“I once had an idea in the back of my mind to leave this place and go abroad,” Besmir Billa told me earlier this year as we sipped tea in the town of Kukes, not far from Albania’s Accursed Mountains. “Of course, like everybody else, I’ve thought about it.”

The mountains rose up all around us like a great black wall. Across the valley, we could see a half-constructed, rusty bridge, suspended in mid-air. Above it stood an abandoned, blackened building that served during Albania’s 45-year period of communist rule as a state-run summer camp for workers on holiday. 

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Kukes has lost roughly half of its population. In recent years, thousands of young people — mostly boys and men — have rolled the dice and journeyed to England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork. 

Fifteen years ago, people would come to Kukes from all over the region for market day, where they would sell animals and produce. The streets once rang with their voices. Those who’ve lived in Kukes for decades remember it well. Nowadays, it’s much quieter.

Billa, 32, chose not to leave. He found a job in his hometown and stayed with his family. But for a person his age, he’s unusual.

You can feel the emptiness everywhere you go, he told me. “Doctors all go abroad. The restaurants are always looking for bartenders or waiters. If you want a plumber, you can’t find one.” Billa’s car broke down recently. Luckily, he loves fixing things himself — because it’s difficult to find a mechanic.

All the while, there is a parallel reality playing out far from home, one that the people of Kukes see in glimpses on TikTok and Instagram. Their feeds show them a highly curated view of what their lives might look like if they left this place: good jobs, plenty of money, shopping at designer stores and riding around London in fast cars. 

In Kukes, by comparison, times are tough. Salaries are low, prices are rising every week and there are frequent power outages. Many families can barely afford to heat their homes or pay their rent. For young people growing up in the town, it’s difficult to persuade them that there’s a future here.

Three days before I met Billa, a gaggle of teenage boys chased a convoy of flashy cars down the street. A Ferrari, an Audi and a Mercedes had pulled into town, revving their engines and honking triumphantly. The videos were uploaded to TikTok, where they were viewed and reposted tens of thousands of times.

Behind the wheel were TikTok stars Dijonis Biba and Aleks Vishaj, on a victory lap around the remote region. They’re local heroes: They left Albania for the U.K. years ago, became influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers, and now they’re back, equipped with cars, money and notoriety.

Vishaj, dubbed the “King of TikTok” by the British tabloids, was reportedly convicted of robbery in the U.K. and deported in 2021. Biba, a rapper, made headlines in the British right-wing press the same year for posting instructions to YouTube on how to enter the U.K. with false documents. Police then found him working in a secret cannabis house in Coventry. He was eventually sentenced to 15 months in prison. 

The pair now travel the world, uploading TikTok videos of their high-end lifestyle: jet skiing in Dubai, hanging out in high-rise hotels, driving their Ferrari with the needle touching 300 kilometers per hour (180 mph) through the tunnel outside Kukes. 

Billa’s nephews, who are seven and 11, were keen to meet him and get a selfie when they came to town, like every other kid in Kukes. 

“Young people are so affected by these models, and they’re addicted to social media. Emigrants come back for a holiday, just for a few days, and it’s really hard for us,” Billa said. 

Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them. They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. “They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,” he said.

Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real. “I’m very concerned about it. There’s this emphasis for kids and teenagers to get rich quickly by emigrating. It’s ruining society. It’s a source of misinformation because it’s not real life. It’s just an illusion, to get likes and attention.”

And he knows that the TikTok videos that his nephews watch every day aren’t representative of what life is really like in the U.K. “They don’t tell the darker story,” he said.

In 2022, the number of people leaving Albania for the U.K. ticked up dramatically, as well as the number of those seeking asylum, at around 16,000, more than triple the previous year. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, one reason for the uptick in claims may be that Albanians who lack proper immigration status are more likely to be identified, leading them to claim asylum in order to delay being deported. But Albanians claiming asylum are also often victims of blood feuds — long-standing disputes between communities, often resulting in cycles of revenge — and viciously exploitative trafficking networks that threaten them and their families if they return to Albania.

By 2022, Albanian criminal gangs in Britain were in control of the country’s illegal marijuana-growing trade, taking over from Vietnamese gangs who had previously dominated the market. The U.K.’s lockdown — with its quiet streets and newly empty businesses and buildings — likely created the perfect conditions for setting up new cannabis farms all over the country. During lockdown, these gangs expanded production and needed an ever-growing labor force to tend the plants — growing them under high-wattage lamps, watering them and treating them with chemicals and fertilizers. So they started recruiting. 

Everyone in Kukes remembers it: The price of passage from Albania to the U.K. on a truck or small boat suddenly dropped when Covid-19 restrictions began to ease. Before the pandemic, smugglers typically charged 18,000 pounds (around $22,800) to take Albanians across the channel. But last year, posts started popping up on TikTok advertising knock-down prices to Britain starting at around 4,000 pounds (around $5,000). 

People in Kukes told me that even if they weren’t interested in being smuggled abroad, TikTok’s algorithm would feed them smuggling content — so while they were watching other unrelated videos, suddenly an anonymous post advertising cheap passage to the U.K. would appear on their “For You” feed.

TikTok became an important recruitment tool. Videos advertising “Black Friday sales” offered special discounts after Boris Johnson’s resignation, telling people to hurry before a new prime minister took office, or when the U.K. Home Office announced its policy to relocate migrants to Rwanda. People remember one post that even encouraged Albanians to come and pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth II when she died in September last year. There was a sense of urgency to the posts, motivating people to move to the U.K. while they still could, lest the opportunity slip away. 

The videos didn’t go into detail about what lay just beneath the surface. Criminal gangs offered to pay for people’s passage to Britain, on the condition they worked for them when they arrived. They were then typically forced to work on cannabis farms to pay off the money they owed, according to anti-human trafficking advocacy groups and the families that I met in Kukes. 

“I imagined my first steps in England to be so different,” said David, 33, who first left Albania for Britain in 2014 after years of struggling to find a steady job. He could barely support his son, then a toddler, or his mother, who was having health problems and couldn’t afford her medicine. He successfully made the trip across the channel by stowing away in a truck from northern France. 

He still remembers the frightened face of the Polish driver who discovered him hiding in the wheel well of the truck, having already reached the outskirts of London. David made his way into the city and slept rough for several weeks. “I looked at everyone walking by, sometimes recognizing Albanians in the crowd and asking them to buy me bread. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me.” 

He found himself half-hoping the police might catch him and send him home. “I was so desperate. But another part of me said to myself, ‘You went through all of these struggles, and now you’re going to give up?’”

David, who asked us to identify him with a pseudonym to protect his safety, found work in a car wash. He was paid 35 pounds (about $44) a day. “To me, it felt like a lot,” he said. “I concentrated on saving money every moment of the day, with every bite of food I took,” he told me, describing how he would live for three or four days on a tub of yogurt and a package of bread from the grocery chain Lidl, so that he could send money home to his family.

At the car wash, his boss told him to smile at the customers to earn tips. “That’s not something we’re used to in Albania,” he said. “I would give them the keys and try to smile, but it was like this fake, frozen, hard smile.”

Like David, many Albanians begin their lives in the U.K. by working in the shadow economy, often at car washes or construction sites where they’re paid in cash. While there, they can be targeted by criminal gangs with offers of more lucrative work in the drug trade. In recent years, gangs have funneled Albanian workers from the informal labor market into cannabis grow houses. 

David said he was careful to avoid the lure of gangsters. At the French border, someone recognized him as Albanian and approached, offering him a “lucky ticket” to England with free accommodation when he arrived. He knew what price he would have to pay — and ran. “You have to make deals with them and work for them,” he told me, “and then you get sucked into a criminal life forever.”

It’s a structure that traps people in a cycle of crime and debt: Once in the U.K., they have no documents and are at the mercy of their bosses, who threaten to report them to the police or turn them into the immigration authorities if they don’t do as they say. 

Gang leaders manipulate and intimidate their workers, said Anxhela Bruci, Albania coordinator at the anti-trafficking foundation Arise, who I met in Tirana, the Albanian capital. “They use deception, telling people, ‘You don’t have any documents, I’m going to report you to the police, I have evidence you have been working here.’ There’s that fear of going to prison and never seeing your family again.” 

Gangs, Bruci told me, will also make personal threats against the safety of their victims’ families. “They would say, ‘I’m going to kill your family. I’m going to kill your brother. I know where he lives.’ So you’re trapped, you’re not able to escape.”

She described how workers often aren’t allowed to leave the cannabis houses they’re working in, and are given no access to Wi-Fi or internet. Some are paid salaries of 600-800 pounds (about $760-$1,010) a month. Others, she added, are effectively bonded labor, working to pay back the money they owe for their passage to Britain. It’s a stark difference from the lavish lifestyles they were promised.

As for telling their friends and family back home about their situation, it’s all but impossible. “It becomes extremely dangerous to speak up,” said Bruci. Instead, once they do get online, they feel obliged to post a success story. “They want to be seen as brave. We still view the man as the savior of the family,” said Bruci, who is herself Albanian.

Bruci believes that some people posting on TikTok about their positive experience going to the U.K. could be “soldiers” for traffickers. “Some of them are also victims of modern slavery themselves and then they have to recruit people in order to get out of their own trafficking situation.”

As I was reporting this story, summer was just around the bend and open season for recruitment had begun. A quick search in Albanian on TikTok brought up a mass of new videos advertising crossings to the U.K. If you typed in “Angli” — Albanian for “England” — on TikTok the top three videos to appear all involved people making their way into the UK. One was a post advertising cheap crossings, and the other two were Albanians recording videos of their journeys across the channel. After we flagged this to TikTok, those particular posts were removed. New posts, however, still pop up every day.

With the British government laser-focused on small boat crossings, and drones buzzing over the beaches of northern France, traveling by truck was being promoted at a reduced price of 3,000 pounds (about $3,800). And a new luxury option was also on offer — speedboat crossings from Belgium to Britain that cost around 10,000 pounds (about $12,650) per person.

Kevin Morgan, TikTok’s head of trust and safety for Africa, Europe and the Middle East, said the company has a “zero tolerance approach to human smuggling and trafficking,” and permanently bans offending accounts. TikTok told me it had Albanian-speaking moderators working for the platform, but would not specify how many. 

In March, TikTok announced a new policy as part of this zero-tolerance approach. The company said it would automatically redirect users who searched for particular keywords and phrases to anti-trafficking sites. In June, the U.K.’s Border Force told the Times that they believed TikTok’s controls had helped lower the numbers of small boat crossings into Britain. Some videos used typos on purpose to get around TikTok’s controls. As recently as mid-August, a search on TikTok brought up a video with a menu of options to enter Britain — via truck, plane or dinghy.

In Kukes, residents follow British immigration policy with the same zeal as they do TikTok videos from Britain. They trade stories and anecdotes about their friends, brothers and husbands. Though their TikTok feeds rarely show the reality of life in London, some young people in Kukes know all is not as it seems.

“The conditions are very miserable, they don’t eat very well, they don’t wash their clothes, they don’t have much time to live their lives,” said Evis Zeneli, 26, as we scrolled through TikTok videos posted by her friends in the U.K., showing a constant stream of designer shopping trips to Gucci, Chanel and Louis Vuitton.

It’s the same for a 19-year-old woman I met whose former classmate left last year. Going by his social media posts, life looks great — all fast cars and piles of British banknotes. But during private conversations, they talk about how difficult his life really is. The videos don’t show it, she told me, but he is working in a cannabis grow house. 

“He’s not feeling very happy. Because he doesn’t have papers, he’s obliged to work in this illegal way. But he says life is still better over there than it is here,” she said.

 “It’s like the boys have gone extinct,” she added. At her local park, which used to be a hangout spot for teenagers, she only sees old people now.

“There’s this huge silence,” agreed Albiona Thaçi, 33, whose husband traveled to the U.K. nine months ago in a small boat. When he left, she brought her two daughters to the seaside to try to take their mind off of the terrifying journey that their father had undertaken. Traveling across the English Channel in a fragile dinghy, he dropped his phone in the water, and they didn’t hear from him for days. “Everything went black,” Thaçi said. Eventually, her husband called from the U.K., having arrived safely. But she still doesn’t know when she’ll see him again. 

In her 12-apartment building, all the men have left. “Now we have this very communal feeling. Before, we used to knock on each others’ doors. Now, we just walk in and out.” But Thaçi’s friends have noticed that when they get together for coffee in the mornings, she’s often checked out of their conversation. “My heart, my mind, is in England,” she said. She plans to join her husband if he can get papers for her and their daughters. 

The absence of men hangs over everything. In the village of Shishtavec, in the mountains above Kukes, five women crowded around the television one afternoon when I visited. It was spring, but it still felt like winter. They were streaming a YouTube video of dozens of men from their village, all doing a traditional dance at a wedding — in London. 

“They’re doing the dance of men,” said Adelie Molla, 22. She had just come in from the cold, having collected water from the well up by the town mosque. The women told me that the weather had been mild this year. “The winter has gone to England,” laughed Molla’s mother Yaldeze, 53, whose son left for the U.K. seven months ago. Many people in their village have Bulgarian heritage, meaning they can apply for European passports and travel to Britain by plane, without needing to resort to small boats.

The whole family plans to eventually migrate to Britain and reunite. “For better or worse I have to follow my children,” said Yaldeze, who has lived in the village her whole life. She doesn’t speak a word of English. “I’m going to be like a bird in a cage.” 

Around the town, some buildings are falling into disrepair while others are half-finished, the empty window-frames covered in plastic sheeting. A few houses look brand new, but the windows are dark. Adelie explained that once people go to the U.K., they use the money they make there to build houses in their villages. The houses lie empty, except when the emigrants come to visit. And when they come back to visit their hometown, they drive so that they can show off cars with U.K. license plates — proof they’ve made it. 

 “This village is emptying out,” Molla said, describing the profound boredom that had overtaken her life. “Maybe after five years, no one will be here at all anymore. They’ll all be in London.”

The oldest settlements of Kukes date back to the fourth century. In the 1960s, when Albania’s communist government decided to build a hydropower dam, the residents of Kukes all had to leave their homes and relocate further up the mountain to build a new city, while the ancient city was flooded beneath an enormous reservoir. And in the early 1970s, under Enver Hoxha’s paranoid communist regime, an urban planner was tasked with building an underground version of Kukes, where 10,000 people could live in bunkers for six months in the event of an invasion. A vast network of tunnels still lies beneath the city today. 

“Really, there are three Kukeses,” one local man told me: the Kukes where we were walking around, the subterranean Kukes beneath our feet, and the Kukes underwater. But even the Kukes of today is a shadow of its former self, a town buried in the memories of the few residents who remain.

David was deported from Britain in 2019 after police stopped him at a London train station. He tried to return to the U.K. in December 2022 by hiding in a truck but couldn’t get past the high-tech, high-security border in northern France. He is now back in Kukes, struggling to find work. 

He wanted me to know he was a patriotic person who, given the chance to have a good life, would live in Albania forever. But, he added, “You don’t understand how much I miss England. I talk in English, I sing in English, I cook English food, and I don’t want my soul to depart this earth without going one more time to England.”

He still watches social media reels of Albanians living in the U.K. “Some people get lucky and get rich. But when you see it on TikTok or Instagram, it might not even be real.” 

Besmir Billa, whose nephews worry him with their TikTok aspirations, has set himself a challenge. He showed me his own TikTok account, which he started last summer.

The grid is full of videos showcasing the beauty of Kukes: clips of his friends walking through velvety green mountains, picking flowers and petting wild horses. “I’m testing myself to see if TikTok can be used for a good thing,” he told me. 

“The idea I had is to express something valuable, not something silly. I think this is something people actually need,” he said. During the spring festival, a national holiday in Albania when the whole country pours onto the streets to celebrate the end of winter, he posted a video showing young people in the town giving flowers to older residents. 

At first, his nephews were “not impressed” by their uncle’s page. But then, the older boy clocked the total number of views on the spring festival video: 40,000 and counting. 

The post The Albanian town that TikTok emptied appeared first on Coda Story.

“People here, local people, just don’t take it very seriously,” said Jambey Wangdi as he sipped on some fresh watermelon juice in a hotel in Tawang, a town in the state of Arunachal Pradesh that sits on India’s jagged eastern Himalayan border with China. He punctuated these words with a phlegmatic shrug. I had asked him how Arunachali people feel about being on the frontline of an intense, intractable and very current border dispute between two nuclear powers.

On June 21, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day “state visit” to the United States — an event that is slightly more ceremonial than an “official” visit and an honor typically reserved for close allies. High on the agenda will be both countries’ strategic need to counter China’s economic and military might and its regional assertiveness. India is being talked up by the Biden administration as the “cornerstone of a free, open Indo-Pacific.” But as the U.S. and India grow closer, the latter’s diplomatic relations with China have nosedived. “This is the worst time I’ve seen in my living memory in I-C relations,” tweeted Nirupama Menon Rao, the former Indian ambassador to both China and the United States. “And I’m not exaggerating. It’s serious.” 

On the eve of his visit to the U.S., Modi told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview, that for “normal bilateral ties with China, peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential.”  Last month, I traveled to  Tawang, which sits 10,000 feet above sea level and about 20 miles from Bum La Pass, the border post between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. China has long claimed Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism, as rightfully Chinese. I met Wangdi at a ritzy resort on the city’s outskirts. A high-ranking functionary in the Arunachal Pradesh government, he was keen to impress upon me the patriotism of people in the state. “Physically we may look a bit different, the shape of our eyes may be different,” he told me. “But emotionally, mentally, we really consider ourselves to be true Indians.”

According to Wangdi, the Indian government’s focus on improving infrastructure in the northeast of the country means that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang in particular are booming. As I drove up to Tawang from the plains on freshly paved roads, evidence was everywhere. Unfinished construction, scattered outcroppings of concrete mushrooms, marred the mountainscape. 

Even the hotel in which we sat was still only half-built. The yet-to-be-installed picture windows in yet-to-be-finished rooms will look out on a famous 17th century Buddhist monastery. Future guests will also see the 30-foot high gilded Buddha that towers over Tawang, a giant looking down on Lilliput.

It was an overcast day in the middle of May when we spoke, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Wangdi leaned back in his chair, every inch the local grandee, self-assured and hospitable. “As far as tourism potential goes,” he told me, “Tawang is at the very top.”

He says the speed and purpose with which Modi’s government is developing Arunachal Pradesh, gradually making the state accessible by air, rail and road, is guaranteed to create economic opportunities and to match the impressive progress on China’s side of the border. Oken Tayeng, a successful tour operator, told me that Arunachal Pradesh was now “at a crucial threshold.” The state, he said, “can still decide the kind of tourists it wants to attract.” He cites neighboring Bhutan as a model for “how to bring in high-quality tourists with little environmental impact.” 

But Tawang is not there yet. The rampant building spree appears ad hoc and unregulated amidst the coniferous hills and cascading waterfalls. Wandering through the center of Tawang — its shabby streets similar to those in dozens of other small Indian hill towns, with tourists from Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra haggling with vendors in Hindi — it is hard to understand why China believes that most of Arunachal Pradesh, and certainly all of Tawang, is theirs.

India’s traditional neighboring rival has been Pakistan. But it is India’s burgeoning rivalry with China that preoccupies security analysts, as the two Asian behemoths, particularly over the last three years, have become embroiled in a bitter, and at times violent, standoff along their 2,100-mile border. Neither country appears willing to take a step back or disengage. 

Though Tawang has been administered by independent India for 72 years now, China maintains that the town is culturally and historically a part of Tibet and therefore Chinese territory. Since 2020, China is estimated to have occupied almost 1,000 square miles of previously Indian-controlled territory in border regions. Satellite images show Chinese-built bridges, roads and watchtowers stretching several miles into what was commonly considered the Indian side of the so-called “Line of Actual Control.” 

Prime Minister Modi has vociferously denied any concession of territory to China. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat. They “have been martyred,” said Modi at the time. “But those who dared Bharat Mata (Mother India), they have been taught a lesson.” Such was the current strength of the Indian army, he added, that “no one can eye even one inch of territory.”

China did not officially disclose any casualties. It was the first loss of life for Indian and Chinese troops on the border since 1975. Another brawl broke out in the final weeks of 2022. On December 9, hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops faced off on the border near Tawang. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told the Indian Parliament that at least 300 Chinese soldiers had tried to cross over into territory held by India. The troops engaged briefly, with their fists and improvised weapons. Six Indian soldiers were reported to have been treated for minor injuries. To prevent fistfights from turning into firefights, India and China have had agreements in place for decades, committing not to use live firearms within a mile or so of the border. But both sides have now deployed arms, and as many as 60,000 troops each, to the border. The situation is “fragile and dangerous,” India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the press.  

Ashok Kantha, a former Indian ambassador to China, says that China has been “pushing the envelope” on border issues with India for over a decade now, seeing what it can get away with. These “gray zone” maneuvers, falling just short of a declaration of war, he told me, are “typical of China’s pressure tactics and intended to make India pay a heavy price for border management.” Kantha, who now directs the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, was referring to the exorbitant costs incurred by India to keep additional troops in harsh and remote terrain all year round and the costs of building the infrastructure to prevent what he called China’s “salami-slicing” method of incrementally expanding its territorial claims.

Writing for The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine, last October, Sushant Singh, a fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, pointed out that “perceived signs of weakness vis-a-vis Pakistan and China are anathema to Modi’s strongman image.” So the Modi government, Singh added, has adopted the “undemocratic domestic strategy of keeping the Indian public in the dark” by restricting “access to journalists and blocking questions and discussions in parliament.” 

Instead, the government and the pliant mainstream media have chosen to hype Modi’s “friendship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, the two famously sat together on a gaudy ceremonial swing in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. 

“Modi’s personalized diplomacy with Xi,” Singh wrote, “has been an abysmal failure.” Over the phone, Singh told me that despite Modi’s posturing about India’s status as a leading global power and Modi’s own status as a charismatic global statesman, the prime minister is fearful of escalating tensions with China.

It is an uncharacteristic diffidence. In February, India’s foreign minister metaphorically hoisted a white flag when questioned about border disputes with China. “As a smaller economy,” Jaishankar said, “what am I going to do, pick a fight with a bigger economy?” It was a discomfiting echo, from a key Indian cabinet minister, of the official Chinese contempt for India’s pretensions. “China,” Ashok Kantha told me, “sees its relationship with India through the prism of its larger rivalry with the United States.” 

Sushant Singh put it more bluntly. “China,” he said, “figures very highly in the Indian imagination. India hardly figures in the Chinese imagination.”

In the Chinese understanding of the global hierarchy, Singh told me, “India is too weak to be granted agency in its own right.” Instead, China thinks of its relations with India as a subplot to the main narrative: China plans to become the world’s preeminent power by 2049. As if to back up this reading, a major security conference held in Singapore in early June was dominated by talk of the rivalry between China and the United States. “A confrontation” between the two superpowers, said the Chinese defense minister, “would be an unbearable disaster for the world.” 

Talk of India, meanwhile, was relegated to a footnote. A Chinese colonel told journalists that India was “unlikely to catch up to China in the coming decades because of its weak industrial infrastructure.” In a dismissive aside, he asked: “When you look at the Indian military’s weapon systems, what types of tanks, aircraft and warships were made and developed by Indians themselves?” The answer is: none.

China’s confidence that it has the upper hand in its relationship with India is bolstered by the numbers. Its economy is nearly six times the size of India’s, and China spends about $225 billion on defense compared to India’s $72 billion.

It is India’s urgency in improving infrastructure in its border areas, in connecting once-isolated states like Arunachal Pradesh to the rest of the country, that accounts in part for China’s increased belligerence, Ashok Kantha told me. Back in Tawang, the construction equipment I saw strewn everywhere, the roads being scoured into the hills and the soldiers who outnumbered the tourists all told the story of India’s attempts to catch up to China.

Sushant Singh traces this development back to 2006, when the influential Indian foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, rejected India’s prevailing strategy of treating its border areas as “buffer zones between China and the Indian heartland.” It was, Singh told me, “an ‘outpost’ outlook inherited from the British.” Instead, Saran argued that India needed to radically upgrade its capacity along the border. It needed to put down hundreds of miles of new roads, lay railway tracks and build bridges and airports. From India’s perspective, this necessary self-assertion in the border regions has revived arguments that had lain dormant for two decades.

While India and China may have been growing further apart for at least 15 years now, the deadly fight in the Galwan valley in 2020 marked the start of what Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar has said is “a very challenging and abnormal phase in our ties with China.” In 2022, China introduced a new border security law, which described the territorial sovereignty of China as “sacred and inviolable.” It also made it official state policy to continue to expand and support the construction of villages and towns along border areas.

India, again belatedly reacting to China’s initiative, announced its own “vibrant villages” scheme to build settlements in long-neglected, often poor and desolate border areas. China has reportedly already built some 600 villages in occupied Tibet. It took until 2023 for India to begin building its first “vibrant village” in Arunachal Pradesh. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state this April to kickstart the program. “Whenever I come to Arunachal,” said Shah, “my heart is filled with patriotism because no one greets people here by saying, ‘namaste,’ they say, ‘Jai Hind’ (long live India) instead.” 

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded to Shah’s visit by saying it “violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” It was a reminder that China has no intention of relinquishing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh. While China claims the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh as its own, it is mostly Tawang that it prizes. “Tawang is indispensable to China,” a retired colonel in the Chinese army told the BBC in March 2023. In 2017, a former Chinese diplomat described Tawang as “inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” He added that the “boundary question was not created by China or India, so we shouldn’t be inheriting it and letting the ghosts of colonialism continue to haunt our bilateral relations.”

It all started, as have many of the world’s present-day territorial disputes, when the British drew a line.

In 1913, negotiations began in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where administrators would retire to escape the heat of the plains. Attending this summit were representatives of British India, Tibet and the new Republic of China — founded after the revolution in 1911 that ended about 275 years of Qing dynasty rule and 1,000 years of Chinese imperial history. Tibet, much to the chagrin of the Chinese representative, was invited as a quasi-independent state. After 1911, the British considered Tibet to be under Chinese “suzerainty,” meaning that Tibet had limited self-rule.

Negotiations played out over several months. When they came to a close, the British representative, Sir Henry McMahon, had determined where the border lines should be drawn between China and Tibet and between Tibet and British India. But China and Tibet could not agree on their border, nor on the extent or nature of China’s so-called suzerainty over a Tibet chafing for independence. 

A document signed by the Tibetans and initialed by Henry McMahon set out the contours of the border line between British India and Tibet, without Chinese agreement — the Chinese delegate walked out of the conference in its final phase. China has since claimed that Tibet, as a Chinese protectorate, had no right to negotiate treaties on its own behalf. The line dividing Tibet and British India, which later became known as the McMahon Line, continues to be the basis of India’s territorial claims. 

The Simla conference ended messily in July 1914, as Europe found itself preparing for World War I. For two decades after the conference, the British authorities did nothing to enforce the McMahon Line. Tibet still saw its writ as extending through what was called the Tawang Tract.

By the mid-1930s though, wrote the journalist and historian Neville Maxwell, a British official named Olaf Caroe tried to “doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference to make them support the assertion that India’s northeastern borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it.” Maxwell is a controversial figure in India, largely because he blames India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, for forcing China into the month-long Sino-Indian war in 1962 by insisting on the legality of the McMahon Line and refusing to come to an independently negotiated border settlement. 
What Maxwell took at face value, the Indian editor Pradip Phanjoubam has written, was that “Tibet was Chinese territory all throughout history,” regardless of what the “Tibetans themselves think on the matter.”

India and China in fact did not share a border until October 1951, when the People’s Republic of China — itself only established by Mao Zedong in 1949 — officially annexed Tibet. The British, despite drawing the McMahon Line, had largely stayed out of Tawang, leaving it to be controlled by Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But alert to the implications of Chinese aggression in Tibet, India sent an expedition to Tawang led by Major Ralengnao “Bob” Khathing who quickly and efficiently established Indian rule by February 1951. 

According to the scholar Sonia Trikha Shukla, Bob Khathing won over residents in Tawang, most of whom were part of the Monpa tribe, with his “tact, firmness and discretion.” He showed, Shukla said, the “benign, enlightened” face of the Indian administration some 37 years after Tawang was supposedly ceded to British India in Simla. China, perhaps preoccupied by the Korean War, didn’t object to India’s takeover of Tawang at the time.

But then, in 1959, there was a popular uprising in Tibet against Chinese control. Fearing arrest and possibly death, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, escaped over the Tibetan border into Tawang. When I visited the monastery in Tawang, I saw photographs in the tiny museum of a lean, young Dalai Lama wearing a hat at a rakish angle that made him look a little like the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in India for over 60 years now, set up the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the western Himalayas.

“When the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India,” wrote historian Jian Chen, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, China became hostile. Two “hitherto friendly countries,” he added, “became bitter adversaries.” According to Chen, when top Chinese leaders discussed Tibet in a Politburo meeting in 1959, Deng Xiaoping — who succeeded Mao in 1976 and transformed China’s economy — said that India was behind the Tibetan rebellion. China believed that the Indian government had allowed the CIA to train Tibetan guerillas on Indian soil, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. 

India, Mao argued, despite its non-aligned foreign policy, remained a slave to Western interests. “When the time comes,” Chen quotes Mao as saying, “we certainly will settle accounts with them.”

Those accounts were settled in 1962. While the rest of the world was distracted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the distinct prospect of the Cold War turning hot, a confrontation between India and China over border delimitations was becoming inevitable. Chinese forces crossed into Tawang on October 20, 1962 and overwhelmed the small number of poorly equipped Indian troops on the border. Prime Minister Nehru turned desperately to the United States and Britain for help. But before any international intervention became necessary, China called a unilateral ceasefire. 

After a month of territorial gains, China, perhaps concerned about the harsh Himalayan winter, perhaps fearful of American intervention, moved its troops back behind the McMahon Line. While China voluntarily retreated from Tawang and present-day Arunachal Pradesh, it retained control over Aksai Chin, about 15,000 square miles of barely populated, high-altitude desert, territory that India claims but that is of strategic value to China, connecting Tibet to the Uyghur Muslim heartland of Xinjiang.

During the 1962 war, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were removed from their homes and held in internment camps just because of the way they looked, much like Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Joy Ma was born in an internment camp in India in 1962. She wrote a book about the 3,000 Chinese-Indians imprisoned in Deoli, in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. I spoke to Ma, who now lives in California, and her co-author Dilip D’Souza on Zoom. Though the war in 1962 lasted only a month, Ma said, many “Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp.” Some died in the camp. “Some,” she wrote in her book, “were deported to China on ships — a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been.”

Ma told me that she grew up in Calcutta and had lived in India until she went to graduate school in the United States. After the war was over, her family couldn’t bring themselves to speak about what had been done to them. “The government was just so punitive,” Ma said. And, long after the war, even their neighbors would ostracize them. “People didn’t want to know us,” she told me, “didn’t want us to visit.” Ma is among a number of Chinese-Indians, most of whom have emigrated to North America, who are seeking an acknowledgement and an apology from the Indian government. 

It’s unlikely to come anytime soon. The war with China looms large in the Indian imagination — for decades after the war, the national tenor was maudlin, mournful, self-pitying but hardly introspective. India positioned itself as a victim rather than any sort of perpetrator. Apart from Ma and D’Souza’s book, there has been no public discussion of the internment of Chinese-Indians or contrition about the destruction of a once-thriving Chinese-Indian community. Only a few hundred Chinese-Indians are left in Calcutta, for instance. Yet every Chinese New Year the media descends on the city to broadcast pictures of dragon dances and celebrate the delicious, hybrid cuisine while resolutely ignoring the jailing of Chinese-Indians in 1962. Over the last three years, as India’s border quarrel with China rose in pitch and intensity, Ma told me, the small Chinese-Indian community has been reminded of its vulnerability and its perpetually provisional status in India. 

“The border,” Ma said, “is the reason for our misery.”

The aftershocks of the 1962 war continue to reverberate in India in other ways too. The abject defeat is a stick with which the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, still beats Nehru.  The war is cited as Exhibit A in the BJP-led prosecution of Nehru’s alleged failings as prime minister. A common trope in the BJP’s narrative is that Nehru was too complacent and too weak-willed to effectively defend India’s borders against Chinese incursions. In December 2022, when Indian and Chinese soldiers brawled on the border near Tawang, the BJP chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, offered some boastful reassurance at a private event. “It’s not 1962 anymore,” he said in Hindi. “It’s 2022 and we’re in the Narendra Modi era.” India could now be relied upon to keep China at bay. And part of how the BJP plans to boost India’s defensive capacities is to invest heavily in Northeast India.

While India prides itself on its linguistic and ethnic diversity, with its pluralism and democratic inclusiveness cited as major weapons in its competition with China, the far less palatable truth is that its union is fractious, riven with conflict and prejudice. In particular, the eight landlocked states of Northeast India, which share borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, have been frequently at odds with the Indian mainstream.  

Modi himself tweeted, on March 26, that the “Northeast is witnessing all-round development. Once known for blockades and violence, the region is now known for its development strides.”

A little over a month later, on May 3, Manipur, one of the Northeastern states that Modi was referring to, exploded in ethnic and sectarian violence that has resulted in over 100 deaths. After weeks of silence, the Indian government moved 10,000 soldiers into Manipur to keep the peace. Still, deaths and cases of arson continue to be reported. Internet services have also been largely unavailable since the conflict began and, at the time of publication, had yet to be restored.

Manipur is a powder keg of ethnic resentment at least in part because the BJP’s Hindu-centric approach stirs up communal trouble, in this case between the largely Christian tribes in the hills and the Hindu Meitei people in the valley. In Assam, another state in the Northeast, the BJP’s flawed attempt to build a national register of citizens has left two million people, many of them Muslim, facing statelessness. 

Still, in Arunachal Pradesh, it is a common refrain that Modi’s time in power has coincided both with an acceleration in infrastructure building and a renewed commitment to the region. Modi himself has visited Northeast India about 50 times in nine years. The fruits of his personal attention are evident in the recent electoral successes the BJP has enjoyed there: Modi’s party is now the dominant political force in the region.

In the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, I visited Thembang, an ancient Monpa village that is currently waiting to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. On the afternoon I was there, the village was deserted except for some thick-set mountain dogs and a drunk swaying precariously down some stone steps. Despite the poverty of the present-day village, the remnants of massive stone walls and gates betray a more salubrious past. For centuries, Thembang was a “dzong,” a fortified administrative and ecclesiastical hub. Dzongs have been a feature of Buddhist architecture since the 12th century, particularly in Bhutan, which also borders Arunachal Pradesh. They are places of local significance, places of business and bustle, politics and religion. 

Walking out of Thembang, I was stopped by Jambay. He only gave me his first name. Obviously prosperous and educated, he spoke fluent English and was eager for conversation with a passing stranger. His family line in Thembang, Jambay said, goes “as far back as it’s possible to go.” But, given the remoteness and relative lack of opportunity in the area, Jambay had been sent to school in Bangalore. He went on to work in the Indian civil service in Delhi. Now, Jambay told me, he had “turned full circle,” returning to his home village to work on a U.N.-sponsored conservation project. 

I steered our conversation toward his opinion, as an Arunachali in close proximity to the border, on China’s assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. Younger people, Jambay said, “know only that they are Indian.” His grandfather’s generation, though, saw themselves as Monpas who were part of a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist land, their cultural totems being the Tawang monastery and the Dalai Lama’s seat in Lhasa. Until 1951, when China annexed Tibet, trade and travel between Lhasa and Tawang — thousands of miles of mountain wilderness traversed on foot and on horseback — was ceaseless, Jambay said.

In 1962, Jambay told me, Chinese troops passed through Thembang on the way to Bomdila, where they battled with the last of the crumbling Indian resistance. The war “was not much discussed” within his family, Jambay said, “because it was so short and most people escaped into Assam before the worst of the fighting.” The few who were “left behind,” Jambay told me, “lived with the Chinese soldiers.” They were “good to the locals,” Jambay said. “Maybe because they wanted to win the people’s hearts.”

But the Chinese soldiers, Jambay said, did not leave a favorable impression. “Indian nationalism flourishes in Arunachal Pradesh,” he told me, “because people resent the Chinese for how they treated the Dalai Lama and are grateful that India gave him refuge.” 

But there is, he added, also a new edge in people’s feelings about Nehru and the Congress party, which ruled India for more than 50 of the country’s 75 years as an independent nation. The Congress is now in opposition, a pastiche of the grand party it once was, pitching Nehru’s great-grandson into a losing battle against Modi, who has effectively styled himself as the destroyer of a complacent, English-speaking Indian elite, which clung fast to their inherited privileges.

Jambay says Congress was reluctant to build infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh because it could also be used by the enemy, whether the Chinese or insurgents from within. “That,” Jambay told me, “is negative thinking, to not want to prepare yourself because you’re so worried about giving your enemy an opportunity.” Some of what Jambay refers to as “step-motherly treatment” is evident in the fact that, until 1972, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North East Frontier Agency, an unlovely bureaucratic label that suggested that the region only mattered as a buffer between India and China. It took until 1987 for the Indian government to declare Arunachal Pradesh a fully-fledged state.

As for Nehru, Jambay says he “gave up on the Northeast in 1962 when he said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam,’ after the Chinese took over Bomdila.” He is repeating, with conviction, the BJP’s main talkingpoints. The implication is that until the rise of Narendra Modi, the Northeastern states were not treated as fully Indian.

Any Indian visitor to Arunachal Pradesh will invariably remark on two things that appear to separate the state from its Northeastern neighbors. Pretty much everyone in the state speaks Hindi. And Arunachalis wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

Jambey Wangdi, the government official I met at the sparkling new hotel in Tawang, told me that people in Arunachal Pradesh are “taught Hindi right from their childhood.” The state, he said, “puts a lot of emphasis on Hindi speaking and Indianness.” Hindi has become a link language in a state with dozens of different tribes that speak in as many dialects. 

The Hindi spoken by Arunachalis, as Wangdi cheerfully admits, is not “grammatically perfect” and is spoken with a distinctive local accent. But it connects the state to the 650 million people in India who speak Hindi as either their first or second language. After the 1962 war with China, the Indian government made language integration a priority, promoting the study of Hindi in schools. Bollywood also hooked Arunachalis onto Hindi. “We love the songs,” Wangdi said, “we sing them all the time.” 

Throughout our conversation, Wangdi kept coming back to themes of Indianness and patriotism. He told me that his father was a junior officer in the intelligence bureau posted at the border in 1962. “You could make a movie about his life,” Wangdi said. Among the stories his father told about the war was one about Chinese soldiers helping farmers in Tawang to work their fields. “In the evenings,” Wangdi said, “the soldiers would gather people together and say, ‘Look at my eyes, look at your eyes. We’re the same. What do you have in common with those Indians with their big eyes, their big noses and their beards?’”

The point, for Wangdi, is that the Chinese soldiers thought external appearances were enough to engender solidarity and kinship. But they underestimated the Nehru government’s efforts to make tribal people, who were culturally Tibetan Buddhists and who were cut adrift in rough, remote terrain, see themselves as part of a vast Indian nation. 

Verrier Elwin, a British-born Indian anthropologist, advised Nehru on how to integrate the North East Frontier Agency and its unruly tribes into India. In Elwin’s slim 1957 book, “A Philosophy for NEFA,” he wrote: “Elsewhere in the world, colonists have gone into tribal areas for what they can get; the Government of India has gone into NEFA for what it can give.”

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government, so repressive in putting down insurgencies in other parts of the country, including the Northeast, seems to have created genuine national feeling. At the monastery in Tawang one morning, its yolk-yellow roofs glinting in the sun, I watched as the young monks, straight-backed in their robes, sang the Indian national anthem. It seemed to me almost performative. But Tongam Rina, an editor at the Arunachal Times, told me that Arunachalis had been systematically and effectively “Indianized.” 

In school, she said, pupils recited the “National Pledge,” which begins: “India is my country / All Indians are my brothers and sisters / I love my country / and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.” On WhatsApp, she forwarded me a recent tweet from the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister’s office, featuring a video of local schoolgirls singing a “soul-stirring patriotic song, filling the air with love for our motherland.” A hard-nosed journalist, Tongam told me that displays of patriotism should not mask the structural problems in Arunachal Pradesh — a lack of jobs, for instance, or the Indian government’s desire to mimic Chinese policies in Tibet by pursuing a narrow development agenda while ignoring its effects on the environment or on local people’s lives.

Nehru’s severest critics argue that it was his refusal to negotiate over the dubiously drawn borders bequeathed by the British Raj that pushed India into a disastrous war. The scars of that conflict mean that, despite the bellicose posturings of Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the government has little desire to take on a militarily and economically superior China. But for at least three years now, both countries have been staring each other down. And there is little indication of when they will choose to return to the dormant, if unresolved, status that characterized their border relations for half a century after 1962.

Sanjib Baruah, a political studies professor at Bard College, told me that “relations between India and China have deteriorated during the last decade primarily because of global strategic realignments.” As it always has, China sees its relationship to India only in the context of wider Chinese geopolitical ambition. President Xi Jinping, Baruah said, has expressed his belief that the U.S. and its allies are conspiring to contain further Chinese advancement. “This is the context,” Baruah added, “in which China sees India’s growing closeness with the U.S. as a threat.” 

In February, two U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Senate “reaffirming the United States’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of the Republic of India.” The resolution noted that the U.S. “recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.” China, said Baruah, the Bard professor, “probably sees the resolution as a provocation.”

The history of the McMahon Line, with the haphazard way it came to be an international border between India and China and the renewed fervor with which both nations claim Arunachal Pradesh’s status to be non-negotiable, is evocative of Benedict Anderson’s line in his seminal work, “Imagined Communities.” It is, Anderson wrote, “the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” To see Tawang as an integral part of either India or China is a willful act of magical thinking.  

Before I left Tawang, I spoke again to Jambey Wangdi. It seemed he too had chance and destiny on his mind. “If the problem of Tibet could be solved,” he said, “whether it’s autonomy or a free Tibet…” He trailed off. Wangdi left the tantalizing prospect of a free Tibet unexplored. He didn’t speculate what that might mean for Tawang, which is closely connected to Tibet through their shared Buddhism. In 1683, the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, one of only two to have been born outside the precincts of Tibet proper. So even then Tawang’s geographical status, if not its cultural identity, was liminal — a peripheral place between other, bigger, more significant places.

It feels like a place that was designed to provoke arguments. Tawang’s value to both India and China is symbolic: It’s about geopolitics, strategy and national self-image. As a consequence, Wangdi pointed out, “the amount of money spent on the military on the border is enormous.” If you have a good neighbor, he said, “you can spend that money on health and education.” If you have a good neighbor, he laughed, “you can get some sleep at night.”

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The European Centre for Media Freedom also came out in support of the Sabah journalists, condemning the detention and demanding that press freedom be upheld. But Turkey itself is a leading jailer of journalists, ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. And, according to German prosecutors, Erel and Albay were under investigation for the “dangerous” dissemination of other journalists’ personal data.

German authorities have legitimate concerns about the safety of Turkish journalists living in exile. In July 2021, Erk Acarer, a Turkish columnist, was beaten up outside his home in Berlin. Later that month, German authorities began investigating Turkish nationalist organized crime groups operating in Europe after the police found a hit list of 55 journalists and activists who had fled Turkey.

In September 2022, Sabah published information that revealed the location of Cevheri Guven’s home. It appears likely — though it has not been confirmed by German officials — that this was the reason for the arrests of Erel and Albay. Guven himself had been arrested in Turkey in 2015 and sentenced to over 22 years in prison. He was the editor of a news magazine that had published a cover criticizing Erdogan. Out on bail before his trial, Guven wrote that he gave his “life savings” to a smuggler to get him and his family out of Turkey. He now lives in Germany.

The ability of states such as Germany and Sweden to protect refugees, whether they are fleeing Turkey, China, Russia or Iran, has waned, as authoritarian leaders have become more brazen in using technology to stalk, bully, assault, kidnap and even kill dissidents. The Turkish state’s appetite for targeting critical voices abroad, especially those of journalists, has been growing for some time. As Erdogan’s government clamped down on media freedom at home, it has co-opted journalists working at government-friendly news outlets into becoming tools of cross-border repression. This has allowed the state to reach outside Turkey’s borders to intimidate journalists and dissidents who have sought refuge in Western Europe and North America.

Since last year, Sabah has revealed details about the locations of several Turkish journalists in exile. In October 2022, it published the address and photographs of exiled journalist Abdullah Bozkurt. The report included details about where he shopped. This was just a month after I met Bozkurt at a cafe in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, where he now lives. Bozkurt told me that he is constantly harassed online by pro-government trolls and because of the large Turkish immigrant population in Sweden, many of whom are Erdogan supporters, has been forced into isolation. It has had, he said, an adverse impact on his children’s quality of life.

Two years before Bozkurt’s personal information was leaked, in June 2020, Cem Kukuc, a presenter on the Turkish channel TGRT Haber, said of Bozkurt and other critical journalists: “Where they live is known, including their addresses abroad. Let’s see what happens if several of them get exterminated.” Just three months after that broadcast, Bozkurt was attacked in Stockholm by unidentified men who dragged him to the ground and kicked him for several minutes. “I think this attack was targeted,” Bozkurt told the Committee to Protect Journalists, “and is part of an intimidation campaign against exiled Turkish journalists with the clear message that we should stop speaking up against the Turkish government.” Bozkurt deleted his address and vehicle and contact information from the Swedish government’s registration system after the 2020 attack, but both Sabah and A Haber, another pro-government media outlet, still published his address last year.

Sabah and A Haber are both owned by the sprawling Turkuvaz Media Group. It is “one of the monopolistic hubs for pro-government outlets,” said Zeyno Ustun, an assistant professor of sociology and digital media and film at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. The group’s chief executive is Serhat Albayrak, the brother of a former government minister, Berat Albarak, who is also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Turkuvaz says that its newspapers have a collective readership of 1.6 million. In April, a month before Turkey’s tense general election, in which Erdogan managed to secure his third term as president, Turkuvaz’s channel ATV was the most watched in the country.

A few days before the second round of the presidential election, in late May, I met Orhan Sali, the head of news at the English-language broadcaster A News and the head of the foreign news desk at A Haber. To enter Turkuvaz’s tall, glass-paneled headquarters on the outskirts of Istanbul, I had to pass through three security barriers. An assistant took me to Sali’s spacious office on the third floor. Sali, who was born in Greece, is small with an incongruously graying beard on his round, youthful face. He wore a crisp, white shirt. On a shelf near Sali’s desk sit a couple of awards, including at least one for “independent journalism,” he told me.

In the same breath, Sali also said, “We are pro-Erdogan, we are not hiding it.” He acknowledged that there is a risk in publishing the names of journalists critical of the Turkish government but said it was not unusual. “If you read the British tabloid newspapers,” he told me, “you will find tons of pictures, tons of addresses.” 

This is not entirely accurate, according to Richard Danbury, who teaches journalism at the City University in London. “It is not true,” he told me, “that even tabloids as a matter of course publish people’s addresses and photos of people’s houses, particularly if they have been at risk of being attacked.”

But Sali was unconcerned. He approached a panel of screens covering the wall. Some of these channels, he said, are hardline and totally supportive of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition candidate in Turkey’s recent election. “All of them,” he told me, “are terrorists.”

In the lead up to the presidential election, Turkuvaz outlets such as A News and A Haber gave Kilicdaroglu little to no coverage. Erdogan, meanwhile, received extensive coverage, according to Reporters Without Borders. One pro-government channel, TRT Haber, gave Erdogan 32 hours of airtime compared to just 30 minutes for Kilicdaroglu.

Sali, who seems to have a penchant for deflecting criticism of Turkuvaz’s journalism by comparing it to that of the British press, told me he sees no problem with this lack of balance. “The BBC,” he said, “is supporting the ruler. Who is the ruler? The king. You cannot say anything against the king, can you?”

At least seven journalists who have had their addresses published by Turkuvaz outlets are alleged by Erdogan’s government to be followers of the Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen, who is suspected of having orchestrated a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan’s government has imprisoned hundreds of critics they refer to as “FETO terrorists,” a derogatory reference to Gulen supporters. Cevheri Guven — the editor whose address in Germany was published in Sabah in September 2022 — is often described in pro-government media as the Joseph Goebbels of FETO, a reference to the Nazi propagandist.

“The 2016 coup had a major effect on the media landscape in Turkey,” said Joseph Fitsanakis, a professor of intelligence and security studies at Coastal Carolina University. “At that point,” he told me, “Erdogan made a conscious decision, a consistent effort to pretty much wipe out any non-AKP voices from the mainstream media landscape.” The AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, was co-founded by Erdogan in 2001.

In October 2022, the Turkish parliament passed sweeping legislation curtailing free speech, including implementing a vaguely worded law that effectively leaves anyone accused of spreading false information about Turkey’s domestic and foreign security facing three years in prison.

Before Erdogan’s rise to power, Turkey did not enjoy total media freedom, said Ustun, the media professor at St. Lawrence University. But, she told me, during his 21 years in politics, “there has been a gradual demise of the media freedom landscape.” Following the widespread protests in 2013, referred to as the Gezi Park protests, and the 2016 coup attempt, “efforts to control the mainstream media as well as the internet have intensified,” she added. The overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets are now under the control of Erdogan and his allies.

Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me that Erdogan has “muscled the press financially” by channeling advertising revenues to pro-government outlets such as those owned by the Turkuvaz Media Group. Erdogan, Barky says, has also weaponized the law. “They use the judicial system to punish the opposition press for whatever reason,” he told me. “You look left and you were meant to look right, and in Turkey today that is enough.”

The media has, for years now, been used as a tool of transnational repression, says Fitsanakis. In 2020, for instance, the U.K. expelled three Chinese spies who had been posing as journalists. But, Fitsanakis adds, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, intelligence services in Europe and North America, fueled by a heightened awareness of the threat emanating from Moscow, have been collaborating more closely to remove Russian spies from within their borders. 

The actions of other diplomatic missions too are being more closely monitored. Turkey, one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression, according to Freedom House, has found itself a target of Western surveillance, making it harder for the state to place intelligence operatives inside embassies. In lieu of this traditional avenue for embedding intelligence sources in foreign countries, Fitsanakis believes, governments are turning in greater numbers toward friendly journalists. “It’s the perfect cover,” Fitsanakis told me. “You have access to influential people, and you get to ask a lot of questions without seeming strange.”

Erdogan’s re-election, experts fear, could mean he will further clamp down on democratic freedoms. Barkey believes there will be a brain drain as more intellectuals and critics leave Turkey for more congenial shores. But the evidence suggests that an emboldened Erdogan can still reach them.

“We might see a lot more emphasis on silencing any kind of opposition to Erdogan in the coming years,” Fitsanakis told me. “And because much of the opposition to Erdogan is now coming from Turks abroad, that fight is going to transfer to European soil.”

The post Turkey uses journalists to silence critics in exile appeared first on Coda Story.

By the time Kat set foot in the safe house in Reynosa, she had already escaped death’s grip twice.

The first time was in her native Honduras. A criminal gang had gone after Kat’s grandfather and killed him. Then they came for her cousin. Fearful that she would be next, Kat decided she needed to get out of the country. She and her 6-year-old son left Honduras and began the trek north to the United States, where she hoped they could find a safer life.

It was January 2023 when the two made it to the Mexican border city of Reynosa. They were exhausted but alive, free from the shadow of the fatal threats bearing down on their family in Honduras.

But within weeks of their arrival, a cartel active in the area kidnapped Kat and her son. This is not uncommon in Reynosa, one of Mexico’s most violent cities, where criminal groups routinely abduct vulnerable migrants like Kat so they can extort their relatives for cash. Priscilla Orta, a lawyer who worked on Kat’s case and shared her story with me, explained that newly-arrived migrants along the border have a “look.” “Like you don’t know where you are” is how she put it. Criminals regularly prey upon these dazed newcomers.

When Kat’s kidnappers found out that she had no relatives in the U.S. that they could shake down for cash, the cartel held her and her son captive for weeks. Kat was sexually assaulted multiple times during that period. 

“From what we understand, the cartel was willing to kill her but basically took pity because of her son,” Orta told me. The kidnappers finally threw them out and ordered them to leave the area. Eventually, the two found their way to a shelter in Reynosa, where they were connected with Orta and her colleagues, who help asylum seekers through the nonprofit legal aid organization Lawyers for Good Government. Orta’s team wanted to get Kat and her son into the U.S. as quickly as possible so they could apply for asylum from inside the country. It was too risky for them to stay in Reynosa, vulnerable and exposed.

For more than a month, Kat tried, and failed, to get across the border using the pathway offered to asylum seekers by the U.S. government. She was blocked by a wall — but not the kind we have come to expect in the polarized era of American border politics. The barrier blocking Kat’s entry to the U.S. was no more visible from Reynosa than it was from any other port of entry. It was a digital wall.

Kat’s arrival at the border coincided with a new policy implemented by the Biden administration that requires migrants to officially request asylum appointments at the border using a smartphone app called CBP One. For weeks, Kat tried to schedule a meeting with an asylum officer on the app, as the U.S. government required, but she couldn’t do it. Every time she tried to book an appointment, the app would freeze, log her out or crash. By the time she got back into CBP One and tried again, the limited number of daily appointment slots were all filled up. Orta and her team relayed the urgency of Kat’s case to border officials at the nearest port of entry, telling them that Kat had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted and was alone in Reynosa with her child. The officers told them they needed to use CBP One. 

“It was absolutely stunning,” Orta recalled. “What we learned was that they want everybody, regardless of what’s happening, to go through an app that doesn’t work.”

And so Kat and her son waited in Reynosa, thwarted by the government’s impenetrable digital wall.

The southern​​ border of the U.S. is home to an expansive matrix of surveillance towers, drones, cameras and sensors. But this digital monitoring regime stretches far beyond the physical border. Under a program known as “Alternatives to Detention,” U.S. immigration authorities use mobile apps and so-called “smart technologies” to monitor migrants and asylum seekers who are awaiting their immigration hearings in the U.S., instead of confining them in immigrant detention centers. And now there’s CBP One, an error-prone smartphone app that people who flee life-threatening violence must contend with if they want a chance at finding physical safety in the U.S.

These tools are a cornerstone of U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to immigration. Instead of strengthening the border wall that served as the rhetorical centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s presidential run, the Biden administration has invested in technology to get the job done, championing high-tech tools that officials say bring more humanity and efficiency to immigration enforcement than their physical counterparts — walls and jail cells.

But with technology taking the place of physical barriers and border patrol officers, people crossing into the U.S. are subjected to surveillance well beyond the border’s physical range. Migrants encounter the U.S. government’s border controls before they even arrive at the threshold between the U.S. and Mexico. The border comes to them as they wait in Mexican cities to submit their facial recognition data to the U.S. government through CBP One. It then follows them after they cross over. Across the U.S., immigration authorities track them through Alternatives to Detention’s suite of electronic monitoring tools — GPS-enabled ankle monitors, voice recognition technology and a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial recognition software and geolocation for check-ins.

Once in the U.S., migrants enrolled in Alternatives to Detention’s e-monitoring program say they still feel enveloped by the carceral state: They may be out in the world and free to walk down the street, but immigration authorities are ever-present through this web of monitoring technologies.

The program’s surveillance tools create a “temporal experience of indefinite detention,” said Carolina Sanchez Boe, an anthropologist and sociologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who has spent years interviewing migrants in the U.S. living under Alternatives to Detention’s monitoring regime.

“If you’re in a detention center, the walls are sort of outside of you, and you can fight against them,” she explained. But for those under electronic surveillance, the walls of a detention center reproduce themselves through technology that is heavily intertwined with migrants’ physical bodies. Immigration authorities are ever-present in the form of a bulky monitoring device strapped to one’s ankle or a smartphone app that demands you take a selfie and upload it at a certain time of day. People enrolled in Alternatives to Detention must keep these technologies charged and fully functioning in order to check in with their supervisors. For some, this dynamic transfers the role of an immigration officer onto migrants themselves. Migrants become a subject of state-sanctioned surveillance — as well as their own enforcers of it.

One person enrolled in Alternatives to Detention told Sanchez Boe that the program’s electronic monitoring tools moved the bars of a prison cell inside his head. “They become their own border guard, their own jailer,” Sanchez Boe explained. “When you’re on monitoring, there’s this really odd shift in the way you experience a border,” she added. “It’s like you yourself are upholding it.”

As the U.S. government transposes immigration enforcement to technology, it is causing the border to seep into the most intimate spheres of migrants’ lives. It has imprinted itself onto their bodies and minds.

The app that Kat spent weeks agonizing over is poised to play an increasingly important role in the lives of asylum seekers on America’s southern border. 

Most asylum requests have been on hold since 2020 under Title 42, a public health emergency policy that authorized U.S. officials to turn away most asylum seekers at the border due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In January 2023, the same month that Kat arrived in Reynosa, the Biden administration implemented a new system for vulnerable migrants seeking humanitarian exemptions from Title 42. The government directed people like Kat to use CBP One to schedule their asylum appointments with border officials before crossing into the U.S. 

But CBP One wasn’t built for this at all — it debuted in 2020 as a tool for scheduling cargo inspections, for companies and people bringing goods across the border. The decision to use it for asylum seekers was a techno-optimistic hack intended to reduce the messy realities at the border in the late stages of the pandemic.

But what started out as a quick fix has now become the primary entry point into America’s asylum system. When Title 42 expired last month, officials announced a new policy: Migrants on the Mexico side of the border hoping to apply for asylum must now make their appointments through CBP One. This new system has effectively oriented the first — and for many, the most urgent — stage of the asylum process around a smartphone app.

The government’s CBP One policy means that migrants must have a smartphone, a stable internet connection and the digital skills to actually download the app and make the appointment. Applicants must also be literate and able to read in English, Spanish or Haitian Creole, the only languages the app offers.  

The government’s decision to make CBP One a mandatory part of the process has changed the nature of the country’s asylum system by placing significant technological barriers between some of the world’s most vulnerable people and the prospect of physical safety.

Organizations like Amnesty International argue that requiring asylum seekers to use CBP One violates the very principle upon which the U.S. asylum laws were established: ensuring that people eligible for protection are not turned away from the country and sent back to their deaths. Under U.S. law, people who present themselves to immigration authorities on U.S. soil have a legal right to ask for asylum before being deported. But with CPB One standing in their way, they must first get an appointment before they can cross over to U.S. soil and make their case.

Adding a mandatory app to this process, Amnesty says, “is a clear violation of international human rights law.” The organization argues that the U.S. is failing to uphold its obligations to people who may be eligible for asylum but are unable to apply because they do not have a smartphone or cannot speak one of the three languages available on the app. 

And that’s nothing to say of the technology itself, which migrants and human rights groups working along the border say is almost irredeemably flawed. Among its issues are a facial matching algorithm that has trouble identifying darker skin tones and a glitchy interface that routinely freezes and crashes when people try to log in. For people like Kat, it is nearly impossible to secure one of the limited number of appointments that the government makes available each day. 

CBP One success stories are few and far between. Orta recalled a man who dropped to the ground and let out a shriek when he made an appointment. A group of migrants embraced him as he wept. “That’s how rare it is,” she said. “People fall to their knees and hold each other and cry because no one has ever gotten an appointment before.”

The week after Title 42 ended, I checked in with Orta. In the lead-up to the program’s expiration, the Biden administration announced that immigration officials would make 1,000 appointments available on CBP One each day and would lengthen the window of time for asylum seekers to try to book them. But Orta said the changes did not resolve the app’s structural flaws. CBP One was still crashing and freezing when people tried to log in. Moreover, the number of appointments immigration authorities offer daily — 1,000 across the southern border — is not  nearly enough to accommodate the demand triggered by the expiration of Title 42. 

“It’s still a lottery,” she sighed. “There’s nowhere in the app to say, ‘Hey, I have been sexually abused, please put me first.’ It’s just your name.”

Back in the spring, as Kat struggled with the app day after day, Orta and her colleague decided to begin documenting her attempts. She shared one of those videos with me, taken in early March. Kat — slight, in a black T-shirt — sat in a chair in Reynosa, fidgeting as she waited for CBP One’s appointment-scheduling window to go live. When it did, she let out a nervous sigh, opened the app and clicked on a button to schedule a meeting. The app processed the request for several seconds and then sent her to a new page telling her she didn’t get an appointment. When Kat clicked the schedule button again, her app screen froze. She tried again and again, but nothing worked. She repeated some version of this process every day for a week, while her attorneys filmed. But it was no use — she never succeeded. “It was impossible for her,” Orta said.

Kat is far from the only asylum seeker who has documented CBP One’s shortcomings like this. Scores of asylum seekers attempting to secure an appointment have shared their struggles with the technology in Apple’s App Store. Imagine the most frustrating smartphone issue you’ve ever encountered and then add running for your life to the mix. In the App Store, CBP One’s page features dozens of desperate reviews and pleas for technological assistance from migrants stranded in Mexico.

“This is just torture,” one person wrote. “My girlfriend has been trying to take her picture and scan her passport for 48 hours straight out of desperation. She is hiding in a town where she has no family out of fear. Please help!” Another shared: “If I could give negative stars I would. My family are trying to flee violence in their country and this app and the photo section are all that’s standing in the way. This is ridiculous and devastating.” 

The app, someone else commented, “infringes on human rights. A person in this situation loses to a mechanical machine!”

In Kat’s case, her lawyers tried other routes. They enlisted an academic who studies cartels’ treatment of women along the border to submit an expert declaration in her case. Finally, after more than six weeks of trying and failing to secure an appointment, Kat was granted an exception and allowed to enter the U.S. to pursue her asylum claim without scheduling an appointment on CBP One. Kat and her son are now safely inside the country and staying with a family friend. 

Kat was fortunate to have a lawyer like Orta working on her case. But most people aren’t so lucky. For them, it will be CBP One that determines their fates.

Biden administration officials claim that the tools behind their digitized immigration enforcement strategy are more humane, economical and effective than their physical counterparts. But critics say that they are just jail cells and walls in digital form.

Cynthia Galaz, a policy expert with the immigrant rights group Freedom for Immigrants, told me that U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which oversees Alternatives to Detention, “is taking a very intentional turn to technology to optimize the tracking of communities. It’s really seen as a way to be more humane. But it’s not a solution.” 

Galaz argues that the government’s high-tech enforcement strategy violates the privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of migrants and their broader communities while also damaging their mental health. “The inhumanity of the system remains,” she said.

Alternatives to Detention launched in 2004 but has seen exponential growth under the Biden administration. There are now more than 250,000 migrants enrolled in the digital surveillance system, a jump from fewer than 90,000 people enrolled when Biden took office in January 2021. According to ICE statistics, the vast majority of them are being monitored through SmartLINK, the mobile phone app that people are required to download and use for periodic check-ins with the immigration agency. Migrants enrolled in this system face a long road to a life without surveillance, spending an average of 446 days in the program.

During check-ins, migrants enrolled in the program must upload a photo of themselves, which is then matched to an existing picture taken during their program enrollment using facial recognition software. The app also captures the GPS data of participants during check-ins to confirm their location.

The government’s increasing reliance on SmartLINK has shifted the geography of its embodied surveillance program from the ankle to the face. The widespread use of this facial recognition app is expanding the boundaries of ICE’s digital monitoring system, this time from a wearable device to something that is less visible but ever-more ubiquitous.

Proponents at the Department of Homeland Security say that placing migrants under electronic monitoring is preferable to putting them in detention centers as they pursue their immigration cases in court. But digitization raises a whole new set of concerns. Alongside the psychological effects of technical monitoring regimes, privacy experts have expressed concern about how authorities handle and store the data that these systems collect about migrants.

SmartLINK collects wide swaths of data from participants during their check-ins, including location data, photos and videos taken through the app, audio files and voice samples. An FAQ on ICE’s website says the agency only collects participants’ GPS tracking data during the time of their check-ins, but also acknowledges that it has the technical ability to gather location data in real-time from participants who are given an agency-issued smartphone to use for the program — a key concern for migrants enrolled in the program and privacy experts. The agency also acknowledges that it has access to enrollees’ historical location data, which it could theoretically use to determine where a participant lives, works and socializes. Finally, privacy experts worry that the data collected by the agency through the program could be stored and shared with other databases operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE — a risk the agency recently conceded in its first-ever analysis of the program.

Hannah Lucal, a technology fellow with the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology, has studied the privacy risks of Alternatives to Detention at length. She told me she sees the program’s wide-ranging surveillance as “part of a broader agenda by the state to control immigrant communities and to limit people’s autonomy over their futures and their own bodies.”

And the program’s continuous electronic monitoring has left some migrants with physical and psychological damage. The ankle monitors, Lucal said, “cause trauma for people even after they’ve been removed. They give people headaches and sores on their legs. It can be really difficult to bathe, it can be really difficult to walk, and there’s a tremendous stigma around them.” Meanwhile, migrants using SmartLINK have expressed to Lucal fears of being constantly watched and listened to. 

“People talked about having nightmares and losing sleep over just the anxiety that this technology, which is super glitchy, may be used to justify further punishment,” she explained. “People are really living with this constant fear that the technology is going to be used by ICE to retaliate against them.”

Alberto was busy at work when he missed two calls from his Alternatives to Detention supervisor. The 27-year-old asylum seeker had been under ICE’s e-monitoring system since he arrived in the U.S. in 2019. He was first given an ankle monitor but eventually transitioned over to the agency’s mobile check-in app, SmartLINK. Once a week, Alberto was required to send a photo of himself and his GPS location to the person overseeing his case. On those days, Alberto, who works with heavy and loud machinery, would stay home from his job to ensure everything went smoothly.

But one day this past spring, Alberto’s supervisor called him before his normal check-in time, while he was still at work. He didn’t hear the first two calls over the buzz of the room’s machinery. When things quieted down enough for Alberto to see another call coming in, he picked up. Fuming, Alberto’s supervisor ordered him to come to the program’s office the following day. 

“I told her, ‘Ma’am I have to work, I have three kids, I have to support them,’” he told me in Spanish. 

“That doesn’t matter to me,” the case worker replied. 

When Alberto showed up the next day, as instructed, he was told by his Alternatives to Detention supervisor that he had more than a dozen violations for missing calls and appointments — which he disputes — and he was placed on the ankle monitor once again. 

The monitor is bulky and uncomfortable, Alberto explained. In the summer heat, when shorts are in season, Alberto worries that people who catch a glimpse of the device will think he’s a criminal.

“People look at you when they see it,” he said, “they think that we’re bad.” The situation has worn on him. “It’s ugly to wear the monitor,” he told me. And it weighs even more heavily on him now that he is not sure when it will come off.

Over the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of people with extensive knowledge of Alternatives to Detention, including immigration attorneys, researchers, scholars and migrants who are, or were, enrolled in the program. Those discussions, as well as an emerging body of research, suggest that Alberto’s reaction to the electronic monitoring he was exposed to is not uncommon. 

In 2021, the Cardozo School of Law published the most comprehensive study on the program’s effects on participants’ well-being, surveying roughly 150 migrants who wear ankle monitors. Ninety percent of people told researchers that the device harmed their mental and physical health, causing inflammation, anxiety, pain, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and depression. Twelve percent of respondents said the ankle monitor resulted in thoughts of suicide, and 40% told researchers they believed that exposure to the device left them with life-long psychological scars.

Berto Hernandez, who had to wear an ankle monitor for nearly two years, described the device as “torturous.” “Besides the damage they do to your ankles, to your skin, there’s this other implication of the damage it does to your mental health,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez, who uses they/them pronouns, immigrated with their parents to the U.S. from Mexico at age 10. In 2019, when they were 30 years old, they were detained by immigration officers and enrolled in Alternatives to Detention as their deportation case proceeded.

Hernandez was in college while they had to wear the monitor and told me a story about a time they drove to a student retreat with a peer a few hours away from their home in Los Angeles. All of a sudden, the ankle monitor started beeping loudly — an automatic response when it exits the geographic range determined by immigration authorities. 

“I had a full panic attack,” Hernandez told me. “I started crying.” Although they had alerted their case manager that they would be out of town, Hernandez says their supervisor must have forgotten to adjust their location radius. After the incident, Hernandez had a physical reaction every time the device made noise.

“Whenever the monitor beeped, I would get full on panic attacks,” they explained. “Shaking, crying. I was fearful that they were going to come for me.” Hernandez thinks the level of fear and lack of control is part of the program’s objectives. “They want you to feel surveilled, watched, afraid,” they said. “They want to exert power over you.”

Hernandez was finally taken off of the ankle monitor in 2021, after appealing to their case manager about bruises the device left on their ankles. Hernandez was briefly allowed to do check-ins by phone but will soon be placed on SmartLINK. They don’t buy the government’s message that these technologies are more humane than incarceration.

“This is just another form of detention,” they told me. “These Alternatives to Detention exert the same power dynamics, the same violence. They actually perpetrate them even more. Because now you’re on the outside. You have semi-freedom, but you can’t really do anything. If you have an invisible fence around you, are you really free?”

Once on SmartLINK, Hernandez will join the 12,700-plus immigrants in the Los Angeles area who are monitored through the facial recognition app. Harlingen, Texas, has more than double that amount, with more than 30,600 placed under electronic monitoring — more than anywhere else in the country. This effectively creates pockets of surveillance in cities and neighborhoods where significant numbers of migrants are being watched through ICE’s e-monitoring program, once again extending the geography of the border beyond its physical range. 

“The implication of that is you never really arrive and you never really leave the border,” Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University researcher focusing on U.S. immigration enforcement who has studied the evolving geography of the border, told me. Kocher says these highly concentrated areas of migrant surveillance are known as “digital enclaves”: places where technology creates boundaries that are often invisible to the naked eye but hyperpresent to those who are subjected to the technology’s demands. 

“It’s not like the borders are like the racial impacts of building freeways through our cities, and things like that,” he noted. “They’re kind of invisible borders.”

Administering all of this technology is expensive. The program’s three monitoring devices cost ICE $224,481 daily to operate, according to agency data.

On that end, there is one clear beneficiary to these expansions. B.I. Incorporated, which started out as a cattle-tracking company before pivoting to prison technology, is the government’s only Alternatives to Detention contractor. It currently operates the program’s technology and manages the system through a $2.2 billion contract with ICE, which is slated to expire in 2025. B.I. is a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a private prison company that operates more than a dozen for-profit immigrant detention centers nationwide on behalf of ICE. GEO Group earned nearly 30% of its total revenue from ICE detention contracts in 2019 and 2020, according to an analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union. Critics like Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the immigrant’s rights group Mijente, say this entire system is corrupted by profit motives — a money-making scheme for the companies managing the detention system that sets up financial incentives to put people behind physical and digital bars.

And B.I. may soon add another option to its toolkit. In April, ICE officials announced that they are pilot testing a facial recognition smartwatch to potentially fold into the e-monitoring system — an admission that came just weeks after the agency released its first-ever analysis of the program’s privacy risks. In ICE’s announcement of the smartwatch rollout, the agency said the device is similar to a consumer smartwatch but less “obtrusive” than other monitoring systems for migrants placed on them. 

Austin Kocher, the immigration enforcement researcher, said that touting technologies like the smartwatch and the phone app as “more efficient” and less invasive than previous incarnations, like the ankle monitors, is tantamount to “techwashing” — a narrative tactic to gain support and limit criticism for whatever shiny new tech tool the authorities roll out.

“With every new technology, they move the yardstick and say, ‘Oh, this is justified because ankle monitors aren’t so great after all,’” Kocher remarked. For people like Kocher, following the process can feel like an endless loop. First, the government detained migrants. Then it began to release them with ankle monitors, arguing that surveillance was kinder than imprisonment. Then it swapped the monitors for facial recognition, arguing that a smartphone is kinder than a bulky ankle bracelet. Each time, the people in charge say that the current system is more humane than what it had in place last time. But it’s hard to know where, or how, it will ever end — and who else will be dragged into the government’s surveillance web in the meantime.

For people like Alberto, there is no clear end in sight. He doesn’t know when the monitor will come off. But he knows it won’t be removed until his supervisor gives the okay. It can’t malfunction if he wants to avoid getting in trouble again. And he can see his daughter is paying attention. 

Recently, she noticed the monitor and asked him what it was. Alberto tried to keep it light. “It’s a watch,” he told her, “but I wear it on my ankle.” She asked him if she could have one too. 

“No,” he replied. “This one is only for adults.”

The post When your body becomes the border appeared first on Coda Story.

When he saw the Tunisian coast guard coming, Fabrice Ngo knew he wouldn’t make it to Italy that day. The young Cameroonian had pushed off from the shore of the Tunisian city of Sfax in a small metal boat with 40 others. They left under the cover of night alongside seven other boats. The small fleet motored north toward Italy, spread out, but all with the same destination. In the distance, the lights of seaside towns dotted the coastline.

The Tunisian coast guard found them two hours into their journey. As the police vessel approached, fear gave way to disbelief. The coast guards — in uniform and on an official ship — boarded the metal dinghy, dislodged and seized the boat’s motor and then sped off, motor in hand. The group of 40, most of them from West Africa, were left at sea with no motor. Panic ensued. Some began paddling with their bare hands.

“We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t move forward. We started tearing up the fuel cans to paddle, everyone had their hands in the water,” Ngo told us. “Some brave ones undressed and jumped in the water to push the boat along.” (We have changed Ngo’s name to protect his safety.)

By mid-afternoon the following day, the boat had floated toward a small chain of islands off the coast of Sfax. Again, the Tunisian coast guard reappeared, towed the group farther out to sea and, again, left them floating at sea, still with no motor.

Then the weather started to turn — the waves grew choppy and water began to fill the dingy. 

“When we had advanced maybe 50 meters, that’s when the coast guard arrived,” Ngo told us. “They towed us back again in the middle, where the water is deep. The boat was getting weighed down by water. If it had continued to fill, we all would have died.”

Desperate for help, the group finally got the attention of a fishing boat that towed them to safety, ferrying them back to the coast near Sfax.

The Tunisian coast guard intercepted and then abandoned Ngo’s boat with the help of technology supplied by the European Union. In 2019, the EU inked a deal to provide nearly 20 million euros’ (about $21.4 million) worth of radar, undersea and airborne drones, radios and other technology, as well as training, to the government of Tunisia. EU officials made a similar agreement with Moroccan authorities. The Border Management Programme for the Maghreb region was designed to arm coast guard authorities in North Africa with new technology to be deployed along migration routes to Europe and to train them to use it. Tunisia recently surpassed Libya as the most heavily traveled route for irregular migration to Europe across the Mediterranean. 

Over the past decade, the EU has struck similar deals — exchanging hundreds of millions of euros worth of surveillance technology, other police equipment and accompanying training — with nearly every non-EU country that borders the bloc. At the center of these deals is the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, an innocuous-sounding international organization based in Vienna that has become one of the bloc’s go-to intermediaries for supplying surveillance equipment and training to police and coast guards in countries bordering the EU. 

The ICMPD’s clients are all either EU states or intergovernmental organizations — it receives more than half of its budget from the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU. Because the ICMPD is not a government institution, it can enable states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.

“The EU is breaking its own rules and values with the border regime we have built up: They partner with autocratic regimes and provide them with technology to use in the Mediterranean to keep people out,” said Ozlem Demirel, a member of the European Parliament from Germany. Demirel pointed to the ICMPD as an example of efforts by the European Commission to carry out this work with as little scrutiny as possible.

Hundreds of pages of documents we obtained through Freedom of Information requests, made primarily to the European Commission, shed light on the organization’s work along EU borders and go into minute detail about the ICMPD’s inner workings.

In 2019, the European Union provided top-of-the-line surveillance equipment to the state security service in Morocco, via the ICMPD, ostensibly to help the country tighten its borders and fight smuggling. But Moroccan authorities, already known for hacking the phones of independent journalists, activists and academics, could use this EU-provided technology to further perpetuate the same type of internal repression. In Libya, the ICMPD was paid by the EU to provide consulting services to Libyan migration authorities, including the Libyan Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration, which runs a network of detention centers that have been criticized by the U.N. human rights agency for the “unimaginable horrors” suffered by migrants detained there. In Bosnia, the ICMPD is building a new migration detention center. A spokesperson for Bosnia’s Ministry of Security told us that Bosnian authorities facilitated deportations to countries with which Bosnia has “good bilateral relations” but no deportation agreement. This is a dubious practice under international law.

And in Tunisia, the ICMPD is supplying technology and training to a coast guard that is increasingly being mobilized to carry out human rights abuses against migrants and refugees. The organization’s “Integrated Border Management Project” — funded by the EU and overseen by the German federal police — may look humanitarian on paper. But in practice, sources on the receiving end of the project say it is designed to prevent people from leaving Tunisia’s shores to seek refuge in Europe.

Ngo eventually made it to the other side of the Mediterranean, in another dinghy. We met him at a reception site for asylum seekers in northern Italy where he had befriended another asylum seeker — also from Cameroon. The two men fled the opposite sides of Cameroon’s civil war at more or less the same time. Ngo is from a French-speaking village and was forced to flee when his home was attacked by an English-speaking militia. His friend is an English-speaker and was a member of one of these same militias until his group was overrun by the Cameroonian military and he was forced to flee the country. But their paths have brought them together.

Both were able to flee Cameroon and make a home in Tunisia. For two years, Ngo worked as a car mechanic, while his friend worked in construction. Both lived in relative stability until, last February, they say they were forced to flee home, again.

In a televised speech on February 21, 2023, Tunisian President Kais Saied directly targeted Black Africans in Tunisia, referring to them as “hordes of illegal migrants” and charging them with carrying out “violence, crime and unacceptable actions.” Saied echoed the conspiracy theories of far-right political parties in both Tunisia and Italy, under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, that tie intracontinental immigration to a “criminal plan” to change the “demographic landscape.”

The speech triggered unrest across Tunisia, where Black people comprise about 10% to 15% of the population. Within days, many people from countries in sub-Saharan Africa who were living in Tunisia, as well as Black Tunisians, reported losing their jobs, being evicted from their homes and facing arbitrary detentions by the police and violent attacks by vigilante groups. After Saied’s speech, Ngo’s boss told him to go home and not to return. For the first time, Ngo considered leaving Tunisia.

“These attacks made many of us want to stay indoors all day, like a cat,” he said. “We couldn’t live in this condition — I was in Tunisia for two years and never imagined taking to the sea.”

“Everything changed after the president’s speech,” said Mohammed Salah, a refugee from Sudan who has lived in Tunisia since 2016. Salah hails from the Darfur region, which became the ground zero for a genocide carried out by Sudan’s notoriously brutal Janjaweed militia in the early 2000s. Granted refugee status in Tunisia two years after arriving, Salah has been working in construction ever since. But after Saied’s speech, he told us, “they fired me from my job, they kicked me out of my home. All because the president said that we don’t like Black people.”

Salah came to lead a movement of people that has, for two months, camped out in front of the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration — in a plum neighborhood outside Tunis where many international organizations have their local headquarters. We spoke to Salah in April, just a few weeks after violence erupted in Khartoum, between the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia, which now calls itself the RSF. “I’ll go to Rwanda, to Europe, wherever,” Salah told us. “I just can’t go back to Sudan, especially now.”

But traveling by sea is becoming an increasingly dangerous option for people like Salah, as the European Union expands its cooperation with the authorities in Tunisia, with the ICMPD serving as a middleman. Sources at human rights and development organizations told us they were concerned that European policy in Tunisia will follow that of neighboring Libya, where the bloc began providing support for a coast guard intended to intercept migrant boats in international waters and to bring them back to the country from which they had just fled. The EU has been internationally condemned for its support of the Libyan coast guard, border police and migrant detention system, which, since 2016, has detained tens of thousands of migrants under inhumane conditions. An investigation by Amnesty International presented ample evidence of migrants being subjected to torture, sexual violence and even extrajudicial killings.

Before 2020, the Tunisian coast guard had a humanitarian focus, explained Romdhane Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, a Tunis-based human rights organization. But in the past three years — and, Ben Amor notes, since the EU began its support for the country’s border authorities — his organization has documented extensive human rights abuses at sea by the Tunisian coast guard, similar to those seen in Libya.

In 2019, the ICMPD began supporting the Tunisian coast guard with a host of technical equipment and training, paid for by the EU. They have radar, communications equipment and drones — everything they need to stop people from leaving Tunisia’s shores or to frighten them away.

A report by Ben Amor’s organization that will be published in June, to which we were given advanced access, details a pattern of abusive behavior by the Tunisian coast guard against migrants at sea. Dozens of interviews, including with shipwreck survivors and fishermen, demonstrate a pattern of abuse by the coast guard and show that it routinely fails to perform its duty to rescue migrants in distress. Researchers documented multiple incidents in which the coast guard deliberately provoked shipwrecks or stole motors from dinghies and left boats full of people adrift — which is exactly what happened to Ngo. The report offers figures that speak to the scale of these operations: Between January and April 2023, the Tunisian coast guard intercepted 19,719 migrants at sea. During the same period, 3,512 were arrested for “illegal stay.”

“The Europeans hide behind this organization,” Ben Amor told us. “So it’s not the European Union that does this, but it’s ICMPD, it’s an independent organization.”

“There is political pressure on the coast guard to prevent people from leaving, whatever the price, whatever the damage,” Ben Amor said. “That’s how the violence started, and the coast guard is responsible for a lot of violence.”

The ICMPD was established in 1993 in response to the fall of the Soviet Union. “We in Europe feared a mass invasion of Russians,” wrote Jonas Widgren, one of the ICMPD’s founders, in a 2002 academic paper. Widgren was frustrated by the lack of a coordinated response by European states to what he saw as a “never-ending asylum crisis.” At first, the ICMPD acted as a mix of a policy think tank and a diplomatic organization, facilitating dialogue among states on issues related to borders and migration and publishing policy briefs.

The organization grew steadily over the years, but the tipping point came in 2015, when more than one million people came to Europe having fled the civil war in Syria. That same year, the ICMPD appointed a new director, Michael Spindelegger, an Austrian conservative politician. According to multiple former colleagues and development insiders, Spindelegger had the political will and the right connections to, as one former employee put it, “make the most of the crisis.”

“The European Union wanted to look like it was throwing money and equipment at the problem, basically throwing money to stop migrants,” recalled one former senior ICMPD employee, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. “Suddenly, there was all this funding available, which included border management training but also included equipment,” they said. “The European Commission can’t just hand over equipment to, say, the Moroccan government, so they need someone like the ICMPD to do it.” If the Commission were to try to push through this type of transaction without a middleman like the ICMPD, it would need the approval of the European Parliament. This can be hard to come by even in a favorable political climate. But the grim optics of reported abuses in Libya would likely draw unwanted scrutiny to the project and potentially jeopardize its approval.

Before coming to the ICMPD, Spindelegger held a series of top government jobs in Austria, including as finance minister and foreign minister. In 2015, he went on to chair the Agency for the Modernisation of Ukraine, a NGO funded by the pro-Russian Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash. The following year, Spindelegger took the helm at the ICMPD.

Known for his neoliberal approach to migration policy, Spindelegger expanded the ICMPD into new regions and began training border guards and procuring technology and equipment for the police in most countries that border the EU bloc. With that expansion came a bigger budget, increasing from 16.7 million euros (about $18 million) in 2015 to 58 million euros ($62.2 million) in 2022. In 2022, 56% of the ICMPD’s budget came from the European Commission. Just three years ago, in 2020, the Commission provided 80% of the ICMPD’s budget.

“Our aim still is to be the go-to organisation for European states on all matters related to migration,” wrote Spindelegger in 2023. The organization also began running vaguely-defined “migrant resource centers,” primarily in South Asia and the Middle East, that appear to be focused on dissuading people from pursuing migration without documents.

The ICMPD operates for the European Commission under a funding scheme called “indirect management,” whereby EU work is outsourced to external agencies and the Commission isn’t involved in how projects are carried out. Several sources told us that this means the ICMPD isn’t subject to the same transparency and accountability measures that it would be otherwise.

“By externalizing this work to an organization outside of the European Union, the Commission is making this work far less accountable, working in a sort of legal gray area,” said Demirel, the German parliamentarian. “The farther this action is from European institutions, the less we can control it — Parliament can’t look at contracts from ICMPD.”

This disconnect is practical, said Jeff Crisp, who worked for the U.N. refugee agency for decades. He pointed to “serious ethical issues that ICMPD doesn’t seem to have addressed.”

“There is a disconnect between some of the language the organization uses and the activities it’s involved in,” said Crisp. “They are making things sound very technocratic and apparently quite neutral, whereas in fact they have very specific political purposes, which are often contradictory to human rights values.” Sources also expressed concern about the overlap between the ICMPD and the EU bureaucracy when it came to staffing. Six former ICMPD employees and European development insiders all described a revolving door of former European Commission employees coming to work at the ICMPD and vice versa.

A spokesperson for the European Commission told us that ICMPD operations “continuously undergo audits, assessments and evaluations with regard to their compliance with rules and regulations of the EU, including the respect of human rights.” The spokesperson did not address allegations that these operations are contributing to human rights violations.

Outside the office of the International Organization for Migration in Tunis, Tunisia’s capital, just over 100 people were still camped out in protest when we visited in April. The headquarters is surrounded by tall white gates, with a plaza containing a small tent city stretching down one side of the building. Three people argued with the security guard at the gate, while others sat in the shade of one of the plaza’s two palm trees. 

One man from Guinea, who asked that his name be withheld for his safety, said he had been camped outside the IOM building to ask for medicine and a way out of the country. After the Tunisian president’s February speech, he was attacked by a group of locals who robbed him of all his belongings. When we met in April, his eye was still noticeably swollen.

“The first time I tried to leave, I was pulled back to shore,” he told us. “The second time, they stopped me on the shores and put me in prison for six months,” he said. He showed us a gap where his tooth once was, which he said he lost after being beaten by guards in prison. “Now I’ve lost it all.”

Ben Amor, the director of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, says this kind of indiscriminate violence has become commonplace for migrants and refugees throughout Tunisia, especially following Saied’s racist speech. 

“We are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis in Tunisia,” Ben Amor said. “And at the same time, ICMPD continues its border management project here — so they equip the Tunisian coast guard with drones, with a radar and with other surveillance systems to keep people from leaving.”

“All of this work is being masked to look like protection,” said Gabriella Sanchez, a migration expert at Georgetown University. Sanchez argues that the European Union carries out border projects with the ICMPD and other third-party organizations deliberately, as a way of avoiding responsibility and accountability. “It is the creation of this illusion that by giving work to third parties, the EU isn’t directly involved and aren’t necessarily morally responsible for the consequences,” Sanchez told us.

With a border control budget that leapt from 12 billion euros (about $12.8 billion) in 2014-2020 to more than 23 billion ($24.6 billion) in 2021-2027, the European Union is almost literally doubling down on its efforts along the border.

Back at the reception site in northern Italy, Fabrice Ngo said he is lucky to have survived his journey over the sea. On the day of his rescue, the fisherman who spotted them attached a line to their metal dinghy and brought them back to the coast. From there, Ngo remembers, the fisherman went back out to find the other boats that had departed Sfax together with Ngo’s. It was then that he found out that the other boats had also been left without motors by the coast guard. 

“They pulled back every boat except one. One boat refused the rescue, and they were left at sea,” Ngo remembered, shaking his head. “That’s how they shipwrecked. Many people died.”

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