ATHENS — Greece’s attempt to lure top scientists back to their homeland after the trauma of the financial crisis has stalled after an ambitious program to reverse the brain drain descended into fiasco.
A group of professors who hoped to bring back young researchers through a much-advertised program financed with EU funds are now feeling betrayed, having been left waiting for years only to find out the program won’t happen.
To rub salt into the wound, no one from the government bothered to inform them that the scheme was dead, they said.
“All this ‘brain gain’ talk isn’t just a joke; it’s a massive step backward,” Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, said. “During the financial crisis, there was only one area where there was money invested: research, as the EU prioritized this. Now there’s nothing; it’s at the very bottom of the list of priorities — a complete abandonment.”
An estimated 500,000 people moved abroad during Greece’s financial crisis, which began in 2008, shrinking the country’s economy by a quarter and driving unemployment to 28 percent. Greece had experienced mass migration before, including in the decades after World War II, but this time it was many citizens with high levels of education and skills who emigrated.
“Brain Regain,” an initiative by the ruling conservative New Democracy government to reverse the mass exodus of scientists and professionals, comprises several schemes, such as offering a 50 percent income tax exemption for seven years, and is expanding to include high-skilled public sector roles.
And overall, the situation has improved since the crisis era.
According to the survey OECD Diaspora Review Greece, from 2021 onward, there has been a steady increase in the number of citizens returning to Greece, with 2023 marking a milestone year when — for the first time since the start of the crisis — more people returned than left. Specifically, during the two-year period of 2023–2024, 69,000 Greeks left their country while 98,000 returned.
But when it comes to scientists, there is still a major problem.
Star-crossed project
The current fury of many researchers and scientists hinges on a Greek government project called “Trust your Stars” — an €80 million research funding program backed by funds from EU’s post-Covid recovery fund, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).
Research teams were called to submit their proposals, with 145 out of a total 1,241 submissions selected. Thirteen months later, after several complaints regarding the delay, the selected list of projects was finally published on July 22, 2025.
Then, it all started to unravel.
A man walks outside the headquarters of bank of Greece during a demonstation against government’s austerity measures in central Athens. | Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images
Those not selected for funding reacted fiercely, with some 203 submitted objections and calls for reevaluation. Scientists raised their concerns over the evaluation process itself, and some even submitted complaints to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
In January 2026, Greece’s development ministry then issued a statement, saying payments of some €40 million had already been made, and that the remaining half of the program’s budget was earmarked for completion by Dec. 31, 2029. But complaints only escalated, with some of those selected for funding sending formal legal notices to the education ministry, seeking details about where the money had been spent since the program had not yet started.
Then, the final bombshell dropped: Trust your Stars was not going to receive the EU funds anymore.
In a statement published in May, Greece’s education ministry said the country’s finance ministry had decided to “remove the project during the review of Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.” It was later revealed that on the day the list of selected proposals was officially published, the government also delisted the program — but no one informed the applicants for 10 months.
“It was ultimately not possible to implement the project ‘Trust your Stars’ within the time frame set out by the RRF,” said an official from the education ministry. “For this reason, the project was removed, as part of a review of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the Council of the European Union.”
“As regards the funds linked to the actions in question, these were redirected to finance other actions undertaken by the RRF and the Education Ministry. Consequently, under no circumstances was there any loss of resources from the RRF,” added the official.
Shattered hopes
On July 15, Greece’s finance ministry issued a statement, saying it was trying to secure funds “to settle any outstanding financial obligations arising from legal commitments entered into at the time of the revocation of the program.”
While the statement rekindled hopes that a solution would be found, Hatzis argues that it was just a legal trick and that the education ministry has no legal commitment since no contracts were signed following the initial announcement of accepted proposals.
“What happened violates a fundamental principle, one that is sacrosanct in states governed by the rule of law: ‘reliance,’ the citizen’s legitimate trust in the state,” he said. “There may be no contractual liability, since we did not sign an agreement, but there is a political, moral and even legal obligation. Many young people turned down other offers or did not take up jobs elsewhere because they hoped they would be paid through the program.”
Hatzis added that with its handling of the situation, the government had managed to turn the entire scientific community against it — both those who had been successful and those who had not.
“If you’re a young scientist and you’re abroad, stay there! If you’re a young scientist and you’re thinking of moving abroad, go for it. Don’t wait a minute!” he wrote in a lengthy social media post.
Pantelis Kammas, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was co-leading one of the teams that had a successful proposal, said the program was a chronicle of a death foretold.
“The perception within the scientific community was that this was EU money and that it could be handed out hastily through nontransparent procedures. There was a sense of mistrust because this was a one-off emergency program,” said Kammas. “The ministry lacked an organized framework for evaluation, the academic community’s objections were based on these well-known shortcomings, and media that seek to oppose the government jumped on that. This was the perfect storm, so the government decided to backtrack and cancel the program.”
Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Athens, said he had gathered a team of 25 young scientists to come to Greece from countries like the U.K. and Germany for a study of medicines used during the Byzantine period, which could serve as inspiration for new pharmaceutical formulations. Fortunately, they had not already traveled by the time the project was canceled.
“The most offensive thing is that the government never bothered to meet us or give us a reasonable explanation about what happened,” he said, noting the government’s handling created even greater problems with the scientific community than those that already existed.
Bouras-Vallianatos himself returned to Greece in 2022 after a 15-year career in Edinburgh, and has not regretted the decision, as he wanted to raise his children in his homeland. However, he added that while many others wanted to return to Greece, the conditions for doing so were not in place. Some of them do but only for sentimental, personal reasons, he said.
“There has been no serious policy by the Greek state to get its scientists back.”
According to preliminary statistics, research spending in Greece has declined, dropping to €1.27 billion — or 0.51 percent of GDP — in 2025, from €1.30 billion in 2024.
“Funding and low salaries is a big issue,” continued Bouras-Vallianatos. “An independent body should be set up, which would allocate funds for research and adheres to international standards in terms of evaluation. We are a small country; we all know each other, so a large proportion of the evaluators should be foreigners.”
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.
“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.
“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.
He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.
It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.
But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.
According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.
The administration plowed forward anyway.
HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.
Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.
Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)
In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”
A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”
Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.
There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countlessstudies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).
The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.
Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”
Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.
Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.
Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.
Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.
To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.
Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”
“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser
Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)
Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.
“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.
The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.
Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebookpostsandreposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)
For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”
Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)
Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)
The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.
The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.
In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.
By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)
The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”
Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy
As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.
Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.
The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.
Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.
From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.
In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.
Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.
But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.
“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”
Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager
Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.
In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”
Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.
“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”
Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.
Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.
The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”
In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”
Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.
Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.
“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”
Collapsing Claims
By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.
About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.
Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.
Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.
Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.
The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.
Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.
Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.
Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.
“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”
Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted
Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)
“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”
In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.
Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.
In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.
The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.
In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”
As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.
Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.
In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.
“Far-Reaching Consequences”
Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.
Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.
In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.
Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”
Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”
“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.
“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon
In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.
Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.
“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”
Thousands of Spanish and Moroccan security officers reinforced Ceuta’s borders on Friday as online messages spread calling for a new mass incursion into the exclave in North Africa.
Following last month’s unprecedented arrival of 72,000 migrants into the Spanish city, viral social media posts proposed a similar surge be staged on Saturday, Aug. 15 — a national holiday in Spain. Authorities in Madrid and Rabat have been tracking the online chatter and coordinating a common response.
Moroccan Interior Ministry Spokesperson Rachid El Khalfi on Wednesday confirmed the country was “taking all necessary measures to counter any attempt at illegal crossing,” and local journalists reported a significant buildup of troops around the border town of Fnideq on Friday.
Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska traveled to Ceuta on Thursday to inspect border infrastructure and a new sea barrier designed to keep people from swimming into the city. The exclave’s security personnel has also been reinforced with an additional 300 police officers and 2,000 soldiers.
“We do this to dissuade anyone who aspires to enter Ceuta and Melilla irregularly,” said Grande-Marlaska. “None of them will remain in Ceuta, none of them will make it to the Iberian Peninsula, none of them will be given legal status.”
The rumored mass crossing has been cited by critics of Spain’s migration policies.
Austria’s conservative Europe, Integration and Family Minister Claudia Bauer, last week mentioned the rumored Aug. 15 surge in a written statement, demanding Madrid “immediately and significantly reinforce border protection in its African enclaves and ensure that this time it will hold.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government also cited the possibility of a mid-August mass arrival last week while justifying its decision to maintain border checks on travelers from Spain.
A federal rule that targets cartel money laundering has driven customers away from the money-transfer counters at small shops on the US-Mexico border. The Guardian's Lourdes Medrano reported on August 11, 2026 that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, ordered businesses in 30 border zip codes in Texas and California to file a report on every cash transaction above $200. — Read the rest
Merz’s deal with the Taliban alarms Afghan dissidents in Germany
Under pressure from the rising far right, Berlin is letting Taliban officials staff Afghan missions in exchange for more deportations. Activists say the arrangement puts them at risk.
By NETTE NÖSTLINGER in Berlin
Illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO
Zarmina Paryani and her four sisters fear they may soon have to again face the persecutors they fled from in Afghanistan — and this time inside Germany.
Paryani and her sisters were imprisoned twice in Kabul for protesting against the Taliban after the Afghan militants retook the capital in 2021, the 27-year-old said. After going into hiding for several months, the family eventually made their way to Germany in search of safe haven.
But now, Berlin has struck a Faustian bargain that allows the Taliban to deepen its diplomatic foothold in Germany in return for cooperation on deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan. For Paryani and other Afghan activists who resisted the Taliban at home, the arrangement is giving their former persecutors new leverage over their lives in exile.
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“It’s hard to accept that my fate and my affairs are being discussed with the very same representatives whose oppression, prisons, whippings and violence I fled from,” Paryani, who worked as a midwife in Kabul and now lives in western Germany, told POLITICO.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government first struck a deal with the Afghan government announced last October that gives Taliban officials control of diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn in exchange for permission to return Afghan migrants directly to Afghanistan. That cooperation was deepened early this summer with a deal that allows more Taliban officials to work in Germany in return for cooperation on additional deportation flights — now up to three per month.
Under the new deal, Germany has expanded deportations to include not only Afghan men convicted of crimes, but also, more broadly, Afghan men with no protected status or legal right to remain in Germany.
The agreement with the Taliban makes Germany an outlier in Europe, making it the first EU country to allow Taliban-appointed officials to work in diplomatic missions inside the country. Before the agreement, Western-oriented Afghan officials representing the former government in Afghanistan had remained in charge.
The arrangement comes as Merz’s government grapples with rock-bottom approval ratings and the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now the country’s most popular political force, according to polls. The AfD’s surge comes ahead of two elections in the former East Germany, where the far-right party is ahead in polls by wide margins. In one of those states, Saxony-Anhalt, the party may take real governing power for the first time since it was founded in 2013, a result that would serve as a great humiliation for the conservative Merz, who was elected chancellor last year partly on a promise to crack down on migration.
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The AfD’s rise is piling pressure on the chancellor to deliver on his election pledge to deport more migrants — even as he insists that working with the Taliban does not legitimize a regime notorious for its human rights abuses. Overall, Afghans are the third-largest group of refugees or people who have fled war to come to Germany, behind Ukrainians and Syrians.
“We are not extending a hand to this Taliban regime,” Merz said in the German parliament in June. “Rather, we are seeking cooperation at the necessary technical level, which is in our country’s national interest.”
‘Nightmares’ and ‘psychological distress’
For Afghan rights activists in Germany, one of the worst consequences of Berlin’s deal with the Taliban is that it may particularly put at risk some 35,000 Afghans who came to Germany under special humanitarian programs for people deemed especially vulnerable to the Taliban. They include Paryani and her sisters in addition to thousands of human rights activists and Afghans who worked with the German military during its nearly two-decade presence in the country.
Paryani and others fear they will have to face the Taliban when attempting to renew their Afghan passports — which they need to extend their humanitarian visas — at Afghan diplomatic missions. Another 321,000 Afghans live in Germany as refugees or with other forms of protected status. They do not necessarily need Afghan passports, unless they want to apply for a permanent residence status.
More generally, activists and refugees also fear the Taliban, with their growing presence in Germany, could gain access to personal information held in databases in German missions, including details about their families, making them susceptible to blackmail and extortion.
Afghan activists speak at a protest camp at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on August 15, 2025, the fourth anniversary of the Taliban takeover. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images
“Given my personal history and my stance on extremism, I am concerned for my safety and that of my family,” one former teacher from Afghanistan granted anonymity due to his fear of retribution from the Taliban told POLITICO.
The former teacher, who lives in Germany with a humanitarian visa, said German immigration officials have asked him to renew his expired Afghan passport, a request that he fears will force him to deal directly with his persecutors.
“This situation continues to cause me significant psychological distress,” he said. “Sometimes I wake up at night because of nightmares related to the Taliban and this situation.”
‘Vulnerable to blackmail’
With its handling of the Taliban, Merz’s government is setting a precedent that will be closely watched by other EU countries. Government officials in Austria and Belgium have said they’re watching Germany’s cooperation with the Taliban closely. Taliban officials also held talks focused on deportations with the EU Commission in June in Brussels.
But Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, the former head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn, who quit last September in protest over the initial deal allowing Taliban officials to serve in diplomatic missions in Germany, warned that the German government’s decision to cooperate with the Afghan regime would come back to haunt it — and that the Taliban would use their new leverage over Germany to advance their interests in Europe, including by building networks that intimidate dissidents.
“They are destroying my country, and now they are coming here,” he said. “They are not thinking of diplomacy. They have a lot of plans in their mind.”
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It’s a sentiment politicians inside the left-leaning opposition also share.
“The German government has made itself vulnerable to blackmail,” Schahina Gambir, a lawmaker for the Greens who was born in Kabul, told POLITICO. “We’re seeing recognition through the back door. The Taliban are being granted access to embassies, they’re being granted immunity, they’re given channels for dialogue — and at the same time, the situation for women and girls in Afghanistan is getting worse and worse.”
There are already signs that the Taliban are exercising their newfound leverage.
Last May, Kabul unexpectedly halted a deportation flight at the last minute, seemingly seeking to extract additional concessions from the German government. A couple of weeks later, Berlin announced the terms of the latest agreement allowing additional Taliban-appointed officials to work at diplomatic missions in Germany.
Officials in Berlin depicted the new deal as a victory and a practical necessity, allowing for more deportations.
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“To increase the number of repatriations, more passports must be issued, more identities must be verified, and so on,” Martin Giese, a spokesperson for Germany’s foreign ministry, said at the time. “To this end, it will also be necessary for more consular officials to be involved.”
But Paryani, the Afghan midwife who fled to Germany with her four sisters, said the Taliban would use their new power to torment them in the country they had sought safety in.
“A Taliban member once wrote to me: ‘Just wait until our embassy in Germany reopens. Then we’ll find you there,'” she said of a comment that had surfaced under one of her social media posts about two years ago. She then deemed it irrelevant because it seemed so unrealistic.
“Today, I feel as though that threat has become a reality,” she said.
President Donald Trump walks by Chief Justice John Roberts. | ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images
Last week, President Donald Trump issued a new executive order that purports to strip citizenship from some Americans.
This isn’t our first time here: Last year, Trump issued an executive order that attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans born in this country. Months later, in response to a lawsuit brought over Trump’s order, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that everyone born in the United States who is subject to US law is a citizen. The Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara (2026) was hardly a surprise, as the Court first ruled that everyone born in the US and subject to its laws are citizens in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).
Still, the Barbara decision did invalidate an executive order from Trump. And that made him very angry. The new order appears to be a response to that 2025 Supreme Court decision, though it is much narrower than his original one.
In this sense, Trump appears to be experimenting with where the line is for the justices when it comes to birthright citizenship. When Trump’s first order came before the Court in Barbara, there was more than a century of precedent establishing that the order was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, four justices voted to overrule at least some of that precedent.
Now, with the new order, Trump is testing whether a smaller bite at the apple is enough to win over one of the justices who voted with the majority in Barbara — two of whom are Republicans. If he manages to hold onto the four dissenters in Barbara and pick up just one more justice’s vote, his new order will stand. It’s a plausible outcome, and one that could potentially foreshadow future efforts to chip away at birthright citizenship.
What does the order actually do?
Trump’s first citizenship order, the one struck down in Barbara, attempted to strip citizenship from many Americans whose mothers were either undocumented or legally-but-temporarily present in the United States when they were born. Had this order been in effect at their birth, it would have stripped citizenship from many prominent Americans, including former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The new order, entitled “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” is much narrower; indeed, it’s unclear some of the categories of people it hopes to denaturalize actually exist. The new order, for example, purports to strip citizenship from children of two non-citizen parents when either parent belongs to a “designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
So, in the unlikely event that, say, a member of Al-Qaeda impregnated a non-US citizen woman who later gave birth on US soil, Trump’s order would mandate that the child’s US citizenship would be taken away.
Another provision purports to strip citizenship from the children of foreign nationals who work in their nation’s embassies or in similar diplomatic capacities but who do not enjoy diplomatic immunity from US law. Again, it’s unlikely that all that many children fall into this category, given the relatively small number of these jobs.
The largest group of people that Trump targets in his new order is children whose parents “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States” for their birth, such as by buying a plane ticket to enter the United States while pregnant. But this category is also fairly small.
In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 9,576 people were born in the United States to residents of foreign countries — out of about 3.6 million annual births — though it is unclear how many of these babies would be affected by Trump’s new executive order, because we don’t know if their mothers entered the United States “to ensure” that their child we be on US soil when born.
So, what does the Constitution actually say about birthright citizenship?
The question of whether people born in the United States are citizens was, until fairly recently, one of the most uncontroversial questions in US law. When Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, handed down the first court decision blocking Trump’s original attack on birthright citizenship, he commented that he’d “been on the bench for over four decades [and]…can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is.”
The relevant provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” So, everyone born in the US, regardless of their parent’s immigration status, past behavior, or membership in a particular organization are citizens — unless they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
As the Court recently reaffirmed in Barbara, moreover, a child is within US jurisdiction if they are “subject to American law.” So, if undocumented immigrants and their children were not subject to US jurisdiction, that would mean that it was illegal to arrest and deport them. And, if members of foreign terrorist organizations were not subject to US law, that would mean that it is illegal for the US government to prosecute them for committing terrorist acts.
That said, Wong Kim Ark did recognize a few narrow categories of individuals who are present in the US but not subject to its laws — two of which are still relevant today. Children of invading foreign armies do not receive birthright citizenship, nor do children of foreign ambassadors and other diplomats who are immune from US law.
As the Court clarified in Barbara, both of these exemptions are derived from an old English rule that provided that the King could not convey citizenship to “those born in lands that he did not control.” Thus, when a foreign military occupied English soil and stripped the King of his ability to rule over those lands, children born to members of that military were not citizens.
The exemption for ambassadors and some other foreign diplomats, meanwhile, flows from what Barbara described as a “fiction of extraterritoriality.” While senior diplomats are present in the United States, they are nonetheless deemed to “remain on foreign soil” and thus are not subject to US law.
But not all employees of foreign governments qualify for this diplomatic immunity. Consider, for example, the tragic facts of Moncadav. Rubio (2025), a recent federal appeals court decision holding that a man who lived as a US citizen for nearly seven decades was not, in fact, a citizen.
Roberto Moncada is the son of a Nicaraguan diplomat who worked in the United Nations when Moncada was born in 1950. The US government previously concluded that Moncada’s father served as a “consul” when his son was born, and, thus, Moncada was a US citizen, because consuls and their families do not enjoy diplomatic immunity. But, in 2018, the US government discovered that Moncada’s father was actually an “attaché,” a more senior diplomat who does enjoy immunity. And then, the father’s diplomatic immunity cut the son off from US citizenship.
Under these principles, several provisions of Trump’s new executive order are unconstitutional, at least in part. The provisions stripping citizenship from the children of employees of foreign governments are lawful to the extent that they apply to children of people with diplomatic immunity but unconstitutional to the extent they apply to lower-ranking individuals with no immunity.
The provision dealing with members of foreign terrorist organizations is also unconstitutional, since people who engage in terrorism on US soil are very much subject to US law — as are babies born on US soil to parents connected to terrorism.Although, in the unlikely event that a foreign terrorist group actually seized control of some portions of US soil, then the exemption for children of invading armies would likely apply.
The provision dealing with so-called “birth tourists” is also unconstitutional, because a pregnant woman who enters the United States to ensure that their child is a US citizen is subject to US law, as is her child.
Indeed, Trump appears to concede this later point in a separate executive order handed down at the same time as his “Continuing to Protect” order. The second order, entitled “Ending Birth Tourism,” instructs two federal cabinet departments to update their rules to discourage alleged birth tourists from entering the country, including by taking “appropriate action to prevent the entry into the United States of, or the granting of any visa or other travel authorization” to such individuals. But, again, if the United States has the power to deny visas or otherwise bar these individuals from entering the country, that means that they are subject to US jurisdiction.
Why Trump keeps trying to restrict birthright citizenship
So, the Constitution’s text, the Court’s venerable decision in Wong Kim Ark, and its brand new decision in Barbara are all clear about who qualifies for birthright citizenship. All of these authoritiesestablish that much of Trump’s new executive order is unconstitutional, because it purports to strip citizenship from people who are subject to US jurisdiction.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the order will be struck down. While Barbara did little more than reaffirm the same rule the Court announced nearly 130 years ago in Wong Kim Ark, four justices dissented in Barbara — although, these justices also released four separate opinions with four separate definitions of who does and does not qualify for birthright citizenship. So, on this Supreme Court, the mere fact that a legal question has been settled for more than a century does not prevent many of the justices from voting to unsettle it.
So, while two of the Court’s Republicans joined all three of its Democrats in Barbara, it is possible that at least one of those Republicans will vote with the dissenters on a narrower question, like whether Trump can strip citizenship from the children of so-called birth tourists. And even if all of the justices in the Barbara majority hold the line, if one of them leaves the Court while Trump is still in office, he will almost certainly replace them with someone who opposes birthright citizenship.
So, while Trump’s executive orders often defy the Constitution’s explicit text, Trump also understands something important about US law: It doesn’t actually matter what the Constitution says if you have five votes on the Supreme Court who are willing to do what you want them to do.
Latvian authorities have discovered a tunnel used by migrants to cross the border from Belarus illegally amid long-standing concerns that Minsk is weaponizing migration against the EU.
On Monday, border guards detected 15 people who had come through a 10-meter-long tunnel near the border fence between Belarus and Latvia, Riga’s Interior Minister Jānis Dombrava said Tuesday.
Belarusian ruler Alexander Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his regime has supported Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine and taken a hostile stance toward the EU.
Tunnels have previously been found in Lithuania, according to Baltic media, but this is the first time one has been used to cross into Latvia.
“This is the first case in which a tunnel has been used for illegal crossing of the state border into Latvia. No signs of violations had previously been detected in this exact location, and no detentions of persons illegally crossing the state border had occurred there,” Dombrava wrote on X.
Authorities returned all 15 people to their “country of departure” and are continuing to inspect the area around the tunnel.
Latvia launched an operation Tuesday to strengthen border security. Dombrava has described illegal border crossings from Belarus as a “hybrid threat.”
Authorities have prevented more than 9,000 illegal attempts to cross the border from Belarus so far this year, the Latvian State Border Guard said in a press release.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration.
In Minnesota’s Democratic primary for an open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan has made Rep. Angie Craig’s vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act a key focus of the campaign, calling it “disqualifying,” even after Craig walked back support of the law. Democrats in primary races in Maryland and Arizona have also faced attacks based on their support of the law this cycle, while others have expressed regret over their votes.
“Voting three days into the second Trump administration for Donald Trump’s immigration bill that allowed him to terrorize our communities, the loss of life, the economic impact, the trauma — it’s horrific,” Flanagan said Monday night during the final debate ahead of the August 11 primary.
Trump and fellow Republicans held up Riley’s February 2024 murder by an immigrant without permanent legal status in the lead-up to the fall elections that year, using the case to cast unauthorized immigrants as dangerous and violent, and argue that the influx of immigrants during President Joe Biden’s term had made the country less safe. The law named after Riley requires federal law enforcement to detain and deport immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes, including shoplifting, even if those charges never result in a conviction. Riley’s convicted murderer had been arrested and released in New York before the murder in Georgia. Forty-six Democrats joined Republicans to pass the law in early 2025, despite criticism that the law denied immigrants due process.
Only a few of those lawmakers have walked back their support for the law, but the backlash facing some Democrats in competitive primaries suggests an evolution on the politics of the issue since Trump took office and dramatically ramped up raids, arrests, detentions and deportations.
Polling consistently shows the majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration. While Republicans remain overwhelmingly supportive, 92 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independent voters said they strongly or somewhat disapprove, according to a July survey by Winthrop University and YouGov.
“The support for something like the Laken Riley Act was speaking to what I think some voters had expressed — wanting a government that can manage the the border and the chaos — but those same voters have shown us in the last year that they also reject indiscriminate arrests, the killings of people, masked agents,” said Lorella Praeli, co-president of Community Change, a Democratic super PAC and nonprofit focused on turning out infrequent voters of color.
In the Minnesota Senate race, the issue is particularly salient following the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which involved the sudden deployment of federal agents to the state and saw ICE ramp up aggressive tactics to detain immigrants, including pursuing them outside of schools. The enforcement campaign led to clashes between agents and protestors, and the killing of two U.S. citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — by federal agents.
“As I stood at the Whipple detention center, as I met with constituents who were being literally rounded up by ICE in Minnesota under Operation Metro Surge, I couldn’t help but regret giving this administration any additional authority,” Craig said in an interview earlier this month, reiterating her comments from a March op-ed in which she first expressed regret over the vote.
“I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.”
In a statement to The 19th, Craig said that Flanagan’s attacks over her vote on the Laken Riley Act don’t take into account her work fighting the administration on the issue. Craig said that from her seat in Congress, she took on the administration by conducting oversight, helping get constituents released from custody and fighting against the opening of new detention centers in Minnesota.
“The attacks from my opponent fall flat when this moment calls for leaders who can take accountability and take on tough fights – not watch from the sidelines,” Craig said.
In Maryland, Rep. April McClain Delaney overcame a primary challenge from former Rep. David Trone, but not before she walked back her support for the Laken Riley Act. Trone made McClain Delaney’s support for the law one his main lines of attack — arguing she sided with Trump and stripped immigrants of due process — and played up criticism from Maryland lawmakers and immigrant rights groups.
In interviews, McClain Delaney said she regretted the vote and that at the time, she didn’t envision the Trump administration carrying out its mass deportation promises.
“I don’t think I totally focused as much as I should have on the ‘accused of a crime’ [part],” she said in a December interview with the Baltimore Banner. “But I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.”
McClain Delaney said that her decision to disavow the vote came after receiving thousands of messages from constituents raising concerns about the administration’s immigration policies and also asking for help from their local representative. More than 50 percent of her constituent services casework at the end of last year was related to immigration, she told the Banner.
McClain Delaney defeated Trone by six points.
In Arizona, Rep. Greg Stanton, the former mayor of Phoenix, easily fended off a challenge from progressive activist Kai Newkirk, but Newkirk’s criticisms of Stanton, including over support for the Laken Riley Act, attracted attention to the race.
Separately, two other Democrats have publicly walked back their support of the law. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said he regretted his vote during a campaign appearance last summer, before his reelection in November. Last April, Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut said during a CNN town hall that she wishes she had voted differently.
“As I’ve thought about it over the past couple of months, I probably would have voted differently. It’s a vote that I regret,” Hayes said.
Not all Democrats are expressing regret. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia has been criticized by Republicans for voting against an earlier version of the law in 2024 but has stood by his vote for the Laken Riley Act ahead of his high-stakes reelection campaign this November.
Immigration – including how Democrats respond to Trump’s policies and communicate a different vision on the issue to voters — is one of the key issues of the 2026 campaign cycle, already a historic one for Democrats as their leaders and base voters grapple with the direction of the party ahead of the 2028 election.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California widely seen as a 2028 presidential contender, said in May that support for the law should be disqualifying.
“Nine swing-state Democrats gave permission for mass deportation,” Khanna told the Bulwark in May.“No one who voted for the Laken Riley Act should have any role in the future leadership of the Democratic Party in this country. … It’s disqualifying, just like the Iraq War vote.”
Heading into November and beyond, Lorella said, Democrats have an opportunity to shift the dynamic of the immigration debate. At the time of the Laken Riley Act vote, she said, Republicans created a “boogeyman” out of immigration, and there was nothing competing against that vision.
“Now we’re a year and some change into what it means to execute a mass deportation agenda. People understand these are neighbors, childcare providers, people who take care of us,” she said. “If all they hear is Democrats say we need to abolish ICE, I think what falls short. They can lead with a governing vision, an affirmative vision for immigration.”
Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and center-left Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday reiterated their push to combat illegal migration after thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into Spanish exclave Ceuta in late July.
“We are aware that many might be wondering about our cooperation. We come from very different political backgrounds, and we certainly do not agree on everything,” Meloni posted in a “joint message” on Facebook, sharing an archival photo of herself and Frederiksen.
“We do not accept uncontrolled immigration to Europe, and we have promoted a strict immigration policy, both in our Nations and in Europe,” the statement continued.
In response to the Ceuta crisis, which reignited Europe’s long-running debate on illegal migration, Denmark and Italy had sent a joint letter to the European Commission demanding immediate action at the EU’s external borders. The letter was co-signed by 20 other European heads of state and government.
Italy has since been one of the harshest critics of Spain’s left-wing government and its migration policies, with Rome announcing border controls for travelers arriving from Spain on Friday.
Meloni and Frederiksen argued that the adverse effects of illegal migration — “rising crime rates, growing pressure on public services, and an erosion of citizens’ trust” — were indisputable.
“For too long, ordinary people … have paid too high a price because of uncontrolled immigration,” they said.
“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it. We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share,” they said.
European People’s Party leader Manfred Weber has called for the swift establishment of migrant return hubs in Africa after tens of thousands of unauthorized migrants surged into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in late July.
In an op-ed for German outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that was published Monday, conservative boss Weber wrote: “Ceuta has shown that close cooperation with neighboring countries can work. Morocco immediately took people back. No one was able to travel onward into the Schengen area” and, he added, “Europe must quickly establish return hubs in Africa.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing government are among the harshest critics, with Rome introducing border controls for travelers from Spain on Friday and sparking retaliation from Madrid.
Weber echoed proposals made last week by EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner, arguing that countries outside the bloc could be offered closer trade ties, economic collaboration and legal migration opportunities in exchange for accepting the installation of return hubs.
“Migrants who have no right to remain must leave Europe — no ifs, ands or buts!” he wrote, adding that returns must no longer depend on the political will of individual member countries.
Weber called for expanding the EU’s border and coast guard agency Frontex to 50,000 operational personnel, working alongside national forces and monitoring member countries’ compliance with the bloc’s border rules.
Weber also rejected internal border controls within Europe as a long-term solution. “They may be necessary in exceptional situations. But they do not address the root cause of the problem … There can therefore be only one answer: strong, joint European protection of the external border.”
In early June, the European Parliament and European Council announced new EU rules on migrant returns, including removals to countries outside the bloc in return hubs.
Weber also argued that the Ceuta crisis, which left around 100 dead, was the result of unilateral national action and said that the Spanish government’s “political signals” have had “an immediate impact on migration routes.”
PISA, Italy — Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to be beaten at her own game.
With an election approaching next year and a new far-right rival emerging, the Italian prime minister — whose political origins lie in Italy’s post-fascist right — is putting aside the moderate image she has built over her four years in office and hardening her tone on migration and security.
Meloni’s government was the first in the EU to attack the Spanish government over a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week.
While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line.
Meloni’s office has made clear it has no intention of lifting the controls until at least Aug. 15, escalating the clash with Spain, which retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.
“We will not back down one millimeter on illegal immigration,” Meloni posted on X while her allies attacked the socialist Spanish government, accusing it of failing to manage migration flows. “Defending our borders, stopping human traffickers, and ensuring effective repatriation will continue to be this government’s policy,” she added.
The clash with Spain is just the latest sign that the Italian leader is doing all she can to secure her core, hard-right electorate in the face of a challenge from the right by Roberto Vannacci, a former general and member of the European Parliament.
With an election expected as early as next spring, Vannacci’s far-right National Future party has been advancing in the polls, overtaking one of Meloni’s coalition partners, the far-right League party, and gaining on another, Forza Italia, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
For Meloni, who began her political career in the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement, the challenge strikes particularly close to home.
“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.”
During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed.
Vannacci, who is campaigning on security and a hard line on immigration, is calling for a more radical solution: “remigration” — a yet-to-be-detailed plan to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin.
The crisis in Ceuta, during which tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, provided Meloni with an opportunity to show that fighting irregular migration remains an absolute priority for her government.
Roberto Vannacci sings the national anthem during a rally in Genoa, Italy on July 11, 2026. | Emanuela Zampa/Getty Images
Meloni’s reaction was “purely the result of domestic political calculations,” said Giorgio Gori, a member of the European Parliament from the left-wing Democratic Party. The Italian prime minister is trying to secure her electorate “by showing that she is loyal to the right-wing slogan and propaganda on migration and beyond.”
For Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli University, Meloni’s priority at this stage is “that the Brothers of Italy [Meloni’s party] doesn’t start losing votes too” — in preparation for a potential alliance with Vannacci before or after next year’s election.
“Vannacci has been growing a lot in polls, especially over the past two months,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco from the YouTrend polling firm, noting that National Future is polling at over 7 percent.
“Without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election,” he said. “These seven points matter a lot.”
The Vannacci effect
Nicola Procaccini, Meloni’s lieutenant and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, denies that Meloni is shifting on policy to protect herself from Vannacci.
“She stands where she has always stood,” he told POLITICO. “She simply isn’t the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office. And she isn’t one now, either.”
Meloni is also facing a challenge to her support for Ukraine, with both the League and Vannacci advocating a softer line on Moscow, opposing military aid to Kyiv and arguing against an increase in defense spending.
Though Meloni has portrayed herself as a strong backer of Ukraine, her reliance on the League for support has meant Italy has contributed just €3 billion in four years, roughly the equivalent of €1 a month for every Italian citizen, less than the cost of an espresso.
Italy has also declined to join NATO’s PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), an arms-buying scheme set up last summer after U.S. President Donald Trump ended new military aid commitments to Kyiv.
Ukraine is where Meloni’s real difference with Vannacci lies, argued Tarchi, who teaches at the University of Florence and is considered the key figure of a movement called the New Right.
“Otherwise, the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons,” he said.
Meloni’s allies haven’t ruled out an alliance with Vannacci but they stress that the possibility will depend on where he stands on key values such as foreign policy.
If he seeks “to position Italy, alongside Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, clearly, it is not possible to stand together,” said Procaccini. “If, instead, he chooses the West — the democracies, Western nations, Western liberal democracies — then we can certainly stand together.”
Tourists traveling between Spain and Italy are caught in the middle of an escalating ideological feud over European border security involving Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Madrid on Saturday restored border controls on ships and flights arriving in Spain from Italian ports and airports, suspending passport-free travel between the two countries. Spain said the move was necessary to protect its citizens from “the persistent irregular migration pressure suffered by the transalpine country.”
The move was an unmistakable retaliation for the checks that Italy has imposed on travelers arriving from Spain since Aug. 1. Rome enacted those measures in response to the mass arrival of people in the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, citing fears that the unauthorized migrants could cross the Strait of Gibraltar and take advantage of the passport-free Schengen area to travel onward to Italy and elsewhere in the EU.
Madrid has pushed back forcefully against that narrative, and noted that the migrants could not leave the North African territory because they lack valid IDs required to travel on ferries to mainland Europe.
Spanish authorities and the European Commission this week confirmed that none of the 72,000 people who surged into Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. During a meeting of EU interior ministers on Tuesday, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi publicly praised Spain for its handling of the situation and expressed Rome’s “sincere solidarity” with Madrid.
Yet despite requests from Madrid, the Italian government has declined to end border checks even after it became clear that there was no risk of the Ceuta crisis spilling into the rest of Europe. Rome’s inaction prompted Spain to issue a statement on Friday threatening to adopt “proportional measures” if Rome did not change course by Aug. 9.
After Meloni’s office responded by declaring “Italy does not accept ultimatums or demands from abroad regarding national security and border control,” Madrid moved to reintroduce its own controls.
Magnus Brunner, the European commissioner for internal affairs and migration, sought to mediate in the dispute.
“I was in contact with both the Spanish and Italian Interior Ministers today. Both confirmed that the internal border controls are temporary,” Brunner said in a post on X. “I stressed the progress we’ve made on tackling illegal migration and that trust between Member States is our most valuable currency.”
“Spanish authorities assured us the events in Ceuta will have no lasting effect on the Schengen area. That is why there are signals from Italy that controls could be lifted soon,” the Austrian commissioner added.
A battle fought in passport queues
The tit-for-tat measures are emblematic of Meloni and Sánchez’s broader feud over migration policies.
Meloni slammed Madrid after it rolled out a scheme to grant legal status to more than 1 million unauthorized migrants earlier this year, and called for a debate on the consequences of the measure during a meeting of European leaders last month.
As the Ceuta crisis unfolded, the Italian premier spearheaded the drafting of a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in which 22 EU leaders argued Madrid’s migration policies had undermined the security of the bloc’s external borders.
“We have a duty to effectively deter and relentlessly combat illegal migration, by coordinating our action, strengthening our external borders and addressing all policies that can serve as pull factors, such as the regularization of [a] very large number of irregular migrants,” the leaders wrote.
Madrid has forcefully rejected Italy’s accusations and pointed out that none of the migrants who entered Ceuta could have benefited from the legal status scheme, which is subject to specific qualifying conditions. Moreover, Spanish officials have bristled at Rome’s suggestion that they are mismanaging the bloc’s external borders, pointing to data showing Italy is doing a far worse job of handling unauthorized migrants.
“Italy is the EU member state that has recorded the highest number of irregular crossings in recent years, with figures that have at times been twice those of Spain,” a Spanish government spokesperson said on Friday.
By reintroducing border controls, Italy and Spain have underscored the fragility of the Schengen area, which has existed since 1995 and now extends to 29 European countries.
Under the current rules, any member country is allowed to reintroduce checks for an initial period of up to six months to address security threats. The measures can be renewed for six-month periods for up to two years, and, in exceptional circumstances, up to three years.
Few expect the spat between Rome and Madrid to endure for that long, but in the meantime those traveling between the two countries will have to endure the resulting inconvenience.
Throughout the week, passengers on flights departing from Spanish airports have complained about the scrutiny they have faced upon arrival in Italy, with travelers reporting significant delays as Italian carabinieri checked their IDs. On Saturday, passengers on Italian flights arriving in Spain were subjected to similar controls, with National Police holding travelers who could not provide official identification.
Some 3.2 million Spaniards traveled to Italy in 2024, and 5.4 million Italians visited Spain. The renewed controls could push travelers to reconsider trips between the two countries — and make other European destinations the inadvertent beneficiaries of an ideological battle playing out in passport queues.
This article has been updated with additional reporting by Gabriel Gavin.
VILARDEVÓS, Spain — Nestled in the scrubby hills of northern Spain, this small village feels like a place that has fallen out of time. In reality, it offers a glimpse of the demographic future.
When Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos begins her English lesson on a June morning, eight children are sitting in front of her. The oldest are in sixth grade, the final year of primary school; the youngest are in fourth.
Teaching them together is not always easy, the 30-year-old says. But there are too few pupils to separate them.
The Rodolfo Núñez Rodríguez nursery and primary school opened in 1974 and was built for 700 children from Vilardevós and the surrounding villages. Today, it has 31 pupils, from preschool through sixth grade.
Apart from the school bell, the building is eerily quiet, even during breaks. The silence extends into the village. Most people encountered in its lanes are old. Many houses are abandoned, their façades marked with signs reading Se vende — for sale.
Vilardevós is an extreme case, but not an isolated one. Across Europe, birth rates are falling, populations are aging and fewer young people are entering the workforce.
Modern welfare states rest on an intergenerational bargain. Today’s workers finance pensions and health care for older people, trusting that others will eventually do the same for them.
Low fertility is straining that bargain. Fewer young people are entering the workforce just as large generations approach retirement. Pension reform has already become one of Europe’s most politically difficult issues, and the viability of the Social Security system is a perennial concern in the United States. Those political pressures will continue to intensify as the population ages.
That has forced governments to confront an increasingly urgent question: Can they persuade people to have more children — and, if not, can immigration prevent the demographic arithmetic from breaking down?
Why birth rates are falling
For a population to remain stable over time without immigration, women must have an average of about 2.1 children. According to the latest Eurostat data, the European Union’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — fell to 1.34 in 2024. In Spain, the lowest among the continent’s large countries, it was 1.1 and still declining.
The United States is only slightly less exposed. Its fertility rate, long higher than Europe’s, has also dropped well below replacement level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it fell to 1.6 in 2024.
For a long time, falling birth rates were not treated as an urgent problem. After all, their effects take decades to emerge: A decline in births does not become a shortage of workers until roughly a generation later. By the time schools empty and pension systems come under strain, the demographic trajectory is set.
Europe and the United States also appeared less exposed than parts of East Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are already grappling with fertility rates below one child per woman.
Then there is the harder question: Why is this happening?
There are many competing explanations. Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has argued that part of the fall in the U.S. reflects a public-health success: Americans have become better able to avoid teenage pregnancies and unintended births. But beyond that, the story is similar on both sides of the Atlantic.
Housing is too expensive. Women are prioritizing their careers. Men are taking longer to mature. Religion has lost influence. Smartphones and social media are weakening real-world relationships. Fear of climate change makes having children feel useless and cruel.
Each hypothesis has its adherents, along with its own books, podcasts and preferred evidence. None, on its own, fully explains the decline.
Berkay Ozcan, professor of social and public policy at the London School of Economics, has little patience for attempts to identify a single culprit. The decline, says the 47-year-old father of two, is driven by a combination of causes. Insecure labor markets and high housing costs play a role, as do changing values, longer periods of education and rising expectations of parenthood.
But all these factors have a common effect: postponement. Surveys show that young people still want, on average, about two children. But many delay parenthood until they feel professionally, financially and emotionally ready, Ozcan says — and often wait longer than they intended.
Eva Beaujouan agrees, and she speaks from more than just professional experience. When the University of Vienna demographer was 34, she and her partner started trying to have a child. They finally managed five years later, after using IVF.
“I would never have imagined, starting at 34, that I would have issues,” says Beaujouan, who is now 48 and has focused her research on late parenthood.
Delayed parenthood extends well beyond affluent urban professionals. “Postponement is now observed in all social strata,” she says.
Assisted reproduction can create false reassurance. It may improve the chances of conception, but it cannot guarantee a child or fully overcome the effects of age. “It is invasive,” she says. “It is expensive. It creates inequalities. Not many people can afford it. And of course, it often fails.”
The cost of children
The fertility problem reflects a basic economic contradiction: Children are essential to the welfare state, but economically disadvantageous to the households that raise them.
In the past, children contributed labor and provided security in old age. In modern welfare states, that role has largely disappeared. “Although having children is necessary for the functioning of the welfare system, they do not have an economic function within the household,” says Beaujouan.
For all the meaning and fulfillment they may bring, raising children is expensive, can interrupt careers and may reduce lifetime earnings. Bringing up a child costs roughly $320,000 for a middle-class family in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted estimates based on U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In Britain, the Child Poverty Action Group, an anti-poverty charity, estimates the cost at about £250,000. For a household solely concerned with financial security in retirement, that money may offer a greater economic return if it is saved and invested instead.
What may be rational for individual households, however, can be damaging when repeated across an entire society.
Martin Bujard, research director at Germany’s Federal Institute for Population Research, explains the problem from an office in Wiesbaden crowded with stacks of paper. Before the conversation can begin, the 50-year-old sociologist and father of two has to clear a space for our two cups of coffee.
For an industrial country, Bujard says, quality of life does not depend primarily on the number of inhabitants. The crucial factor is how many people are entering the labor market relative to those retiring.
“If that is roughly in balance, the economy and welfare systems work,” Bujard says. “If only a few young people come up behind while very many retire, things become tricky.”
Searching for solutions
Back in Vilardevós, Yaiza Ferreiro Collazos remains in the classroom after the lesson and talks about her own plans. The 30-year-old is childless, like all her female friends.
“We work, and afterward we want fun or time for ourselves,” she says.
Collazos and her friends sometimes discuss having families, but she worries about what motherhood would require her to give up. “If I had a child, I could no longer continue my current life,” she says. She also worries about how pregnancy would change her body.
Governments across Europe have spent years trying to make such decisions easier. So far, none has found a reliable way to reverse falling fertility.
Two decades ago, Germany launched a major expansion of childcare for children under three. The reform was aimed primarily at closing the gap between the former West and East Germany. During the years that followed, fertility rose from around 1.4 to around 1.6 children per woman. But then the gains petered out — and the rate fell again. By 2025, it had reached a new historic low of 1.32.
Hungary relied more heavily on financial incentives. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government — proudly “illiberal” by its own description — offered parents bonuses and fiscal advantages, including an income-tax exemption for mothers with four or more children. Fertility rose from about 1.25 in the early 2010s to around 1.6 in 2021, before falling back to roughly 1.4.
Attempts at persuasion have fared no better. In 2016, Italy introduced a “Fertility Day” campaign. One advertisement showed a young woman holding an hourglass beside the slogan: “Beauty has no age. Fertility does.” The campaign provoked widespread outrage.
“It is very difficult to develop such campaigns,” says Beaujouan. “If you tell women at a later stage that if they do not start having children before such an age they will have trouble, then they start feeling guilty and anxious.”
Her assessment of the policy record is harsh. “I have not seen anything yet that would increase fertility rates,” she says. “Some policies can lay reasonable conditions for having children. And if they were not here, fertility may be even lower in some places. But they are rarely a motor of fertility rates.”
The immigration alternative
There is one response that has changed the demographic numbers where family policies and tax incentives have not: immigration. Spain offers perhaps the clearest example.
By the logic of its birth rate, the country should be shrinking. Instead, its population has grown from 46.5 million a decade ago to almost 50 million today. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 70 percent of Spain’s employment growth between 2019 and 2024, according to an analysis by Esade, a prominent Spanish business school.
The country’s immigration policy is, however, hardly a template for the rest of Europe. Much of its recent immigration has come from Latin America, especially Colombia and Venezuela — countries where Spanish is the mother tongue and Christianity is the dominant religion. That does not make integration automatic. But it makes things easier.
In much of the rest of Europe, immigrants have been harder to absorb: Newcomers often arrive without the language, credentials or cultural familiarity that make it easier to find work and settle quickly. Migrants from Muslim-majority societies have also faced greater political and public pushback than Spain’s Latin America newcomers.
That may help explain why Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been more willing than most European leaders to embrace large-scale immigration. Spain, he argues, needs younger workers to keep its economy growing and its welfare state afloat. His government recently launched one of Europe’s largest regularization programs for undocumented migrants. By early July, 1.2 million people had already applied.
But immigration solves one demographic problem by creating a different political challenge. Sánchez’s critics argue that the government counts the economic benefits while underestimating the pressure on housing, schools and public services, as well as the difficulties of integration and social cohesion.
Spain’s conservative opposition and the far-right Vox party accuse Sánchez of rewarding illegal immigration. Vox leader Santiago Abascal has claimed that the government is creating a “pull effect” and accelerating what he calls an “invasion.”
The recent crisis in Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on Morocco’s northern coast, demonstrated just how politically explosive immigration has become in Europe. In late July, tens of thousands of migrants, almost all of them young men, crossed into the territory, overwhelming local authorities. Some factors remain disputed, including the role of the Moroccan government, but the political backlash was immediate: Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 leaders signed a letter warning that Madrid’s generous policies risked creating a “pull factor” for irregular migration and placing pressure on other member states.
This criticism is backed by a public increasingly skeptical of large-scale immigration. Recent polling by YouGov, a London-based opinion research firm, found that majorities in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Denmark said immigration over the past decade had been too high. In the United States, about half the population supports deporting immigrants back to their countries of origin.
The controversy will not be resolved anytime soon. Just as the consequences of collapsing birth rates take decades to become fully visible, the long-term effects of large-scale immigration unfold slowly.
Renewal and resistance
Luton, 1,350 kilometers north of Vilardevós and half an hour by train from London, offers a contrasting picture of Europe’s demographic future. The English city has just under a quarter of a million inhabitants. In 2024, its fertility rate was 2.0, the highest in the country. The national figure was about 1.4.
Data provided by the city administration points to one important difference: Women in Luton tend to have children earlier. One in three births is to a woman aged 25 to 29, compared with one in four across England. Births to women aged 35 to 39, by contrast, account for a larger share nationally than they do in Luton.
Immigration is central to that pattern. Two-thirds of babies born in Luton in 2025 had a mother who was born abroad, according to figures provided to POLITICO by the local council. Across England, the share was about one-third.
Tahmina Saleem, the Labour politician who chairs the town council, describes Luton as “super-diverse and proud of it.” Born in Sheffield to parents from Punjab, she argues that the city attracts families because it still offers jobs, including through its international airport, while housing remains cheaper than in London. Behind her, on the wall, hangs a portrait of King Charles III in a scarlet parade uniform.
The diversity is most visible in the neighborhood of Bury Park, where many newer families have settled. Shops, travel agencies and religious institutions reflect the area’s large Muslim population and its links to South Asia and elsewhere. Women in headscarves and hijabs are a common sight. Travel agencies advertise the Hajj and Umrah, the major and minor pilgrimages to Mecca, and grocery stores sell halal products.
Luton is also illustrative of the political backlash that large-scale immigration can engender.
While Saleem sees immigration as having made the city younger and more open, others see Luton as a symbol of a country becoming demographically and culturally unrecognizable.
The far-right English Defence League emerged in the city in 2009, drawing heavily from the football-hooligan milieu and organizing against immigration and Islam. Its best-known leader, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, is also from Luton. Robinson has built his political identity on the same themes.
His influence now extends far beyond his hometown. In May 2026, Robinson drew roughly 60,000 supporters to a “unite the kingdom” rally in London, evidence that the grievances first mobilized in places such as Luton have become a national political force. The previous September, an even larger rally drew an estimated 110,000 people and featured a video link with Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has repeatedly amplified Robinson’s agenda on his social media platform X.
“Tommy comes by now and then with cameras and foreign journalists to provoke us,” says Hamza Parker, a volunteer at Discover Islam Public Information Centre, a nonprofit organization in central Luton. “But he does not succeed.”
Limits of policy
Back in Vilardevós, Mayor Tamara Balboa García studies the population pyramid of her municipality. Of its 1,598 inhabitants, just 66 are 14 or younger. More than 960 are 60 or older. For every child or teenager, there are almost 15 senior citizens.
If the trend continues, García says, the village will eventually cease to have a future. But she insists that decline is not inevitable. The municipality helps returnees and newcomers find housing and work, particularly in agriculture, wine production and elder care. And even though the municipality is shrinking, it still has a supermarket, a pharmacy, a football pitch, an outdoor swimming pool, several bars, a bank branch and, of course, the school with its tiny classes.
A local nonprofit, Portas Abertas (“Open Doors”), plays a central role in the effort to keep the city alive. Andrea Rodríguez, the social educator who runs its local office, describes how the organization helped one immigrant family settle in the village: The mother, a trained nurse, found work quickly; the father was placed first as a truck driver and later as a baker; their child joined an after-school program.
Rodríguez’s own life is an example of what Portas Abertas wants to achieve. She left Vilardevós as a young woman for her training, but later returned. Four years ago, she bought a house for €92,000.
When the reporter looks at her incredulously, Rodríguez laughs. “It was even in good condition!”
Unlike the mayor, the schoolteacher and many other women in the village, Rodríguez has a child: a four-year-old daughter.
Before the reporter can ask whether she plans to have another child, Rodríguez answers.
GROSSETO, Italy — The Italo-Spanish clash on border controls is escalating.
Italy on Friday said it has no intention of suspending border checks on travelers from Spain, “a friendly country,” and rebuffed Madrid’s threats to retaliate if Rome maintains the emergency measures it instituted in response to the mass arrival of migrants in the Spanish exclave Ceuta last week.
“Italy does not accept ultimatums or demands from abroad regarding national security and border control,” the Office of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote in a statement.
Earlier in the day, the Spanish government had threatened to take “proportional measures” if Rome did not stop its reintroduced border checks and temporary suspension of the Schengen Agreement by Aug. 9.
In its statement, Rome said it would keep these controls in place “at least until August 15 and, in any case, until security and terrorism risks to Italy can be completely ruled out,” adding that a new “migratory wave” is expected in Ceuta on that date.
“Only when it is certain that there will be no security or terrorism risks for Italy, that there will be no new wave and that there are no irregular migrants heading toward European territory will it be possible to reconsider what has already been decided,” said the document.
BRUSSELS — EU Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner warned on Thursday the bloc is vulnerable to unauthorized migration if control of its external borders depends on the goodwill of neighboring countries.
Brunner’s remarks came at an extraordinary meeting of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, a week after a major migration surge from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which has reignited debate over how the EU should secure its frontiers.
“What we have seen in Ceuta during the past few days was … a test of our resilience and also of the security of our external borders,” Brunner said.
“We must cooperate with our neighbors, of course. But as long as control depends on the goodwill of one neighboring state, we remain … vulnerable,” he added.
Brunner described last week’s events in Ceuta, when around 72,000 migrants forced their way into the Spanish exclave, as “solid proof that we need a strong and effective tool — and different tools — to combat smuggling.”
Ceuta Mayor-President Juan Jesús Vivas, who also attended the meeting, saidthat around 100 people died during the mass border crossing, and that between 3,000 and 5,000 remained in the exclave.
Brunner said the EU should use all available leverage to secure the cooperation of countries bordering the bloc.
“It’s about further strengthening the work with partners … [We need to] step up our migration diplomacy by reinforcing comprehensive partnerships to stem this illegal migration, secure effective returns and create the right opportunities for people at home,” he said.
Brunner said cooperation with non-EU countries was essential “because the goal there is to make sure such events never happen again.”
The conservative Austrian commissioner’s party colleague Integration Minister Claudia Bauer warned on Thursday in a written statement that “another attempted mass crossing” in Ceuta could happen on Aug. 15, quoting Spanish media.
“In light of reports of another attempted mass crossing, Spain must immediately and significantly reinforce border protection in its African enclaves and ensure that this time it will hold,” she said.
The United States on Thursday moved to allay fears that it was questioning Spain’s sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, but criticized Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government for its “refusal” to defend the North African exclaves from a “migrant invasion.”
Amid the crisis, Spanish politicians and media raised concerns about the warming relationship between Morocco — which claims Ceuta and Melilla — and the U.S. President Donald Trump, who was infuriated by Socialist Sánchez’s refusal to back the war in Iran.
Many in Madrid expressed fears Washington could decline to rein in Rabat, and pointed to a recent U.S. Congress report that described Ceuta and Melilla as being in “Moroccan territory” and was supportive of negotiations on the “future status” of the cities. But U.S. State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott insisted that there has been no change in U.S. policy on the exclaves.
“The United States unequivocally supports Spain’s sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla,” he told POLITICO.
The State Department noted that the congressional report did not represent U.S. law.
Pigott said that allegations suggesting Washington was questioning Spain’s continued control of the cities had been “pushed by nefarious actors who wish to distract from the Spanish government’s shameful refusal to defend its people from the migrant invasion of its territory in Ceuta.”
He also argued the Spanish government was solely to blame for the crisis in the exclave, into which 72,000 unauthorized migrants surged last week.
“The invasion of tens of thousands of migrants into Ceuta is a direct consequence of the Spanish government’s refusal to defend their sovereignty, secure their borders, and protect their people,” he said.
The crisis in Ceuta initially prompted widespread criticism from EU leaders such as Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen, who last week attacked Spain for having “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration.”
Ceuta is not in the Schengen area, and is separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar.
While the EU member countries have since reversed course and praised Madrid for its handling of the situation, Pigott on Thursday called on Spain to “take all necessary actions to remove illegal migrants and regain control over its borders.”
“Unrestricted mass migration into Ceuta endangers the Spanish people and threatens the security of Europe,” he said. “The State Department stands with the Spanish people and all Europeans in defense of their sovereignty and welcomes all efforts to repel the invasion, remove illegal migrants from European territory, and secure Europe’s borders.”
Additional deaths involving Delaney Hall, a private immigration jail run by The GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, has sparked renewed calls for the closure of the notorious 1,000 bed facility even as the Trump administration dramatically increases arrests and detentions across the nation.
On Saturday Aug. 1st, 41 year-old Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died while in custody. Multiple press reports and Lopez-Cornejo’s mother maintain that Lopez-Cornejo, a father of a 12-year-old girl, who suffered from chronic illness, died from medical neglect after he was refused treatment. He had been in the United States for 20 years and was taken into custody on his way to work.
In a statement shared with CNN, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Lopez-Cornejo “experienced a medical emergency while in ICE custody,” and GEO Group staff “responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services.”
After the confirmation of Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) disclosed he had learned of a third death in late July in which the detainee experienced a seizure not long after arriving at Delaney Hall. According to Menendez’s account, GEO Group and ICE officials told him they called for EMS and the unidentified man was taken to University Hospital where he died. His name and additional details have yet to be disclosed.
Back in December 2025, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died while in custody in Delaney Hall. At that time, 30 people had died in ICE custody across the country that year.
Unlike the high profile violent confrontations witnessed in Minneapolis that sparked massive street protests and culminated in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Peretti, ICE is now utilizing non-law enforcement databases for programs like Medicare to target and apprehend thousands of people who are actually in this country legally. In fact, scores of American citizens have been abducted off the street and detained.
Since Delaney Hall re-opened as a private immigration prison at the start of the second Trump admin, grassroots groups like NJ Pax Christi and Eyes on Ice NJ have had a humanitarian witness at the site located next to the Essex County Correctional Facility in the Ironbound section of Newark.
At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year.
Back on May 9, 2025 masked federal agents abducted Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street outside the private jail, only to release him later that day after a mass non-violent protest. While charges were dropped against Baraka, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continues to prosecute Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on charges related to that day that could result in a 17 year jail term. McIver, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. (D-N.J.) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), who were also on site at Delaney Hall that day, insist they were there only fulfilling their constitutionally-protected oversight duties.
The city of Newark has been pressing for The GEO Group to permit a fire inspection and obtain a certificate of occupancy for the sprawling private jail. Back in 2021, activists had successfully lobbied the state of New Jersey to prohibit municipal and county governments as well as private facilities from entering into new contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees.
Private jailers like The GEO Group successfully challenged the legislation in court. At the time, the Biden administration was holding more than 26,000 detainees nationwide at more than 120 sites. Multiple press reports indicate the Trump administration is now holding almost three times that number at over 450 facilities in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and in U.S. territories. In July, ICE reported it had arrested 51,000 people, the largest number in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, according to ABC News.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump pledged to target millions of U.S. residents and “deport them so rapidly” he would “rescue every town that had been invaded and conquered.” In that same campaign, Vice President JD Vance advanced an admittedly completely fabricated story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ domestic pets. The claim was so outrageous that local municipal officials and Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine spoke out on behalf of Springfield’s Haitian residents, who they said had filled jobs in the rust belt town that had actually helped revive the local economy.
At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year. That does not include the multiple fatal shootings just since Trump was sworn in for the second time. According to the Guardian, last month’s fatal shooting of 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was the 10th such fatal ICE shooting since Trump regained office.
In an interview with WBAI Pacifica Radio, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), who has been in Congress for less than three months, recounted that in her multiple visits to Delaney Hall “what was clear was that there were individuals being detained with chronic health conditions that were not receiving the kind of care that is necessary and mandated by their doctors.”
Lack of access to timely medical care has been a long standing and well-documented complaint throughout the ICE system and private contract immigration prisons across the nation.
Over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall. Under the GEO Group business model, detainees maintain the private jail for a dollar a day. Earlier this summer, large crowds of protestors converged on Delaney Hall in support of the hunger strikers.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) ICE agents stand guard in front of protesters outside Delaney Hall which is being used as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has been a vocal opponent of the private jail and was turned away when she initially came for a visit, she did call out the New Jersey State Police at the height of street protests outside Delaney in solidarity with the hunger strikers.
The move marked a significant escalation and came after the Trump administration threatened to suspend the processing of international flights at Newark Liberty International on the eve of the World Cup, in which New Jersey had invested heavily.
Henry Craver, writing for the American Friends Service Committee, described GEO and ICE’s repressive and violent response to the show of solidarity for the hunger strike.
“In one incident guards tried to remove a strike leader soon after the strike began,” Carver wrote. “When other detained people formed a human shield around him, armed officers returned in force. They swept through multiple units, physically assaulted people, and deployed tear gas. People in those units told AFSC that they struggled to breathe for hours after.”
Carver continued: “The retaliation escalated in the following weeks. Hundreds of detained people have been transferred out of Delaney Hall to facilities in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — far away from their families and communities.”
With a Republican Congress very much under the control of Trump, efforts at oversight of ICE and the private prison system that has expanded significantly has been left to the Democrats, who are in the minority. Grassroots efforts at the municipal level have been far more effective in galvanizing resistance to the creation of new immigration prisons.
State lawmakers also have a mixed record when it comes to reigning in ICE’s mass deportation strategy. A federal judge recently struck down New York State’s legislation to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks while letting stand a provision that prohibits town and county governments from entering into so-called 287(g) partnership that deputizes local police to enforce immigration laws.
“I need to say that every single American should be paying attention to what’s happening here — our government is treating a set of people with such impunity, with such inhumanity it is costing them their lives,” Mejia said. “Now we can debate our positions on immigration and immigration reform but I think it is fair to say that essentially sentencing people to death is not what the American people are calling for or want.”
Mejia continued: “It is imperative that at least the state of New Jersey is pushing hard to make sure that our state officials have full and unrestricted access to these detention centers to ensure the well being of these individuals. These are human beings.”
Trump has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as “animals,” “illegal monsters” and “gang members” staging “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”
These claims, which have been the way the Fox media complex frames the immigration, are easily debunked by study after study that found immigration into the U.S. is actually associated with lower crime rates.
Working at the European Commission is one of the most coveted civil service jobs in Brussels. Yet, officials employed there describe high pressure, bureaucracy and burnout.
Our colleague Seb Starcevic has interviewed dozen officials from different commissioners’ cabinets and directorates-general, varying in age, nationality and seniority. On the podcast, Zoya Sheftalovich and Sarah Wheaton parse through what these insiders had to say about their working conditions.
Next, last week’s Ceuta crisis — when a surge of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave — has revived a basic question: Why does Spain still hold territory in North Africa? With Madrid increasingly isolated from both U.S. and European allies, doubts are also growing over who would support Spain if Morocco moved against Ceuta or its other North African city, Melilla.
Plus: Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharma company of Ozempic fame, is launching a pill version of its weight-loss drug Wegovy in Europe … and transatlantic tensions are already brewing.
Questions? Comments? Get in touch! You can message us or send a voice message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
PARIS — The United States is dragging its feet on approving President Emmanuel Macron’s pick for French ambassador to Washington amid a spat over human rights at the United Nations, according to three people familiar with the dispute.
Macron may have charmed U.S. President Donald Trump with pleasantries and fine dining at Versailles Palace during his June visit to France, but the delay in approving the new envoy reveals that diplomatic tensions between the two countries are still simmering.
Aurélien Lechevallier, a longtime Macron ally, was expected to take office next month but his posting is yet to be approved by the U.S. Department of State — a process that is usually a formality between allied countries.
According to two people familiar with the matter, the Trump administration took offense at a social media post from France’s mission to the U.N. in Geneva that criticized Washington’s decision to side with Russia and North Korea against the renewal of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk’s mandate.
“The United States is very disappointed in the irresponsible and disrespectful rhetoric from the French,” said an official from the Department of State in response to a written question about Lechevallier’s clearance process. “We are responding appropriately to their comments.”
Türk, an Austrian national who has been high commissioner since 2022, has drawn U.S. ire for his criticism of the country’s immigration policy and Israel’s war in Gaza.
Two of the individuals also expressed hope that the dispute, which was first reported by Reuters, would blow over and Washington would not block Lechevallier’s appointment.
Love-hate relationship
The spat illustrates the volatile relationship between the U.S. and its oldest ally France. While Macron and Trump have shared moments of camaraderie in front of the cameras, they have polar opposite world views and regularly spar over NATO, Ukraine and trade relations.
Trump’s participation in the June G7 summit in Evian was praised as a high point in the relationship, with the U.S. president showing signs of support for Ukraine and prolonging his visit to France to join Macron and his wife for dinner at the gilded Versailles Palace.
“We have our ups and downs in our relationship with the U.S.,” said a former French official, who has kept informed of the transatlantic relationship. Macron is capable of challenging America’s bullying at the Economic Forum of Davos, but “can also hug President Trump and invite him to sign his Iran deal in Versailles.”
The hold-up in Lechevallier’s approval process will end up being “an anecdote,” said the former official, who, like others quoted here, was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “But it confirms we are not afraid of a confrontation” with Washington, they added.
For a senior figure from Macron’s Renaissance party, however, the U.S. targeting a senior French diplomat is “staggering.” Lechevallier is currently chief of staff to Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot and was Macron’s classmate at the elite ENA graduate school.
“We’ve been extremely cooperative, even considerate, on Iran … We’ve been polite and diplomatic. And we’re faced with something that is a bit humiliating,” said the official.
Diplomatic tensions
The French foreign ministry declined to comment on Lechevallier’s stalled approval procedure and has not protested publicly. But Paris has not rowed back its criticism of the U.S. human rights record either.
“Our position was known. We supported the renewal of the high commissioner’s mandate,” said a French diplomat. “Differences of opinion over a [U.N.] vote do not call into question the strength of our relationship or our ability to work together.” Last month, the U.S. voted against the renewal of Türk’s term, accusing him of leading the U.N. human rights system “to its deathbed.”
Despite the personal relationship between Trump and Macron, the dispute comes at a time of simmering diplomatic tensions with the U.S. Barrot has sharply criticized Washington over its military intervention in Venezuela, as well as its threats against Greenland. He also vowed France would never give in to U.S. “blackmail” over trade tariffs.
Relations with U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Kushner have also soured over his perceived lecturing on the fight against antisemitism in France and his alleged interference in French political life. Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared, was twice summoned to the foreign ministry.
“Kushner had problems [with the French foreign ministry] … He was humiliated. Maybe this is also payback,” said the former French diplomat.
The news came the way it always comes in my family, sideways, through a phone. I was in my living room, sunk into the chaise lounge I retreat to, comfortable in a way that now embarrasses me, when I heard my mother’s voice in the other room calling my father. Something in her tone. You learn your parents’ registers the way you learn weather, and this was the register of bad news from far away.
Greece was burning again. Crete worst of all, in the south, where a fire near Rethymno had driven some 8,000 people from their homes in a single night. Fires on Paros and Andros, scattered across the Aegean. And then the name I had been bracing against: Lesbos. A blaze near Plomari, the old ouzo town on the island’s south coast, was eating coastal homes while roughly 100 firefighters fought it, and a seaside resort emptied into the dark.
The fires are not a freak event, and no one in Greece pretends they are. They began in early July and have barely paused since; this is the second week of a major outbreak, dozens of fronts at once, fed by a record European heat wave, a spring of too little rain and the Meltemi, the dry seasonal winds that come screaming down the Aegean in July and August at up to 100 kilometers an hour and turn a spark into a wall. Scientists have said it plainly: Climate change is loading the dice, the Mediterranean’s pine and olive and dry scrub catch faster and burn hotter than they used to, and summers like this one are becoming the rule, not the exception. Greece has always burned in August. It has not always burned like this.
My father is from Lesbos. My mother’s people are from there too, further back, so the island runs down both sides of me like a watermark you only see when the light hits it right. It is where my family’s houses stand, where a portion of my life is already promised, where I know I will one day go to live for a while, because the pull has never once loosened. It is, if I am honest, where I come from in the deepest sense, not only the blood but the making. My love of poetry, my hunger for art — I trace all of it back to that island, to Sappho, who sang there 26 centuries ago and somehow reached a Greek-American boy in Pennsylvania and told him what he was.
I have not set foot on Lesbos in 10 years.
That is the sentence, the amount of time, I keep circling. Now I watch it burn on a screen from a soft chair, an ocean and a lifetime away, useless.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell.
There is a particular helplessness to diaspora I have never quite found the words for, though I keep trying. You love a place you are not in. You grieve a fire you cannot smell. You refresh a feed for news of a village whose name your relatives say with their whole mouths and you say with an accent that gives you away. The distance is not only miles. It is the knowledge that everyone there is living what you are merely watching, and that watching, from comfort, is its own small shame.
I was made by that island’s water. They tell me that as a baby, I would not leave the sea. I would stay in the Aegean until I cried at being carried out, submerging myself again and again until, the family story goes, I matched the sea, my skin gone the temperature of it, indistinguishable, a small animal that had already decided where it belonged. Even now, when I step into that water, something in me resets. The sun on it, the salt, the particular blue no postcard has ever gotten right — it reconnects me to my own being, returns me to whatever I was before the world got complicated.
There was a year, when I was barely one, that the island nearly kept me for good: a lost passport, a wary government that took an American baby for a Greek one, and a U.S. congressman who finally untangled it and got me home. It is a longer story than this essay can hold, but its shape has never left me. The point is this: That island has been trying to keep me since before I could speak, and I have spent a decade letting the ocean between us win.
And here is the thing I cannot hold simply, what kept me on the chaise longer than the news required. That same sea that baptized me is, for thousands of others, a grave.
Lesbos is not only my father’s Eden. For more than a decade it has been a frontline, the first Greek soil that exhausted, terrified people touch when they cross from Turkey in boats that were never built for open water. My sacred water is someone else’s last water. My homeland is a stranger’s checkpoint and, if they are lucky, their refuge.
I don’t know how to make those facts, that awful juxtaposition, clean, and I have stopped trying. Both experiences are true. The island is sacred to me for what it gave me, and it is sacred to the fleeing for what it offers them, which is the oldest thing land can offer: safety, ground, a place to stop running.
When the fires come, they do not check anyone’s passport. They take the olive groves and the goats and the summer houses, and they take the makeshift shelters and the fragile new footing of people who had already lost everything once. In Crete, the deadliest front this week, three firefighters have already died trying to hold the line against the blaze. That is what steadies me and breaks me in the same breath, that a land this rich in what it gives, in shade and figs and refuge and myth, keeps burning while the world half-watches.
A Mediterranean summer on fire has become a genre now, a seasonal rerun we thumb past on the way to something else. This year’s footage looks like last year’s, and that of the year before, a sameness that is its own quiet violence. Repetition sands horror down into wallpaper. But it is not wallpaper to the family loading a car in the dark, or to a firefighter’s widow, or to a man in Pennsylvania watching his one island go up in flames on a screen. Familiar is not the same as bearable.
What the fire has done, strangely, is make me want to go back not to take but to give. To help. To stand on the ground instead of scrolling past it. I have spent ten years loving Lesbos as an inheritance, a thing I own from a distance, and the smoke on my screen has shamed that love into something more useful. My mother’s ancestors and my father’s boyhood and Sappho’s fragments and the sea that raised me are all still there, waiting, under a sky the color of alarm. My uncle is in Athens. My family’s houses are still standing, for now. And I am here, finally understanding that loving a place from afar is not the same as loving it.
I think I will go to Lesbos this year. Not because the fire is out, but because it isn’t. The sea is still there. It is still the color no one can name. And it is still, for me and for the strangers arriving on its shore, the difference between drowning and being born.
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