In August, 2021, thirty-two Afghans who had fled their country just before the Taliban took over arrived at the border, hoping to claim asylum. Poland refused to process them. So the Afghans, stranded, sat in a muddy no man’s land, flanked by armed border guards on both sides. Technically, they were already in Poland, in a tiny village called Usnarz Górny. There was no fence there, so locals and journalists could interact with the refugees. Images of an Afghan woman camped out with a gray cat went viral. The European Court of Human Rights soon ordered Poland to give the migrants assistance and temporary shelter.
Within weeks, Poland announced a state of emergency and closed areas near the border to medics, humanitarian workers, and reporters, among others. The Polish journalist Aga Suszko, who helped with the reporting for this piece, recalled, “I’m in a democratic country, covering something happening before my eyes that’s very significant, and suddenly: ‘You cannot see it, so you cannot report on it, because you cannot see it.’ ”
Illustration by Anuj Shrestha
The weather in the forest cooled, and rain set in. The Afghans were sleeping on the ground. That September, Poland’s interior minister held a press conference, aired on national TV, in which he displayed a photo, purportedly of a man having sex with a cow, and claimed that it had been discovered on a device confiscated from a migrant.
In October, migrants attempted more than ten thousand crossings (the Polish border guard counts crossings, not people), and Poland passed a law effectively legalizing “pushbacks.” In a pushback, authorities force migrants back across the border immediately after they arrive, often violently, without considering asylum claims or other needs. (The guards often send them through access gates.) The law appeared to violate E.U. and international law’s principle of non-refoulement, which forbids returning people to places where they face threats to their life or freedom. The Afghans would clearly be in danger if sent home. Even if they were returned only to Belarus, they would be at risk: border guards there regularly beat migrants who failed to complete the journey to Poland. Yet Poland pushed back the thirty-two Afghans, including a fifteen-year-old girl, arguing that they had remained outside Polish jurisdiction the whole time, so non-refoulement didn’t apply.
The next month, hundreds of desperate and marooned migrants, freezing in makeshift encampments on the Belarusian side of the border, tried to break through the barbed-wire fence to Poland. Polish border guards responded with tear gas and water cannons. “I had my life before 2021 and my life after,” Suszko, the journalist, told me. She’d grown up hearing the story of how, in the nineteen-eighties, the Solidarity movement had heroically overthrown the oppressive Communist regime, transforming the country into a democracy that generally respected human rights and the rule of law. “It was the death of Poland as I knew it,” she said.
Since 2021, Poland has built the permanent border wall that Ahmed crossed; razor-wire fences stand on both sides of it. Thousands of security officers are now stationed there, along with cameras, thermal and motion sensors, night-vision devices, and other surveillance tools.
