a week,” my parents told me and my sister, told their friends, told our relatives around the world, told each other. After all, the previous day’s Arab Times, the bigger of Kuwait’s two English-language dailies, had announced on its front page that the problem “between brothers” had been settled. And then the Iraqis cut the phone lines.

In 1990, globalization was an idea gaining currency in academic circles. As cosmopolitan pre-teens, defined not so much by where we came from as by what we read, watched, heard and thought, you could say my friends and I anticipated the zeitgeist. So in that tiny, undistinguished country in the Arabian Gulf, I drank the British fruit cordial Vimto and ate Hardee’s roast beef sandwiches. I spread Danish butter on my toast and only ate Granny Smith apples. I loved “The Real Genius,” starring Val Kilmer, and also loved the movies of Satyajit Ray that I watched with my parents. I supported Liverpool Football Club. I listened to New Order and The Smiths and Gang of Four and Orange Juice. On my bookshelves, Tintin and Asterix comics shared space with Archie digests and Amar Chitra Katha. 

Such scattershot particulars, such quirks of personality, I understood. “Indian,” “Bengali,” I did not. My migrant parents — though migration is surely the ultimate expression of the individual over the community, over the ties that bind — still sought succor in a collective identity, in their sense of themselves as part of a community.

When my father joked that Margaret Thatcher was my prime minister, he knew that Thatcher, the leader of a country to which I had no ties that any immigration officer would recognize, might as well have been my prime minister, just as George H.W. Bush might as well have been my president, or Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah my emir, because I did not know what it meant to have such allegiances.

What he didn’t seem to know was that my Anglophilia was a result of moving to Kuwait, of flailing for identity in a country to which I could never belong. Identity, I knew from an early age, was nebulous, its edges as unruly as an ink stain.

India offered me my external identity, Britain my interior one and Kuwait was the metaphorical suburban bedroom in which I played out my fantasies. For our family, Kuwait wasn’t as final as emigration. It elicited no real grief, no loss. Even if it lasted years, decades, it was a temporary condition. Home was elsewhere.

Before the invasion, an exasperated teacher once accused me of daydreaming with the words: “You really do live in your own utopia.”

Looking the word up in the dictionary that night, I discovered that utopia meant “no place.” It occurred to me that I might be living in Utopia, in no place, nowhere that could be recognized as somewhere. Even at 10 years old, I viscerally felt the truth onto which my teacher had stumbled.

I knew I was “Indian,” a transplanted Bengali. I had an Indian passport. I ate regionally specific Indian food, like the fish curry Bengalis called “macher jhol” and, on weekends, “luchi and begun bhaja,” fried puffy flatbread and aubergine slices. My father was one of the founders of the Bengali Cultural Society, an outlet for Bengalis in Kuwait to put on plays, sing songs and make their children recite the nonsense verse of Sukumar Ray. It gave them a space to assert their identities and retain their connections to what Indians like to call their “native place.”

My parents had no difficulty filling the blank canvas that was Kuwait with the colors of the culture they left behind. What could be easier in Kuwait than pretending you had never left India? Your social life revolved not just around other Indians but mostly around Indians just like you, in terms not just of ethnicity, region, religion and language but class, education, even profession. Kuwait dented none of their cultural confidence. Their leisure time was filled with the Bengali language and Bengali food.

For me, though, Kuwait was quite literally no place. Children like me were not like the children of immigrants to the U.S., U.K., Australia and so on — children torn between cultures, negotiating a fraught terrain between the domestic experience and the world outside. We were instead bereft of culture. Bereft of cultural context.

My claim on India was almost as tenuous as my claim to Britain. And the unstated policy of the country in which I lived was to deliberately keep at arm’s length a population of expatriate workers that outnumbered citizens. With its broad boulevards and American fast-food restaurants with cheery signage, Kuwait looked and sometimes felt like an international airport.

The Iraqi invasion had little effect on my self-absorption. I felt no fear, no swell of sympathy for my few Kuwaiti friends, mostly teammates on the school football team, all of whom were still on their summer holidays in luxury hotels and yachts across Europe. I thrilled instead to the novelty of the invasion and the promise that the school term might not begin as scheduled. The early days of the occupation passed slowly. For news, we were reliant on the elusive shortwave signal for the BBC World Service. 

The only Kuwaiti we really talked to was Asrar Al-Qabandi, a young woman my mother knew who had been educated largely in the United States. Asrar was different from other Kuwaiti women. My mother had met and befriended her when she applied for a job at the playschool my mother ran. Asrar kept her hair short and usually wore baggy trousers. Her incorrigible habit of expressing her opinion made her unpopular with her family and a frequent visitor to our apartment.

Asrar used to complain to my mother about Kuwait, the country’s conservatism, the easy money that had made its people lazy and insipid, their lack of interest in education and their prejudices. She seemed to have few friends apart from my mother. Until the invasion, I had never heard her express any affection for Kuwait. I imagined Kuwait as a scab on her knee, irritating and unsightly but comforting to pick at.

Occasionally, the invasion would make its presence felt. We heard our parents talk anxiously about a close friend, a man with a pendulous belly and spry wit, who had been arrested in Iraq for carrying counterfeit dollars. Our parents panicked about their own dollars. These were bought at five times the usual rate and were the only currency Iraqis would accept in exchange for a plane ticket to Jordan, the only country that had kept its border with Iraq open.

Our encounters with the occupying soldiers were infrequent and sometimes farcical. As Indians, we were relatively safe in occupied Kuwait. We were of no interest to Iraqi soldiers, unlike Westerners who made valuable hostages and, for obvious reasons, Kuwaitis, small bands of whom, Asrar among them, were organizing and mounting a sporadic, flickering resistance. The stories told about Iraqi soldiers among Indians were mostly of buffoonery, tales tinged with condescension for soldiers stealing computer monitors they thought were TVs, for soldiers who were not Iraqi at all but bewildered Bangladeshi gardeners or Filipino drivers forced into the army as casualties in the eight-year war with Iran mounted. It was only after we left Kuwait that I read about the rapes and torture that happened during the occupation.

In the opening pages of “The Satanic Verses,” as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha plunge towards “Proper London, capital of Vilayet,” Salman Rushdie puts the words of a famous song into Gibreel's mouth:

O, my shoes are Japanese

These trousers English, if you please

On my head, red Russian hat

My heart's Indian for all that

For an Indian living in India, the song is about pride, jauntily nationalistic lyrics written for a newly created nation. In contemporary India, the song is relevant and resonant as a simultaneous embrace and rejection of globalization — some things, your heart and soul, are forever local. For the immigrant Indian, the song is a defiant but futile resistance. For the Gulf-based Indian, the song is matter of fact, an accurate expression of the expat life. Of course, your heart is Indian, whatever the imported fripperies of your new, materially comfortable life. What other choice is there?

But for the Indian expat’s child, the child put into a British or American school to suit their parents’ aspirational, upwardly mobile sense of themselves, the song seemed foolish, sentimental.

How do you keep your heart free from the influence of your shoes, trousers and hat? What does it mean to have an Indian soul? For me, the idea of an authentic self was muddied, perplexing. If you come from somewhere, a particular place, and you live there all your life, an authentic self that grows organically from your sense of place is something you take for granted, so strong and defining a part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine what could diminish that land-based identity.

For us, those cosseted children of Utopia, of no place, what could fill the place-shaped hole in our identity? It’s not that the question of where you come from becomes hard to answer, it’s that it no longer has any meaning. This is distinct from the struggle of the immigrant’s child to negotiate between the place to which they now belong and their “place of origin” so inadequately represented by the short, rickety bridge of the hyphen — Vietnamese-American, say, or Afro-Caribbean British. Or from the immigrant’s division between the place remembered and the place in which you found yourself.

Part of my love for English football was for its unabashed tribalism. I remember being in my neighborhood bookshop and coming across a copy of E.P. Thompson’s canonical text “The Making of the English Working Class” and begging my bemused father to buy it. I was too young to make any sense of what I was reading but I was powerfully drawn to the idea that an entire class of people could be “made,” as if you could pull a community whole from a kiln, as if a shapeless, shifting mass of individuals could be given contours, shape and coherence.

We left Kuwait in the last week of September 1990.

My father and some of the other men staying with us had arranged for a bus and a driver to take us to the southern Iraqi city of Basra and then on to Baghdad. At dawn, we arrived in the Iraqi capital, where we stayed at a hotel for a week before we were able to board a flight to the Jordanian capital Amman.

Bengalis are, of course, India’s doughtiest tourists. For that week in Baghdad we reverted to type, eating fish and chips on the banks of the Tigris, riding the creaky rollercoaster at the empty but functioning amusement park and visiting the National Museum. Reality, the reality in which we were refugees fleeing from Kuwait, a country occupied by Iraq, the international pariah in which we were now vacationing, only occasionally intruded — in the form of empty supermarket shelves and a tour guide who begged us for our cartons of chocolate milk for her baby because the powdered variety was all that was available in Iraq.

In Amman, we slept at the airport for one night before we were able to board one of the many free flights Air India had organized to transport Indian refugees to Bombay and safety. Two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were on a plane to India. I didn’t know then, still arguing with my friends about the relative merits of Liverpool and Manchester United, AC/DC and Iron Maiden, how lucky we were.

Smothered by relatives in Bombay, in my grandmother’s apartment bursting with books, art and furniture accrued over the course of entire lives of entire generations, I began to realize how ephemeral my life in Kuwait was, how thin my connection was to that place, or this place, or any place outside my own head. I was fascinated by Bombay, by its noxious drains, its rusting red double-decker buses, its panoply of streets. But I knew I didn’t belong in the city like my mother did.

Being a perpetual migrant might have been new in 1990. Today it is unremarkable. By 2020, some 280 million people around the world were estimated to be international migrants.

In “Identity and Violence,” the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen makes a forceful argument for the essential heterogeneity of identity, the value of each of the many parts that constitute the whole:

“The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

Wonderful as this passage is, my response is an impatient “yes, but…” The global response to such blithe cosmopolitanism has been the parochialism espoused by the likes of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and recently elected right-wing governments in countries like Italy and Sweden. Months after Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, then-Prime Minister Theresa May told a Conservative Party conference that if “you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

I know what she means. I am a middle-aged Indian man. I have an Indian wife and two Indian children. We live in India. My wife and I are both Bengali and, though neither of us is even slightly religious, our surnames place us safely among the Hindu upper castes that control India.

Protected by these markers of “Indianness,” my place in Indian society is unquestioned, even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi does the bidding of his ideological masters and remakes India from a pluralistic, secular nation into an increasingly belligerent, nostalgia-fueled Hindu nation. This state that makes life so difficult for the poor, the disenfranchised, the lower caste and the Muslim looks upon us with benevolence and avuncular affection.

It’s discomfiting to have spent so much time feeling out of place, only to find that it is the external, most superficial markers of my identity that both define and legitimize me in Modi’s new India.

All I have to do is keep my mouth shut, lest I give myself away.

Ensconced in India, ostensibly an unimpeachable citizen of somewhere, I remain indelibly marked by my years in “no place.” I have spent most of my life in cities to which I have no claim other than temporary residence. My perspective has been that of the perpetual, if privileged, outsider. It’s a common enough modern condition but, as former Prime Minister May argued, still suspect.

In a speech in 1993 — ironically in defense of greater integration with Europe — another former British prime minister, John Major, offered a lyrical, classically rural vision of “timeless” Britain. “Fifty years from now,” he said, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers... Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.”

Similarly, the real India, we are always told, is to be found in its villages. Indeed, only 35% of Indians live in cities. And in many of those cities we retain a parochial suspicion and fear of outsiders, of behavior that we consider strange and do not recognize as our own. Just a few years ago, for the first time in its long history, China became a predominantly urban society, with over 50% of its people living in cities. The 2009 documentary, “Last Train Home,” showed the toll of urbanization on one poor Chinese couple who work in a factory, cut off from their village, their growing daughter, their values and everything they’ve ever known or taken for granted. The annual trip home only emphasizes their alienation.

Yet their daughter, despite her parents’ unhappiness, abandons her own education to seek work in the city, drawn by that same desire for independence, for freedom from the social bonds of village life. India is headed in this direction.

Global cities remain vast agglomerations of outsiders. It is partly why these monstrous conurbations are so reviled. Back in 1987, Hanif Kureishi offered a stirring defense of London in “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” the movie he wrote, directed by Stephen Frears. Sammy’s father, a compromised Pakistani politician, points out that London is a “cesspit.” 

What can Sammy possibly like about this city? London is beset by race riots, poverty, violence and crime. “Well,” Sammy tells his father, “on Saturdays, we like to walk on the Towpath and kiss and argue.” It’s the beginning of a short disquisition on metropolitan pleasures. “Neither of us is English,” he says of himself and Rosie, “we’re Londoners, you see.”

Community feeling can emerge even within collections of outsiders. Kureishi’s London in the 1980s — resistant to authority, carnivalesque, an ad hoc and mutable community of outsiders — is distinct from the country around it. Major’s Britain is inimical to Kureishi’s London: one “unamendable” where the other is protean, one a sun-dappled, bucolic idyll where the other is unrestrainedly rough and urban, one faithful to what has been before where the other craves the new, the mixed, the composite culture of a city marked by migratory flows.

Shortly before the Allies began Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, I began my first semester at a boarding school in the Palani Hills in Kerala. In the library at my new school, I discovered in an issue of TIME magazine that my mother’s old friend Asrar had been arrested by the Iraqis. She had been shot, I read in one account, seven times in each breast and seven times in the vagina. In another, I read she had been shot four times in the head, once between the eyes, and that the right side of her face had been cut open with an ax. The accounts of the work she did for the Kuwaiti resistance — running guns and money from Saudi Arabia, destroying Iraqi communications systems, disguising herself as a cleaner to smuggle out vital records and documents from ministries now guarded by dozens of occupying soldiers — are impossible to reconcile with the small, bespectacled woman I remember. But even back then her size belied her spirit.

Asrar was hailed in death by her family as she had never been in life, hailed as a martyr for the cause of a country she had little regard for until it was taken away. I thought of Asrar in 2019, when young people in Delhi began protesting the Modi government’s exclusive, narrow, parochial view of Indian citizenship as expressed in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Before the pandemic forced them off the streets, the protestors, many of whom would have been unaffected by amendments aimed at Muslims and minorities, were fighting for an idea of India. An India forged in the constitutional ideals of plurality and democracy. They were saying, “We are not a Hindu nation.” We will not be refashioned into a theocratic state built on principles of exclusion and prejudice. Perhaps, like Asrar, these young people were motivated to fight for an India they saw was being taken away from them, to fight for the secular ideals with which they had grown up, whatever the failings of the state to live up to those ideals. 

In Modi’s new India, words such as “secular” and “plural” were to be jettisoned as the follies of governments past. But the protests did not reflect the smug cosmopolitanism of an elite diaspora or a cosmopolitanism that offered no challenge to the prevailing order. Instead, it struck me as a revivifying commitment to community as a cobbled-together, living thing that expands rather than contracts.

It showed me a path forward, out of a complacent, calcified nostalgia for my utopian “no place.” What I thought I missed growing up in Kuwait was community. In my hermetically sealed room, in my imagination unsoured, uninflected by experience, I tried to understand what it was to be a part of something larger than yourself, to belong somewhere and to claim it as your own. 

The wrongheaded answer I came up with was to fetishize the local, to fetishize community as a club from which I was excluded when — to borrow from Woody Allen borrowing from Groucho Marx — I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.

What I didn’t know was that communities cannot be so easily confined, so neatly shaped. That outsiders, too, can form communities. That outsiders, too, can find their place.

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But people from countries such as Iraq and Cameroon who are trying to come across another border with Poland have received a starkly different response. Further north along the EU member state’s border with Belarus, their pleas for help are being ignored. 

Initially angered by EU sanctions following Belarus’s rigged presidential election in August 2020, strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko lured people from around the world to his country on the false promise that they can get easy access to a safer future in western Europe. Hoping that an increase in asylum seekers will sow discord across the EU, Belarusian authorities have ferried men, women and children to the border with Poland and forced them to cross since mid-2021.

Poland’s response has been heavy-handed. As the number of attempted crossings swelled last fall, human rights groups documented unlawful cases of pushbacks by Polish border guards, a practice that continues to this day. The border area was also militarized, and an exclusion zone established.

European Union leaders in Brussels have been positive on Poland’s actions, as the issue of how to respond to migration is largely considered the business of individual member states. When Warsaw announced in January that it had started construction on a metal wall along the Belarusian border to keep people out, European allies issued no objections.

Despite the 18-foot-high and 116-mile-long barrier, people have not been deterred from seeking protection in the EU. But it has worsened conditions for asylum seekers who risk life-threatening injuries and death trying to scale it.

Now with surveillance technology being installed along the wall, and Poland fearful that Russia and Belarus will usher many more people to its borders, Aleksandra Łoboda, a member of the humanitarian organization Grupa Granica, warns against border militarization.

With temperatures falling, we spoke about the current situation on this part of the Polish border. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Aleksandra, what is the situation on the Poland-Belarus border right now?

Since the wall was raised, the Polish government’s narrative is that it has been a deterrent and the scale of the humanitarian crisis has reduced. We follow the situation very closely and we know that’s not true. What the wall has done is diminish the health of people who are trying to cross the border. We have been treating a lot of leg injuries from falls, a lot of cuts from the razor wire that lines the top of the wall. There are more and more cases of hypothermia. The situation is tough.  

We don’t have an estimate on how many people are crossing, but we do know how many people are asking us for help (we only provide humanitarian aid to people who are on the Polish side). So, every week it’s between 100-200 people. Last week, there were 149 requests for assistance. Also, take into consideration we are not the only initiative providing humanitarian aid, so the real number of people is even higher.

Over the last 14 months, 27 people are confirmed to have died on the Polish-Belarus border. We believe around 190 people are missing. We will never know how many people died on the border because so much of the evidence gathering has been left to grass roots organizations.

This month the initial installation phase of high-tech surveillance equipment along the wall was inspected by Polish authorities. How could this infringe on the rights of asylum seekers?

It’s a further attempt to militarize the border. This should not be the response to the humanitarian crisis. No wall can stop migrants crossing the border if they are seeking international protection. 

Building a wall and adding surveillance could contribute to even higher abuse of peoples’ rights, the rights to asylum, right to freedom from torture. If you want to get to the root of migration, you cannot just erect a barrier and hope the issue will disappear. 

When I was reporting near the Poland-Belarus border last year, there was a lot of disinformation swirling around about the people on the Belarus border. Has that continued?

The government is actively spreading disinformation and claiming that people who are crossing the Poland-Belarus border are economic migrants who do not need international protection. We have documented people who have been asking us for help and most of them come from countries affected by war and conflict, so this is one kind of disinformation.

Another is the line that the people who are trying to cross the border with Belarus pose a threat to national security. We have helped approximately 13,500 people from the border area, but the Polish community has accepted hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, and it hasn’t posed a threat to national security. We have seen it is possible for Polish society to accept people from other countries, to accept a larger number of people who are fleeing wars and conflict. So, I think the government has proved that its own line is propaganda, disinformation. 

The EU has supported the Polish government’s actions on the Poland-Belarus border. How do you feel about that?

There is more than one humanitarian crisis on European borders. The EU needs to take a common approach, which should not focus on the militarization of borders but should examine how to implement the right to asylum, the right to international protection. As a bloc it needs to change its current policy in terms of migration. 

Looking ahead, the Polish government says it will build a temporary security wall with Kaliningrad to prevent migrants crossing over from the Russian enclave. How much is this on your radar?

We are closely monitoring the situation on the Poland-Kaliningrad border and for now, as far as I know, there have not been a lot of people trying to cross. We will monitor the situation and see what happens. Judging by the Poland-Belarus border there may be a real threat to peoples’ rights so we must keep an eye on it. 

Aside from migrants, a lot of Polish people don’t want Russians to seek asylum in Europe because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Our message is that everyone has the same right, anyone who flees persecution from war and conflict can seek protection regardless of their nationality.

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“These are just individuals who are seeking a new life in the U.K.,” said Lucie Audibert, a lawyer at Privacy International. “And so the necessity of surveilling them and monitoring in this way is highly questionable, and I question the effectiveness of it as well.”

The devices, which are bulky ankle bracelets of the same type that have been used in the criminal justice system for decades, monitor migrants’ movements 24/7. Anyone who is on immigration bail in the U.K. can be tagged, for an unlimited amount of time. 

The Home Office unveiled a new 12-month pilot to experiment with tagging people arriving on small boats in June, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson said migrants couldn’t be allowed to simply “vanish” into the country. The Home Office have said they intend to use the tags to stop migrants bound for offshore detention centers in Rwanda from disappearing — despite absconding rates being as low as 1% in 2020, according to a Freedom of Information request by Migrants Organise.

Privacy International argues that the practice of tagging migrants lacks the proper safeguards that are in place when the devices are used in the criminal justice system. They add that the devices can be inaccurate as well as intrusive. The privacy rights charity filed complaints with the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Forensic Science Regulator.

Privacy and migration advocates say the Home Office can use the location data to check up on migrants who claim to remain in the U.K. on the basis of family ties with the country — to assess whether they really do visit their relatives. They also say the surveillance measure leaves migrants traumatized, stigmatized and — in some cases — housebound, afraid to engage with the outside world.   

The use of GPS tagging on migrants has already been trialed extensively in the U.S., under a program known as “Alternatives to Detention,” which has been expanded under President Joe Biden. The U.S. government argues that placing people under electronic surveillance is kinder and less brutal than imprisonment, and keeps more people out of immigration detention centers. But immigrants in the U.S. say the tags are dehumanizing.

“You feel like you’re in prison again,” a U.S. asylum seeker told us in May. He described crying “tears of joy” when the bracelet was removed from his body after three months’ wear. 

The argument that the tags are a humane alternative to detaining migrants has been mirrored in the U.K.’s policy, according to Audibert. But, she says, it’s a false premise: “Every alternative to detention in the criminal justice system has never reduced prison numbers. It has just expanded the size of the population that was controlled.” 

The Home Office recently expanded the criteria for who is eligible to be tagged to include anyone who arrives in the U.K. via irregular routes, such as small boats — a practice which is now a criminal offense in the country. Earlier this month, a report in the Guardian revealed that the Home Office was rolling out new “facial recognition smartwatches” to migrants as a complement to the ankle tags. The smartwatches, though removable, require migrants convicted of a criminal offense to scan their face up to five times per day to ensure they’re still wearing them. 

The Home Office, in a statement, emphasized the tags will be used on “foreign national criminals” but made no mention of its pilot scheme to also tag asylum seekers with GPS ankle bracelets. 

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Since August 2021, the Home Office has successfully tagged over 2,500 foreign criminals, reassuring victims that their perpetrators cannot escape the law and will be removed from the U.K. at the earliest opportunity. Since January 2019, the Government has removed over 10,000 foreign criminals.”

The use of GPS tracking has severe effects on the mental health of the wearer, according to research by Monish Bhatia, a criminology lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. He describes, in a report published last year, how many people who are tagged experience it as imprisonment and punishment. They say the tag makes them feel like criminals, and that they have to live with the stigma if their tag is spotted.

The tag means they’re often reluctant to engage with their community and do everyday activities like playing sport for fear of revealing their tag, and can end up isolating themselves, in a form of self-inflicted house arrest, because they do not want to be tracked. 

Bhatia argued the practice of tagging had no use other than to wield power over asylum seekers and minority groups. “It’s purely for control — and it is discriminatory. I’ve called it racial surveillance on more than a few occasions and I’ll stick with that term to describe this technology,” he said.

The U.K. has in recent years rolled out a massive program of surveillance and technology to try to deter migrants from crossing the English Channel, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to the British taxpayer. Audibert described how the GPS policy forms part of this strategy of deterrence and is part of the Home Office’s overall intention to stop migrants from making dangerous journeys across the water in small, fragile vessels. 

“They’re pouring millions of pounds into this crazy invasive technology,” said Audibert, who described how most migrants had no interest in breaching their bail conditions. “It’s criminalizing people that aren’t criminals in the first place.”

Frankie Vetch contributed to this report.

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“What we do when we prevent migrants from crossing is that we save their lives,” Darmanin told a group of reporters.

The following month, on November 28, Darmanin returned to Calais. Instead of his usual retinue of staff, he was accompanied by officials from around the European Union. They had gathered for a crisis summit after a fragile dinghy capsized five days before, drowning 27 people in the cold, grey waters that separate Britain and France. 

Before the meeting, Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent a letter to President Emmanuel Macron, calling for closer cooperation between French authorities and the U.K. Border Force and millions of euros’ worth of investment in surveillance technology. Among his suggestions were ground sensors, radar, and aerial surveillance by manned aircraft and drones. Towards the end of the letter, Johnson also proposed the return of migrants to France. In response to the letter, which Johnson posted on Twitter, Darmanin summarily disinvited U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel from the talks.

In September, Patel had suggested that, if France could not bring the flow of migrants to British shores under control, she would renege on an earlier promise of £54m ($72m) to help fund the policing of crossings from Calais and the surrounding area. On Sunday, Darmanin said he had received a fraction of the money. Meanwhile, record numbers of people have managed to make their way across the Channel and into the United Kingdom — more than 25,000 so far, this year. 

The drive to improve surveillance is an enormous and transformative undertaking. In recent years, residents of Calais say their city has become almost unrecognizable. The roads leading to the port, where ferries loaded with trucks depart for Dover, are now surrounded by new, high-strength fences. Along the beachfront, every 50 feet or so, new Chinese-made Hikvision CCTV cameras watch over passersby. 

And, yet, the crossings keep happening.

After Darmanin’s first visit, I climbed among the sandy hillocks at Dunes de la Slack, not far from Boulogne. It was a clear morning and, across the water, Dover’s famous white cliffs were sharp against the dawn sky. A black police truck, with what appeared to be a camera mounted on top of it, was crawling along the beach. 

Policing the 50-mile stretch of coastline between Boulogne-Sur-Mer and Dunkirk is a colossal task. The beaches are huge and the dunes full of natural hiding spots. Among them, I saw footprints weaving back and forth, where people had run down to the beach to board small boats to England.

 When migrants hoping to make the journey to the U.K. arrive in Calais, they contact local migrant smuggling networks, usually via WhatsApp, and pay upwards of €3,000 ($3,380) to cross the Channel. A smuggler tells them he will text or call when it’s time. When that message comes, migrants set to leave from Slack board a train from Calais down towards Boulogne, where they then walk for almost an hour to the beach and uncover a dinghy buried in the sand. The boat is inflated and scrambled to the water, where around 30 people clamber aboard. It then makes its hazardous way across the busiest shipping lane in the world. 

The 27 deaths on 24 November constitute the single biggest loss of life in the English Channel since the International Organization on Migration began keeping records in 2014. Since then, 166 migrants have been reported dead or missing as a result of trying to reach England from France. The danger of such crossings is one of the reasons why the U.K. and French governments are funneling resources into monitoring these waters.

In 2019, an EU research group began a project to explore new frontiers in maritime surveillance, testing out new ways to use manned and unmanned craft, both underwater and in the air, with the aim of “beefing up the European Union’s external borders.” The project wrapped up on October 31, 2021. Alongside the U.K. Border Force, Britain’s Royal Air Force has been deploying military surveillance aircraft and a civilian contractor has supplied Portuguese-made Tekever drones to patrol the Channel. High-speed, unmanned boats have also been trialled and, according to documents leaked last year, plans for “marine fences” — floating walls that block small vessels — have also been considered. 

On the French side, it’s more about boots on the ground, with gendarmes and police searching for migrants, using infra-red binoculars and increased patrols. But, at the port of Calais, they also have access to heat scanners, carbon dioxide, motion and heartbeat detectors, which, backed up by sniffer dogs, seek out migrants trying to cross the Channel by stowing away on trucks. 

In both France and the U.K., the operations are presented as a multi-million-euro rescue operation. But the life-saving argument was significantly diminished earlier in 2021, when Priti Patel ordered British officials to rewrite maritime law, so that the U.K. Border Force could carry out “pushbacks” in the Channel, forcing migrant boats headed towards British shores to turn around and go back where they came from. In September, it was revealed that Border Force staff were being trained to drive small vessels back into French waters using jet-skis, a move condemned by the French government. 

In response to questions about the recent deaths in the Channel, the U.K. Home Office would not confirm whether it was continuing to propose pushbacks as a valid method of immigration control.

Despite all the money spent on technology and manpower on both sides of the Channel, people are still willing to risk their lives to board a fragile boat and attempt to reach the U.K.

According to estimates by humanitarian groups, there are currently around 2,000 migrants staying in and around Calais. Before they have even attempted to cross the Channel, the increasing securitization of the area makes it difficult for them to exist and forces them into the city’s shadows. 

Outside the imposing walls of a ruined 16th-century fort in October, near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel in Coquelles, I met Jackson and Gago, two teenagers from South Sudan. 

They were at a phone-charging station organized by a local NGO, even though they didn’t have working phones themselves. Jackson, who requested that his name be changed, had sold his to pay for his journey to Calais. Gago’s was broken. The two boys met in Libya, lost each other on the journey to Europe, and then were reunited in Calais. They told me that they planned to stay together for the rest of their journey. 

Since arriving in Calais, Gago said that he had only had basic interactions with police. He did, however, explain that there was an unremitting soundtrack to his life. “The police find you, and they tell you, ‘Allez allez.’ I think it means, ‘Go, go.’”

Neither Jackson nor Gago were aware of all the measures in place to stop them crossing the Channel. They just knew that the journey is arduous. Gago’s arm was in a sling. A smuggler slashed it with a knife, he said, when he tried to get onto a boat for a journey across the Channel that he hadn’t paid for. 

Jackson described how he could see the lights of England from Calais. 

“We don’t have anything and there’s no way to go,” he said, “The only way is on the river and the river is too big. We can’t swim.” 

I asked if he meant the sea. 

“Yes, the sea.”

For many people migrating across Europe from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Calais is the end of the road. Crossing the Mediterranean, through the Balkans, Greece or Italy and into France, it’s where they end up. In many cases, the journey has taken months, or even years. But, what they find is far from a safe haven.

In October 2016, the last shelter in the “Jungle” — a migrant encampment that had sprung up the previous year and grown to a peak population of 10,000 people — was destroyed. But people continue to come to Calais. Now, they bed down whenever and wherever they can, hiding from the authorities under bridges and tracts of scrubland. Every 24 hours, they are moved on by police. 

On a gloomy morning, I sat in a car, parked on a road a few streets away from the headquarters of the Gendarmerie Nationale in Calais. I was accompanying volunteers from Human Rights Observers, a group formed in 2017 to monitor police and gendarmes operations and document violations of migrant rights. In practice, that means filming daily evictions. 

After a few minutes, one, two, three, four vans pulled out of the parking lot. We followed them to six successive sites in Calais. Uniformed officers combed the areas, confiscating any forms of shelter and forcing migrants to get up and leave. 

In Calais, everyone is watching each other. While filming the police and gendarmes, HRO team members are regularly subject to ID checks. “Sometimes they laugh at us. One officer said, ‘Instead of filming us, just send us nudes,’” recalled a project coordinator named Emma. “Sometimes we are a bit paranoid. We think that everything is against us.”

Shortly after, I went to speak with Franck Toulliou, chief commissioner of police in Calais. “The aim is to prevent a new camp like the Jungle,” he said. “But we remain humane with people, whether they’re Afghan, African or French.”

Ibrahim, a 20-year-old man, originally from the Gambia, is constantly aware of the cameras installed around Calais. Every time he sees a police van, he wants to take cover. He has even had residents filming him with their phones. 

 “This is not the life I want to live. I want to move freely, because I’m young and I’m not a criminal. I don’t want to hide myself like a convict,” he said. “Cameras are everywhere in Calais. Even this place, that we are in now, there is a camera.” 

We were sitting in a garage, attached to the home of Brigitte Lipp — known to many migrants as “Mama Charge.”

An entire wall of the building was taken up by a makeshift phone-charging setup. Power strip after power strip, giving life to devices belonging to the many migrants in her neighborhood. Twice a day, every day, 66-year-old Lipp, a lifelong Calais resident with cropped blonde hair, a sing-song voice and a sharp sense of humor, opens up to provide her much-needed, free service. 

Though cell phones are vital for migrants in Calais, it’s common practice for them to be thrown into the sea once the boats reach British waters, for fear of the devices being taken by the Home Office and the information they contain used to deny asylum claims. 

Often, the most privacy-conscious people in Calais are the smugglers. In order to protect their own identities, they often warn migrants to delete their phone histories before they reach the U.K.

In 2018, the U.K. Border force paid £133,000 to Cellebrite — an Israeli surveillance company that builds mobile phone extraction technology — to scrape phones for evidence of migrant journeys. Similar payments of £335,000 were made to Swedish extraction company Micro Systemation, according to an analysis by Privacy International. Cellebrite markets its technology as able to “audit a person’s journey to identify suspicious activity prior to arrival.” 

Running down one side of Lipp’s road is a 20-foot-high fence. It’s there to keep people out of what used to be a migrant campsite. “There used to be trees all along the street,” Lipp said. “But they cut them down.” 

This is true all over Calais. The local government has deforested large areas, to make it more difficult for migrants to hide and easier for police to spot them.

In addition to the fence, a large CCTV camera has been installed a few doors down from Lipp’s house. “I’m sure it’s for me,” she said, as the camera swiveled round to follow a passing car. 

At a heavily securitized truck stop just outside Calais, razor wire, 360-degree cameras and spotlights circle the vehicles. Police vans are stationed there, and at other locations like it, 24 hours a day. A guard buzzed me in to meet Stuart and Tina Malcolm, who were eating a full English breakfast with their young son, while they waited for a ferry back to Dover. The British couple run a business specializing in cross-border removals. 

“I’ve been coming here for about 20 years. The fencing is the major change. Before, you could see the beaches, you could see everything. I know it’s necessary, but it does feel a bit Berlin Wall,” said Stuart.

 “The personality of Calais has been completely wiped out,” Tina added, remembering childhood day trips, when she and her family would eat mussels and fries. “It used to feel really welcoming, but now it feels cold and uninviting.” 

In 2015, Stuart found three young men from Mali hiding in his truck, after he arrived in the U.K. Preventing stowaways is a constant worry. British hauliers face fines of up to £2,000 for each migrant found in their vehicles. He described how, just one week earlier, he had spotted people trying to open the rear of his truck at a roundabout near the port. He showed me the scrabbled fingermarks, still visible in the dust on the door. 

“The desperation you could see in them, trying to get on the back of these trucks... it’s the scary aspect of them putting their lives at risk just to cross a body of water,” Tina said.

Both described the painstaking journey their vehicles make through the border zone.  Before they can board a ferry, trucks are scanned with X-rays, heartbeat monitors, carbon dioxide detectors and, finally, checked by dogs. Privacy campaigners have described such technology as a multi-million-euro industry that profits from the misery of migrants. But, for Stuart, it is reassuring. 

“I had an exhaust gas recirculation valve in the van. I was blowing exhaust fumes into the back. You wouldn’t want somebody in there,” he said. “The technology, when it works and is used properly, is safer, and quicker.”

Many privacy advocates believe that the border zones traversed by migrants provide ideal testing grounds for surveillance technology that will, eventually, affect the rest of us. Most migrants are undocumented and, therefore, unlikely to assert, or even be aware of their rights. Some sections of the local community, convinced that they are at the epicenter of a crisis, might also be more accepting than others elsewhere. 

“Migrants have a lot more pressing concerns than their own privacy. But I think those of us who can challenge the closing down of their rights, should,” said Chris Cole, director of the UK.-based organization Drone Watch. He argues that Calais and the south coast of England constitute a beta version of a future when “the amount of surveillance will just rocket” for everyone.

The skies over the English Channel, where Spitfires and Messerschmitts duelled during the Battle of Britain, are now the preserve of a different kind of military aircraft. In August 2020, Patel appointed a new “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander,” Dan O’Mahoney, tasked with “saving lives by making dangerous Channel crossings unviable." As of January 2021 a new command center, based in Dover, has been using drones to keep a watchful eye over the sea and search for people arriving by boat. 

The Ministry of Defence has provided the U.K. Border Force with state-of-the-art hardware including three planes and the Thales Watchkeeper winged drone. In August 2020, the Ministry of Defence announced it had deployed a Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime plane to spot migrant vessels. Later that year former British Army officer James Cowan told a U.K. parliamentary committee that the deployment of large aircraft like the Poseidon, which has a quoted flying cost of £35,000 ($47,000) per hour, was like using “a very expensive hammer” to crack a walnut.

In contrast, Cowan went on to explain that drones provide better and much cheaper support. “The English Channel has proved to be an excellent opportunity to test the utility of two fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles,” he said. 

The Home Office has not published the number of drones in operation over the Channel, citing security concerns. 

“As part of our ongoing operational response, we continue to evaluate and test a range of safe and legal options for stopping small boats,” a Home Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

In France, the rollout of drones has been less smooth. In July, Darmanin said he had asked Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, to help the country “deal with” the coastline of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. 

According to the former director general of U.K. Border Force, Tony Smith, France has not been keen on using air surveillance assistance from the British government. “There has been a reluctance to accept technology from us. They didn’t want any of our surveillance capability.” he told the Telegraph newspaper in July. 

The use of drones was actually banned by the French privacy watchdog in January, in a ruling that found their use to monitor compliance with coronavirus restrictions would be a violation of citizen rights during the pandemic. Darmanin, however, is still pushing for more aerial surveillance of migrants. On Sunday, following the crisis talks with European ministers, he announced that a manned Frontex surveillance plane would now patrol the channel “day and night.”

"We have to prevent lives being lost. We have to prevent chaos coming to our external borders," EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said.

As winter sets in, there’s a common feeling among migrants in Calais that time is running out. The days are getting colder, the sea more treacherous, and staying in and around the city is becoming harder. Most of the people I spoke to said they were battling colds and infections as a result of sleeping outdoors, night after night. 

Last week, I got a text message from Jackson, one of the South Sudanese boys I met near the fort. He had made it to the U.K. in a small boat, and was, for the time being, safely installed in accommodation in a Kent seaside town. He had managed to get a new phone in Calais, which the Home Office took for inspection when he arrived. “They gave it back to us, finally,” he texted me. 

“What about Gago?” I asked. 

“He’s still in Calais,” came the reply.

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