At the Gates of Fortress Europe

1.

Druskininkai is a hilly, forested area in southern Lithuania, near the border with Belarus and Poland. Its name derives from druska, which means salt. Over thirty mineral springs pocket the ground. Since the nineteenth century residents of the capital, Vilnius, have flocked to spas there to bathe in the calcium-rich waters. Today the city of Druskininkai is known for its mud baths and amber therapies.

In July 2021 the Lithuanian border security agency, VSAT, set up a makeshift encampment for detained asylum seekers not far from the city. A high metal barrier encircled the site, inside which a second chain link fence enclosed military-style tents. Armed officers patrolled the perimeter; surveillance cameras rotated on high poles. Inmates looking out could see a glimmer of the blue Nemunas River, which divides Lithuania from Belarus.

Sajjad Mohammedhasan arrived at the Druskininkai camp on July 25, 2021. A twenty-four-year-old IT professional, he had fled Iraq two days earlier, flying to Belarus on a tourist visa and trekking through pine trees to the Lithuanian border. “I want to claim asylum,” he said in English to the first border guard he flagged down. Had they asked what the reason was, Sajjad might have informed them that he was facing death threats back in Baghdad. A few months earlier, his fiancée had disappeared. Sajjad suspected that her family, who disapproved of their relationship, had kidnapped her. An uncle told Sajjad his life was at risk. He left with a single backpack.

But the guards asked no questions. They handcuffed Sajjad, confiscated his passport and cell phone, and drove him to a small border station, where he sat outside on the ground with over a dozen other captives, including two Iraqi families. A few hours ticked by. Then they were driven to the Druskininkai camp, where Sajjad was placed in a tent that had space for ten people but was housing sixteen, including five women and six children. It was cold at night but there were no blankets. The daily meal was a plastic bag with canned tuna, a corn roll, and a bottle of water. When the guards brought a kettle, inmates packed around it. Sajjad wanted a coffee but gave up when he saw the crowd. After two days, he was moved to a tent with fifteen men.

There were no interpreters. As one of the few people who spoke English, Sajjad communicated with the guards. “Why are we here?” he asked. “I want a lawyer.” They mostly said they were following orders or did not reply. Eventually one let him borrow his cell phone. When Sajjad tried his uncle, there was no answer. For a second call, the guard charged $10. Sajjad paid and dialed his sister: “I’m just calling to tell you I’m fine.” He didn’t know what else to say.

*

On July 30 it was announced that the male inmates were being moved. As they lined up to board a bus, officers searched their belongings, removing passports, phones, and electronics. Guards beat some of those who questioned or resisted orders. They kicked a Kurdish man for hiding a SIM card and cell phone in his shoe. 

The men were transferred to the Rūdninkai camp, over sixty miles northwest, close to the Polish border. An open-air facility built on a former military training ground, it was about the size of two soccer fields—far larger than Druskininkai—and held some eight hundred inmates. The two entrances were always monitored and armed guards patrolled the perimeter, sometimes with dogs. While most of the guards were VSAT, some were from other Lithuanian and Polish agencies.

At first there were no toilets, showers, or running water; the inmates relieved themselves outside. Three days later the authorities brought port-a-potties. On the fourth or fifth day firemen arrived and filled two large cans with water for washing. Along with several others Sajjad begged them to open the fire truck’s hose. From behind a fence the driver turned the water on; the men ran under the high-pressure stream in their underwear. Later the authorities set up a shipping container with showers and toilets, but the water that came out of the tap looked like mud and smelled of rust. Sajjad washed some underwear and his pajamas, which never dried in the damp air—he eventually threw them away. The camp authorities did not provide new clothes or sheets (though they later gave blankets). They returned his phone a month after taking it.

There were inmates from around the world: Russia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria, India, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan. The tents were organized by nationality or region, but the section groupings appeared random. Sajjad shared a tent with nine other Iraqi men in a section of twenty-five tents without electricity. Initially they were cordoned off by a metal fence; the inmates on the other side threw power banks across. After a protest broke out the authorities allowed them to remove the fence and mingle. To pass the time they played football in a cramped strip. They named Rūdninkai the Garbage Dump. 

As in Druskininkai, the camp food made inmates sick. A few times a week a white van pulled up and sold provisions—chicken and bread, cucumbers and potatoes, soap and toothpaste—at double the price of an average Lithuanian supermarket. The inmates asked the vendor to bring them pots and oil, then cooked over open fires. 

As August faded into September the evenings got cooler. At night Sajjad wore all his clothes and nestled under several blankets, but he was still freezing. After the firetruck shower he had developed a cough that lodged in his lungs like a splinter. To stay warm, the men ignited fires with leftover oil and burned whatever they could: discarded clothing, mattresses, pillows. 

Then it started to rain. The tents were flat on the ground and water came in through the sides. When Sajjad pulled his shoes on they squeaked with moisture. One night the rain came down hard, as if someone were throwing stones on the tarp. Sajjad woke up in a pool of water. He and the others pushed sand with their hands to form a berm around the tent perimeter. 

Sajjad was allowed to register an asylum claim. But neither he nor anyone he spoke to was given a chance to challenge their detention or told when they might be freed. There were occasional protests, which Sajjad avoided; he was afraid of being labeled an instigator. Later, in March 2022, when inmates in another Lithuanian detention camp, Medininkai, peacefully protested, the authorities sent in an antiriot squad. Amnesty International reported that officers entered the women’s quarters while everyone was sleeping, handcuffed a group of partially clothed African women, beat some of them, then dragged them outside as a form of public humiliation. 

*

Almost as soon as Sajjad arrived at the Garbage Dump, inmates began to disappear. In August he counted some fifty escapes. One night two of his friends broke out and hid in the nearby forest until a smuggler’s car picked them up. Both made it to Western Europe. On September 4, six weeks after he was brought there, Sajjad decided to try his luck. 

In the afternoon, he chose a part of the perimeter that was patrolled by an older guard who often dozed in his car. There were two metal fences, one low to the ground and the other some three meters high; Sajjad wedged himself through the first and launched himself over the second from the base of a spotlight. There were no sounds or movement from the vehicle. He ran for half a mile through the thick dense woods before slowing to a walk, struggling for breath—camp life had drained his strength. He thought he was almost free. 

Suddenly a dog appeared, circling him and barking. The noise alerted a border guard, who ran over: dressed in all black, he looked like a goon from a film. “I surrender,” Sajjad shouted, raising his hands. But the guard came closer, right up to his face, and sprayed him in the eyes. As Sajjad fell against a tree, the man gave a command to the dog, which jumped on him, biting into his arms, shoulder, and thigh. He collapsed on the ground. “Stop,” he screamed. “Stop!” A second officer arrived and called off the animal. The pepper spray blurred Sajjad’s vision. His corneas burned. The officers grabbed him off the ground, handcuffed him, and walked him back to the camp. His arm and leg were covered in bloody gashes.

Back at the camp they dragged Sajjad inside a giant refrigerator. He knew other men who had been put there as punishment for trying to escape. Arab inmates called it ghorfa al-sa’ada: “the happiness room.” It was too dark for him to see his own hands. The motor of the cooling fan droned in his ears. To ward off the cold, he rubbed the pepper spray from his arms onto other parts of his body. His insides ached. He was imprisoned there at least a few hours, possibly longer. It occurred to him that he had traveled a long way to die. The thought amused him. 

Finally two officers came inside and handcuffed him again. One of them pulled his hands up behind his back, making him stumble as he walked; when he fell, they smacked him with their batons. The pair paraded him through the camp and released him. The other men helped Sajjad into bed. His friend Bahar wrapped his wounds with gauze; the authorities did not call a doctor. After a few days, they returned his belongings. Once he was well enough to move around, he helped a group that was plotting a new escape. They started to dig a tunnel, working in the middle of the night. Sajjad kneeled on the ground and used a tent peg.

On September 25, helmeted men with black balaclavas and automatic weapons arrived at the camp and, over three days, moved all the inmates onto buses. Sajjad thought about trying to slip away, but there was nowhere to hide. When he left Rūdninkai, the tunnel was some nine meters long. Another five meters, and it would have been complete. 

2.

When the European Union was established in 1992, administrators in the bloc envisioned a common asylum framework. At the time there were some 700,000 refugees in Europe—in part because of the disintegration of Yugoslavia—and reception conditions varied widely. With the EU also came an external border. Countries began treating migration as a crime; some detained asylum seekers on arrival or once their claims were rejected. 

This was particularly prevalent in the UK. According to a report from the United Nations Refugee Agency, seven thousand asylum seekers were detained there in 1998, for an average period of sixty-five days. Germany routinely held them at the airport until their claims were assessed. France “retained” them at airports, ports, and train stations for up to twenty days. The procedures were different but detention, albeit generally short-term, was widespread.

In 1999 the Common European Asylum System was enshrined. The laws initially did not provide clear guidance around detention, but a number of regulatory policies were passed over time, such as the provision that refugees could not be detained solely for seeking asylum. The measure was to be a last resort and applicants’ fundamental rights were to be protected. These principles were in line with international human rights law, the European Convention on Human Rights, and other legal treaties, all of which prohibit arbitrary detention. From 2010 onwards detention in many countries either flatlined or declined.

The political environment changed radically after the “refugee crisis” in 2015, when some 1.3 million people fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts in the Middle East and Africa sought asylum in the EU. (In 2014 around 630,000 asylum applications were filed.) Most European leaders—Angela Merkel was a momentary exception—reacted with alarm instead of solidarity. Right-wing politicians called to seal the external borders. Viktor Orbán built a barbed wire fence along Hungary’s border with Serbia and Croatia and erected detention camps termed “transit zones” along the former. Barricades then went up in Bulgaria, Austria, Slovenia, Greece, and Spain. 

In 2016 the EU cut a deal with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who accepted over $6 billion in aid in exchange for ramping up coast guard and border security to prevent refugees from crossing from Turkey to Greece. Similar deals followed with Albania, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Niger, Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya. Across the EU’s external borders, guards and paramilitaries often violently repelled refugees or forcibly deported those who made it across. In Libya over 10,000 refugees were imprisoned and many tortured in government-run detention camps, while EU funds to stem migration poured in.

Some European countries also started confining refugees in ad-hoc fashion within their own borders. In March 2016, following the EU–Turkey deal, Greece imprisoned mostly Afghani, Iraqi, and Syrian asylum seekers in guarded camps until their claims were processed. That same year Italy set up facilities in Lampedusa and Sicily to fingerprint and register asylum seekers (at that point mostly Africans). Some were detained for up to a month. Even countries far from the EU’s external borders, like Austria, Germany, and France, used detention, particularly for asylum seekers whose claims had been denied. As human rights organizations legally challenged these practices, some judges ruled them to be unlawful. 

The Covid-19 pandemic provided another pretext to enact harsher deterrents on migration. In Greece, asylum seekers on five islands were placed in longer lockdowns than the general camp population. In parallel, violent pushbacks continued at the EU’s external borders, such as in Croatia, where guards beat people trying to cross and, without giving them an opportunity to claim asylum, returned them to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Pandemic restrictions made it harder to document and challenge the abuses. This May I spoke over Zoom with Hope Barker, who analyzed European migration policy for the Border Violence Monitoring Network between 2021 and 2024. “The construction of people as threats to public health substantially legitimized asylum detention,” Barker told me. “The walls had already been built.”

*

The EU’s contradictory stance on migration was further exposed in 2021. That summer Alexander Lukashenko, the far-right despot who has ruled Belarus for thirty years, abruptly loosened the country’s visa rules—though he was no friend of migrants. In May, when Lukashenko arrested the dissident journalist Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend, the EU sanctioned several officials and banned Belarussian planes from EU airspace. Lukashenko’s calculated retaliation was to grant people from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia a thirty-day tourist visa in advance, knowing they would move on to Lithuania and Poland.

In Minsk a cottage industry sprang up to ferry people to their next destinations: the city was full of hostels, smugglers, and taxis. The Belarusian government even transported migrants to the borders in trucks. That year some 39,000 people from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere tried to enter Poland. About 4,500 crossed into Lithuania. 

European leaders responded as Lukashenko predicted. The prime ministers of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, and Lithuania, Ingrida Šimonytė, said they were facing “a hybrid attack,” and the EU itself accused Lukashenko of “instrumentalization.” (A year later the bloc would welcome over four million Ukrainians without qualms.) On July 2 the Lithuanian government declared a state of emergency due to a “mass influx” of immigrants. A week later it sent guards into the forest that stretches along the border with Belarus, imposed six months of mandatory detention for all asylum seekers, and constructed detention camps. Lithuanian Red Cross monitors sent to the different sites found unaccompanied minors housed with adults they did not know, pregnant women without care, people urinating in bottles, and one man with a prosthetic leg sleeping on a top bunk.

Rather than reprimand Lithuania, the EU supported it. In mid-July Josep Borrell, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, declared that “to use migrants as a weapon, pushing people against the borders, is unacceptable.” By July 30 the EU’s border agency, Frontex, had deployed over one hundred officers, thirty patrol cars, and two helicopters along Lithuania’s border. “Solidarity!” the Frontex press releases declared. Humanitarian organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières reported that Lithuanian guards were beating asylum seekers in the forest and repelling them to Belarus. Frontex had a history of collaborating with border officers accused of violence and torture at the Greek–Turkish maritime border and near the Libyan coast. Now they were doing so inside the bloc. 

Lithuanian politicians, an immigration advocate recounted to me, took to television and radio stations to declare that immigrant men were coming not only to rape and kill but also to steal eggs from chicken farms. Meanwhile the government was chipping away at asylum law. In August the Lithuanian parliament removed the right to seek asylum for people who had entered the country “illegally”—even though Article 18 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights makes no distinction between legal or illegal arrival. The state began constructing a 320-mile-long razor wire fence. Lukashenko publicly denied he was encouraging migration but was evidently delighted by the stir he had caused. “We will not hold anyone,” Belarusian media reported him stating in a meeting in July. “We are not their final destination after all. They are headed to enlightened, warm, cozy Europe.”

In early August the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, travelled to Vilnius and praised the Lithuanian government for repelling “the threat.” Although media reports were already circulating about the horrific detention conditions, Johansson ignored the subject. Later, in February 2023, when Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda awarded her the Cross of the Commander of the Order of Merits, she praised him for “standing tall against Lukashenko’s attempt to instrumentalise human beings.” In early September Poland erected a fence and declared a state of emergency along a three-kilometer stretch of border, denying access to human rights monitors and journalists.

Back in Brussels, the EU funneled money from different pools—the Internal Security Fund, the Integrated Border Management Fund, the Asylum and Migration Fund—to the Lithuanian Interior Ministry. In 2020 the EU had given Lithuania less than $3 million for border management; in 2021, that number rose to $64 million. As Amnesty documented, the bloc also sent almost eighty personnel to Lithuania, via the little-known EU Agency for Asylum, to assist with receiving asylum seekers and processing their cases. When Amnesty asked if they had witnessed any human rights abuses, the agency spokesman replied, “The EUAA does not have a mandate to assess Member State national legislation or monitor practices.”

Treating asylum seekers as a security threat had consequences. By October Frontex’s own officers had filed some twenty “serious incident reports” about witnessing collective expulsions. The number of other “incidents” was unknown. 

Juste Remytė was one of thirteen people working in Lithuania’s asylum department when the state of emergency was declared. The division hired sixty new staffers, many of whom, Remytė told me when we spoke on the phone in May, had not been trained or educated in refugee law but wanted “to defend the state.” she watched in horror as the asylum process was manipulated. The staff were pressured to review applicants quickly; politicians clearly did not want a fair consideration of each case. “At some point, I understood that I cannot beat the system,” Remytė said. She quit her job and joined the Lithuanian Red Cross, one of a handful of NGOs providing legal and humanitarian aid to detainees.

As the situation in Lithuania unfolded, the EU was negotiating a revision of its common asylum system. The reforms, which had been discussed since 2016, were supposed to streamline the asylum process, alleviating the concerns of the southern states—including Greece, Italy, and Spain—that received the most applicants. As 2021 rolled into 2022, Barker followed the negotiations closely and lobbied parliamentarians in Brussels. Her network wanted the new legislation to abolish prison-like reception facilities, insist on fair asylum procedures, and cease violent pushbacks. Many states, however, were eyeing faster deportation procedures, biometric data collection of asylum seekers, more equal distribution of applicants across countries, and enhanced border security.

The final reforms were to be adopted by the European Parliament, whose 720 members are directly elected by the public, and the EU’s Council, composed of the heads of all twenty-seven member states. Bitter and ugly arguments ensued. Member states pressured their elected parliamentarians to restrict migration by any means necessary. “The situation was totally crazy,” Barker reflected. “You really saw that the Parliament has no mandate; they’re not a co-legislator in any way.” She could not have known how far European leaders would go.

3.

Kybartai, located near Lithuania’s border with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, was once a Soviet rehabilitation facility. In 1991 the Lithuanian government converted it into a prison. Two high walls—one metal and topped with barbed wire, the other concrete—surround a cluster of weathered gray buildings. Grassy fields stretch to the horizon on all sides. 

In September 2021, a few weeks before Sajjad arrived, Kybartai was repurposed from an active jail into a detention site. The Lithuanian prisoners were transferred out. Amnesty reported that some guards were fired and then rehired with new uniforms. The facility had capacity for 450 inmates, but soon over 600 detainees were living inside. Red Cross workers who visited the camp nicknamed it Alcatraz.

Sajjad was initially placed in a room in Section A, on the fourth floor of a five-story building. There were four toilets for some seventy-five people, all from the Middle East. (Africans were on a different floor, Asians on another.) His room had twenty bunks for twenty-one inmates; one of them slept on top of the dining table. The walls were a dingy yellow, as if to compensate for the lack of light that came from a single small window barred with iron and wire. Sajjad hung a sheet around his top bunk. The room reeked of mildew.

Each morning around 4:00 or 5:00 AM, the guards barged into the cell, turned on bright overhead lights, and counted the inmates. At night the doors to the floor were locked. Prisoners were allowed a daily hour outside in the small courtyard. One person from each room was granted a weekly visit to the prison store. On his first trip Sajjad bought ten packs of Chesterfield cigarettes, which he and his cellmates chain-smoked with delirious pleasure. 

On October 11 a guard woke Sajjad up and took him to a shipping container. He was not given advance notice about his asylum interview and didn’t even have the chance to wash his face. The government offered him a translator but not a lawyer. Allotted an hour to make his case over a video call, he successfully argued for more time, but the asylum official neither described what the legal process entailed nor told him how to challenge his detention. 

About two weeks later, for no apparent reason, Sajjad was taken to Section B, a two-story building, and placed in solitary confinement. His cell had two metal doors, a toilet and a sink, and a small window facing a concrete wall. The outer door had a window that was covered. Someone slid food through the window. He was imprisoned there for two days, then got an Iraqi roommate. “Welcome,” Sajjad said, jubilant to see another person. The man looked around. “Cursed god,” he replied.

After six days the guards moved Sajjad to another cell in Section B with two inmates. During the day they could walk about the floor. The guards controlled everything. They allowed inmates out during the day, took them to the cafeteria for three daily meals (and to the wash area for a weekly shower), locked them in at night. 

Sajjad was incarcerated in Section B for seven months. He adopted a stray kitten that wandered into the building and named her Rose. She was black and white with green eyes, and snuggled up against his chest while he slept. He also learned basic Lithuanian using children’s books and textbooks that social workers brought in. Now he could understand when the guards insulted the inmates. There was no Wi-Fi, but Sajjad asked an Iraqi friend on the outside to add credit to his cell phone account, then used the device to configure a hotspot, creating an open network. Time blurred. In the winter Sajjad saw snow for the first time in his life, covering the concrete courtyard. 

He began documenting prison life. In one video from October, he sits on his bunk bed wearing an orange sweater. “This is me, in the same place,” he says to the camera. “If someone says this is a lie, this is my bed.”

*

In November 2021 Sajjad was informed that his asylum claim had been rejected. The authorities did not tell him why but handed him a legal document in Lithuanian, which he read using Google Translate, finding a number of inaccuracies and lies. It claimed, for example, that his girlfriend was Kurdish, and, more outrageously, that he had avoided the Lithuanian border authorities. 

Sajjad appealed the decision and asked for a lawyer. The authorities gave him the email address of Paulius Vinkleris from the firm Vinkleris ir partneriai. He emailed Vinkleris on November 30, then again on December 14, but there was no reply. Through January he then sent Vinkleris a series of WhatsApp messages, all of which turned to blue check marks, indicating they had been read; still no answer. 

On February 14, 2022, Sajjad attended another video hearing at which, to his surprise, Vinkleris showed up. After Sajjad delivered a lengthy argument via a translator, Vinkleris weighed in: “I agree that his appeal should be accepted.” The judge said the decision would take two weeks, but the notice, dated March 30, only arrived in Kybartai on May 4. The appeal was successful: his case was to be relitigated. 

Later, the Lithuanian newspaper Delfi reported that the government, evidently keen to be seen meeting its legal duties, had, from 2019 to 2021, paid over half a million dollars to Vinkleris, only for him to abandon most of his six hundred clients. The government later terminated his contracts. Vinkleris did not respond to two requests for comment. The third time I wrote to him, he replied, denying the major substance of Delfi’s allegations. The government, he said, paid him only €50 per asylum case. As for Sajjad, Vinkleris told me that “He explained everything by himself in the Court” and that, far from ignoring his messages, “I was strongly supporting him in all stages.”

As winter shifted into spring, Sajjad conducted research on his case. He wrote for help to Amnesty, the broadcasters Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, and Al Arabiya, the Lithuanian Human Rights Council, and the EU Parliament. Only the EU Parliament sent a proper reply. “Please be assured that we have read your message attentively and are deeply sorry to read about your situation,” its Citizens’ Enquiries Unit told him. “Our main role is to inform citizens about the activities, powers and organisation of the European Parliament. We do not provide legal advice or interpret legislation, so we are not in a position to help directly with your request.” His last resort was the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), located in Strasbourg, France. Anyone whose rights are violated in one of the forty-six members of the Council of Europe—most European countries as well as Turkey—can file a complaint against a member government there. When another man in Sector B smuggled in a laptop, he typed up his case. 

Around this time, Sajjad met a Lithuanian social worker whom I’ll call Julia. She had punkish blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She sent him sweet text messages, shared her Netflix password, made the days more bearable. They began dating in secret. 

Sajjad completed his ECHR application, a lengthy document in which he detailed everything that had happened since he entered Lithuania. In describing his time in solitary, Sajjad wrote: “I was extremely lonely and cried frequently. For what felt like a month, I barely ate the meals provided.” He emailed the application to Julia, who printed it out, smuggled it inside the prison for him to sign, then smuggled it out to Red Cross lawyers, who mailed it to Strasbourg. 

In mid-June Sajjad was transferred back to Section A. Later that month he was issued a camp ID card and told that he could leave Kybartai for a twenty-four-hour window. Unbeknownst to him, the EU’s Court of Justice had ruled that Lithuania was violating EU law by detaining asylum seekers. Authorities were forced to comply with the court ruling and slowly released inmates. Of the over 4,000 refugees who entered that summer, most headed west as soon as they were set free. By late 2022 only a few hundred people remained in the detention centers.

On July 16 Sajjad walked out with Rose, dropped her off with a friend in the city of Kaunas, then slept for two nights at a youth shelter in Vilnius. (He and Julia had ended their relationship.) Sajjad’s uncle wired him some money. On July 18 he got into a black VW Passat with three other Iraqis. They drove overnight through Poland to the German border and, early the next morning, got out at Frankfurt an de Oder, a small town on the Oder River. They walked across a bridge into Germany and requested asylum. “Now I’m in the greatest country in the world,” Sajjad said, dazed from not sleeping. The policeman laughed.

*

Sajjad bounced between different German cities for a month while filing his claim. Germany generally places asylum seekers in group housing, often in rural areas. Applicants are only allowed to move if they get a job and no longer accept social benefits. In September 2022 Sajjad was transferred to a camp in Rheinfelden, near the Swiss border.

The camp, built on the site of a former army barracks, housed some 300 to 450 people, who stayed in the old dormitories and metal shipping containers. The administrators and guards often picked fights with the refugees. Sajjad lived with another Iraqi man in a dirty, cramped, cube-shaped room on the second floor of a container. The heat frequently went off. He left as often as possible, walking on a trail that ran along the Rhine, at night looking for the darb at-tabbāna, the Milky Way. The river reminded him of his grandfather, who lived on the Euphrates.

One night Sajjad woke up with a knifelike pain in his chest. I’m having a heart attack, he thought. The camp guards refused to call an ambulance. “You’re free to leave,” they said. He took a taxi to the local hospital, where the doctor said it was psychological. A few nights later, the pain returned. This time he traveled further to a regional hospital, where a doctor who knew Arabic admitted him until he could detect the root cause, which turned out to be an infection in his heart muscle. 

It was in the Rheinfelden camp that Sajjad first thought about ending his life. Migrants often feel suicidal ideation while in prolonged detention or after their release. A 2022 World Health Organization review of available studies across Australia, Europe, and the US found that some 74 percent of those in immigration detention were depressed and close to half suffered from PTSD. 

In May 2023 the ECHR informed Sajjad that it had agreed to review his complaint. This meant that Lithuania would have to address all the allegations; he would then get the opportunity to respond. He reached out for legal advice to a volunteer he had met in Lithuania, who was now working at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, which in turn contacted Equal Rights Beyond Borders, a smaller legal outfit that represents asylum seekers pro bono. In the end, a coalition of organizations—Equal Rights Beyond Borders in Germany and Greece, The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, and the Lithuanian Red Cross—supported his case, S.M.H. v. Lithuania. ECHR cases can take years. The outcome will likely rest on a definition of “whether or not he was detained,” Jamie Kessler, one of his lawyers, explained to me over Zoom. Lithuania was claiming it had limited Sajjad’s liberty, not deprived him of it entirely.

4.

I first heard from Sajjad’s lawyers at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in the fall of 2023. He had wanted them to contact journalists to raise public awareness about the detention camps. Former detainees were at risk of being deported from Germany back to Lithuania, or from Lithuania to their countries of origin. 

When we spoke on Zoom, Sajjad looked disappointed. He was hoping to meet a television reporter, or at least someone from a major paper. I was a freelancer writing for this publication, which he’d never heard of. Still, he said, if I visited, we could see how things went.

In April 2024 I took a train from Berlin to Rheinfelden to meet Sajjad in person. By then he had gotten out of the camp and moved into his own apartment in the downtown area. (In January 2023 he secured a paid internship with a local green energy company.) When I got there and removed my shoes, as is the German custom, he gave me a pair of plastic slippers from the hospital. As we chatted I found that his German was already proficient and his English fluent, though he thought it could be better. While we had coffee his mother called from Iraq. The new apartment was spacious, but in the airy rooms, the silence was heavy.

I spent four days in Rheinfelden. On a Saturday morning we walked twenty minutes to the camp, which was eerily quiet. We saw few residents and no children outside. Bored guards milled around; one had an AK-47 tattooed on his neck. A bench sat without legs on the ground. A dead Christmas tree was affixed over the main office, its white lights glinting. 

Almost as soon as we entered, two guards who remembered Sajjad started tailing us. Ten minutes later, apparently because I took a picture of the laundry line, they escorted us out. If we didn’t leave immediately, they would call the police. The encounter brought back Sajjad’s muted anger. Visitors were allowed in the camp, he said. Why did the guards think they were better than the residents? He insisted we go to the local police station to register a complaint. An officer confirmed that it was perfectly legal to visit the camp but said there was no way to pursue the small grievance.

Sajjad’s case is extraordinary in many ways. He wrote his own application, which is very rare—and that too while incarcerated. He also amassed more evidence than is usually possible: emails, photos, and videos. (In some Greek detention sites, for instance, phones are not allowed.) I sat on his couch and browsed through the files: photos of the dog bites, muddy water covering the bathroom floor, snow falling in the prison courtyard. 

*

Sajjad connected me with seven other Iraqi men who had been imprisoned in the Lithuanian camps and were awaiting the outcome of their asylum cases. Under the EU’s Dublin regulation, which allows asylum seekers to be returned to the first country they entered, five of them were at risk of deportation to Lithuania. One was in the UK, another in Belgium, and the rest in Germany. In person I met with a well-known political satirist who fled Baghdad after a group of men attacked him on the street, stabbing a screwdriver into his belly. On the phone I spoke with a young gay man who could not live freely back home. 

All of them had suffered in detention. At least two, like Sajjad, were diagnosed with PTSD. Many had self-harmed. One man had lost two teeth in Kybartai after being denied access to dental care; another heard a constant ringing in his ears. “There are no words to describe what happened,” Ahmed told me. (He asked that his name be changed.) They had eaten rotten fruit, seen people tasered and beaten by guards, felt hatred intimately. In Germany they were prescribed antipsychotics, antidepressants, and antianxiety medications, but none of this addressed the real problem: their cases were in limbo.

In May Ali Ogaili, a twenty-four-year-old man from Baghdad, pled his case before an asylum court. He presented a letter from a German church that described him as an exceptional volunteer and another from a continuing education program where he had already obtained B1 language proficiency. But his application was denied and the court ordered him sent back to Lithuania. (He appealed the decision.) In February 2024 the Lithuanian Red Cross published a report noting that half of the asylum seekers who fled from there to Germany were sent back. “Understanding this world, and how it works, is worse than not knowing,” Sajjad said. 

Lithuania never rescinded the state of emergency that was declared in 2021. In 2023 it passed a law legalizing pushbacks and extended the “border territory” five kilometers inside, which only people with “special permits” are allowed to enter. There are continued pushbacks in the forest, with no one there to bear witness, except for a grassroots collective called Sienos Grupe. The EU recently gave Lithuania $10 million to “improve” Kybartai and other facilities and is funding an electronic surveillance system along the border. (Druskininkai and Rūdninkai are closed.) In 2023 Lithuania’s highest court struck down the 2021 law allowing the automatic detention of asylum seekers as unconstitutional. But the government still persists with detention in some cases, claiming this is permissible under an “accelerated procedure.”

Fewer people are crossing into the country from Belarus, which is still offering visas. More immigrants now cross into Poland: over 26,000 people have gone there from Belarus since the start of the year. In October Prime Minister Donald Tusk—a former president of the European Council—suspended asylum procedures. The EU Commission initially denounced his decision but backtracked once it became clear that most of the twenty-seven member countries supported him.

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Last April the European Parliament passed the revised EU-wide policy, enshrining the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. A complex regulation composed of nine different legislative files and comprising over a thousand pages, the pact incorporates elements of the Lithuanian model, allowing countries to detain asylum seekers, including children, during a “state of emergency.” It mandates that people entering via the EU’s external borders must be detained and screened at the country of arrival for up to twelve weeks; some can be directed to an “accelerated asylum procedure” and deported if they do not qualify. 

During this detention period, the “legal fiction of non-entry” applies. Until relatively recently, this term was typically used for airport transit zones, such as between the arrival gate and passport control. In 2018 Germany became the first EU country to extend it to land borders; others, like Lithuania, have followed. Its inclusion in EU-wide migration policy allows countries to pretend that asylum seekers who have crossed the physical border are not yet legally inside the EU. (No one is sure yet how this policy will be implemented.) Barker predicted that the pact would result in “a proliferation of open-air prisons at the external borders.” After it passed, she quit her job. She could no longer see the point in lobbying the EU. 

Once the pact was sealed, Italy made a five-year deal to send asylum seekers intercepted at sea to two detention centers on Albanian territory, where their claims would be litigated over video. In mid-October the Italian navy intercepted a boat of ten Bangladeshis and six Egyptians and forced them to Albania, where the men were transferred to the new “processing centers.” These camps, built on a former air force base, are surrounded by twenty-meter-high fences; inmates are barred from leaving. A few days after the group arrived, an Italian court ruled that the government had violated EU law and ordered the men sent back to Italy. The Italian supreme court is now hearing a case about the camps’ legality. The EU still funds de facto detention centers in the Greek Aegean islands and deportation centers in Turkey. 

The most powerful EU countries drive decision-making in Brussels. Advocates have told me that the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and France were the prime movers behind the asylum reforms, pressuring parliamentarians to follow their directives. “In the very final phase…there was immense pressure on the negotiators and a lack of respect for EU procedural rules,” Catherine Woollard, from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said over the phone. The southern states and some parliamentarians initially opposed the new border screening and detention procedures but eventually they gave in. 

Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron thought a harder stance on immigration would win back voters from extremist parties. The opposite happened in recent elections. In July France’s National Rally came dangerously close to grasping power; in September the Alternative for Germany won a state election for the first time. If these results offered a lesson to centrists, they have not been learned. The new French interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, has identified reducing immigration as his top priority and announced plans to increase deportations. In September Germany started conducting checks at borders to turn back asylum seekers, which defies the EU’s principle of freedom of movement. (Orbán congratulated Scholz on social media.) 

The EU was founded to promote peace through the free movement of people and goods within its borders. Its capitulation to nativist ideology may not be surprising, given Europe’s colonial history and the tensions that have long existed within the union. But inherent to the project was the belief that people should have the right to move freely, that the mixing of ethnicities, cultures, languages, and ideologies could lead the continent toward a better future. The failure of European leaders across the political spectrum to develop a more humane migration policy toward those outside the bloc is a betrayal of this ideal—and a failure of imagination. “All forms of systematic violence are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle,” wrote the late anthropologist David Graeber. You cannot see a border, only attempts to demarcate it: fences, walls, wire, dogs, drones, towers, signs. Borders are ideas, living in our minds like dreams.

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If the ECHR rules in Sajjad’s favor, he could be entitled to monetary compensation. It’s also possible that the court could require Lithuania to adjust their detention practices. But the country’s broader border and asylum policy will not necessarily change. Marius Taparavicius, a senior lawyer for the Lithuanian Red Cross, worked across six detention sites in the summer and fall of 2021. When we spoke on Zoom, he noted that legal challenges against the government had revealed how thoroughly its State Border Guard, the Ministry of Interior Affairs, and the Ministry of Justice had deceived the public about their operations. In one case, the government had claimed that five Afghani refugees never set foot in national territory, when in fact they were prevented from doing so. Last year the Red Cross documented that several refugees pushed back into the Belarusian forest had frozen to death. Elected officials turned a blind eye to the disclosures; there were no public protests. Only the highest courts and a few human rights organizations took notice. “Society did not react to the fact that they were lied to,” Taparavicius said.

The Rhine separates Rheinfelden, Germany, from a prettier town of the same name in Switzerland. That Saturday morning the bridge across was busy: Swiss shoppers dragged carts in one direction for cheaper groceries, and Germans strolled in the other direction toward a sprawling park. The river is fed by melting Alpine glaciers, its emerald water clear enough to see through to a bed of flat stones. I could cross to the other side, unlike Sajjad. He holds a temporary residence permit and cannot leave the country until his case is resolved. On hot summer days, he walks down to the shore and jumps in the water.