The articles trace a shift in German political attitudes toward both immigration and the far right. Most striking is the growing regional cooperation between AfD and the CDU, the country’s traditional party of government. The Brandmauer (“firewall”), the principle of non-collaboration with far-right extremism, is breaking down. In efforts to make their views more palatable to a roaring German nationalist sentiment, traditional parties are making pacts with AfD.

“My party doesn’t speak the language of the people on the streets,” says Markus Töns of Gelsenkirchen’s SPD.

Töns criticises a national party out of tune with voter perceptions, but the question remains: should parties align themselves with street-level far-right sensationalism?

Back in 2025, the Courthouse News made a premonitory claim: “People are afraid of a further deepening gap in society due to polarization”.  Trends in voter intent show the divide is now palpable at the state level. The Economist argues AfD’s rise does not necessarily signal a “blue wave” but a “growing apart” of communities. To make the point, it paints a grim picture of Gelsenkirchen as a town stripped to its bare bones; in contrast with richer, graduate-heavy cities like Cologne, Bonn and Münster, the AfD underperformed. Likewise, CNN attributes the party’s strength in Eastern Germany to economic disparity and the carrying of a communist legacy. That explains why Saxony-Anhalt shows 40% voting intention for AfD, but fails to account for growing affinity in Western Germany: in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, the swings were 9% and 11%, respectively.

The Economist also calls out the growing pro-Russia sentiment. Officials in Gelsenkirchen, where AfD has secured one-third of seats, are seeing a push for discourse against Germany’s support for Ukraine. In the east, where the AfD is strongest, CDU politicians have adopted positions “friendlier to the Kremlin than their party leaders in Berlin might like”. In the Ruhr, local SPD campaigns for stricter immigration policy than the national party does.

Importantly, this deepening collaboration entrenches a division of immigrants into wanted and unwanted. The AfD’s election manifesto is explicit about who should be allowed to enter, remain and work— a warm welcome for “European skilled workers” and a points system for non-EU migrants.

The party also advocates a German Germany. Central to its programme is “Leitkultur,” or leading culture: the protection of Germany’s culture and language and their establishment as dominant, so that everyone adopts “the values and morals seen to be inherently ‘German’”. By demanding that immigrants assimilate to this dominant culture, Leitkultur echoes the National Socialist ideal of cultural and racial homogeneity. CNN reads it similarly, noting that remigration carries inherent “Nazi connotations”.

Unsurprisingly, the AfD’s language on reclaiming living spaces for German-born citizens resonates heavily with nationalist sentiment. The AfD’s aim of letting “each German citizen build their own four walls instead of living as renters” and the party’s calls for cutting ties with the EU in pro of a “sovereign Germany” and a “Europe of Fatherlands”.

For Germany, then, it seems that “To Open the Gate” is taking on a new meaning— letting the AfD in. As Anna-Lena Karl, an SPD councillor and interviewed by The Economist, puts it: letting the AfD have such an active role in city structures poses a “normalisation” effect. To answer Töns critique, to align with the AfD is to make a discourse of xenophobia normal.

I found these readings very helpful with further contextualizing the political climate in Germany, as well as evaluating how different types of journalism help portray events differently. For example, the InfoMigrants article presented the information with a more objective angle than the other articles. The writers in this piece were more clear and to the point, formatting the AfD’s policies in bullet points. They didn’t touch as much on the jarring implications that these laws would have, but rather just presented the AfD policies in a digestible way.

However, the other articles have more of an analytic nature to them, adding inputs regarding the implications of the rise of the AfD, specifically calling out the alarming correlations between the AfD and Nazis. I enjoyed the structure and writing style of The Economist’s story, particularly the lede. The details about the past booming industrial town first left me confused as to how this town related to the AfD. However, once the author made the connection, explaining how towns like these have more support for far right politics, it really gave me a better sense of the nuance of the situation. This lede and style of writing was a perfect way for the author to answer the question that many people have about the rise of the AfD – who would vote for such a party?

The answer to this question is what I find the most unsettling out of the situation. This article makes it clear that the AfD is really capitalizing on the worries and frustrations of people, and using this fear to rise to power, as well as using immigrants and refugees as a scapegoat to a plethora of issues in the country. This reality was unsettling to me because with the rise of AI and other technologies, we live in such a rapidly changing world, meaning this uncertainty and shift towards far right policies can happen anywhere at any time.

I also couldn’t help reading this article through a comparative lens of politics in Malta. I had the opportunity to speak with a journalist who emphasized that in Malta, the blaming of immigrants for problems that they are not associated with has caused racism in the country to run rampant. These parallels are a bit disheartening, as it seems as if it is unavoidably human nature to choose a group to blame for one’s own problems disproportionately. We can also see this in history, particularly with the Nazis scapegoating the Jewish community at the dawn of WWII. The parallels between the two situations are stomach churning to say the least.

Additionally, these articles were evidently effective in their objective – letting more people know about the AfD. I of course knew about the AfD before reading these articles from exposure in this class, and some outside conversations. However, I did not fully understand the gravity of the situation, or how alarming it really is until reading this collection of articles. This really underscores the importance of journalism, even with the rise of social media, as these articles convey this information in a captivating and nuanced way that an Instagram post simply cannot achieve.

Russia has changed its attacks on Ukraine from nighttime to round-the-clock bombardment. 

In a September 4 report, the Associated Press revealed Russian drone and missile attacks, which for much of the war came mainly at night, have begun to also occur during the day—disrupting daily life. As Samya Kullab of the Associated Press writes, “[the air raids have] interrupted commutes, shopping trips and children’s school, intruded on life’s biggest moments.”

For Veronika, an alumna of Princeton University from Kyiv, Ukraine who asked to be identified only by her first name because her relatives remain in the capital, her extended family have made leaving attached to a deadline. In the recent weeks, as Russian daytime strikes began, many families around them have also left, according to Veronika.

“They have decided to leave before, but this is the time they sound the most earnest to leave,” Veronika said. When asked where they might go, Veronika said her extended family has not decided. They are considering joining her family in the United States or moving to Spain. They now plan to leave within the month, she said.

About 4.41 million people had returned to their places of residence after being displaced by the war as of December 2025, including about 1.1 million who returned from abroad, according to the International Organization for Migration. The IOM also reported that nearly 4 million people remained internally displaced within Ukraine.

For Ukrainians who have remained in the country through more than four years of war, the attacks come as another winter approaches. “Combined with the cold winter around the corner, it no longer makes sense to stay. Finding basic needs like water will be an issue once more,” Veronika notes.

Ekaterina Pravilova, Professor of History and Director of the Program in Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies at Princeton University whose research focuses on the Russian Empire and its prior satellite states including Ukraine, said the winter is particularly difficult because Russia’s targeted attacks on infrastructure leave residents without electricity and heating.

Pravilova remarks that people she hears from in Kyiv describe repeatedly responding to air-raid alerts, “So it’s like constantly, all day, drones and missile attacks.”

Yet, many Ukrainians have adapted to the conditions, she said, including by buying generators and changing their routines around power outages and air raids. “The resilience of the population is just remarkable,” Pravilova said.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 5.9 million Ukrainians were refugees abroad at the end of 2025. UNHCR further emphasized that persistent airstrikes, damaged housing, and attacks on essential infrastructure continue to hinder sustainable returns to Ukraine by refugees.

For Veronika’s relatives, these challenges are weighed against fleeing. “My relatives plan to flee, but it is so hard for them to leave [their country] and their livelihoods, that is why they have stayed so long,” Veronika said.

As conflict reignites in northern Ethiopia, questions around accountability ensue across borders.

Every evening after work, Mekdi Yilma calls her mother, Seble Beyene, in Addis Ababa from her home in Palo Alto, California. For the past five years the calls have followed the same pattern: first the news from the north of ongoing conflict between the Amhara and Tigray region, followed by a daily catch up on the lives they lead apart. 

Nearly four years after the Pretoria peace agreement ended the 2020–2022 Tigray war, Ethiopia is sliding back into large-scale conflict. On Sept. 20, seven armed groups, including the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Amhara Fano militias that once fought alongside federal troops against it, and the Oromo Liberation Army, announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, with the stated aim of overthrowing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government. Four days later, the TPLF declared Tigray to be in a “full blown war” with the federal government.

Beyene has been following the fighting through the evening news via her satellite TV and reports from neighbors since phone and internet service across Tigray went dark last Friday, “The last time we have seen conflict reach this level, we lost two years of our country to war.” This harsh reality has been top of mind for her daughter Yilma who has not last visited Ethiopia since she immigrated to the states 14 years ago to become a machine learning engineer. Despite her distance from the conflict, it has touched every corner of the Ethiopian community back home and those who migrated to the States.  “During the war nobody outside Ethiopia seemed to take notice, the pandemic was taking hold of the media outlets, and I am afraid nobody is watching what is taking place now,” Yilma said.

Fighting has since spread into Amhara and Afar. Tigrayan forces seized three regional airports and Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights. The UN Human Rights Office reported that federal airstrikes, some reportedly carried out by drones, hit five schools in Tigray on September 22. It has also documented allegations that the TPLF is forcibly recruiting civilians, including children. In Afar alone, a humanitarian source estimated that at least 150,000 people have been displaced.

The renewed fighting lands on a population that never recovered from the last war. A two year conflict that killed up to 600,000 people, by some estimates, yet drew a fraction of the global attention given to wars in Syria or Ukraine. For many Ethiopians, the answer to war and economic collapse has been to leave. That has been something Yilma has thought deeply about, “Bringing my mother to the US has been a constant battle, even now that I hold a green card it is difficult for me to reconcile with and convince my mother to abandon the only life she knows.” 

In 2025, the International Organization for Migration recorded nearly 1,000 deaths and disappearances along the “Eastern Route” from the Horn of Africa through Djibouti and Yemen toward Saudi Arabia, double the year before and the deadliest year since monitoring began in 2014 with Ethiopians making up 97% of migrants tracked on the route. In 2023, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopian migrants attempting to cross from Yemen, a charge the Saudi government has denied.

“I was privileged in the sense that I came with a visa, a plane ticket, and a university to call home to,” Yilma said. Beyene expressed how proud she is of her daughter but worries about abandoning her country. “Mekdi was lucky. She had a way out that was safe, but most young people here are not as fortunate.” 

The Ethiopian government has turned around to blame foreign powers for the escalation. Abiy’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, said the alliance had been operating with financial backing from neighboring Eritrea, and the army chief has accused Egypt and Sudan of supporting the rebels.

For Beyene, the question is not who is to blame but whether anyone will be held accountable this time, “After the last war, we were told there would be justice. That was quickly forgotten. Instead, there is another war and the world should not look away again.”

Sources:

“As Fighting Intensifies, Humanitarian Source Estimates at Least 150,000 Displaced in Afar, Tigray TV Hit by Drone.” Addis Standard, 28 September 2026. Addis Standard article

Council on Foreign Relations. “Conflict in Ethiopia.” Global Conflict Tracker, updated 25 September 2026. CFR Global Conflict Tracker

“Former Enemies Form Alliance to Overthrow Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed.” Agence France-Presse, via inkl, 21 September 2026. Inkl Article

International Crisis Group. “Arresting the Dangerous Descent Back into War in Northern Ethiopia.” International Crisis Group, September 2026. Crisis Group statement

“Seven Ethiopian Armed Groups Announce Anti-Government Alliance.” Reuters, via U.S. News & World Report, 21 September 2026. U.S. News article

On September 14, 2026, New York City joined the City of Chicago, the City and County of San Francisco, and three others in a lawsuit against the Trump Administration’s new public charge rule.

The U.S. public charge rule allows the Department of State to deny visa applicants deemed “too reliant” on public benefits. DOS says the rule is part of government efforts to prioritise immigrant self-sufficiency.

While “public charge” has long been part of U.S. immigration law, who falls under this category is up to the presidential administration. In his first term, President Donald Trump expanded the discretionary capacity of individual immigration officers, suggesting anyone who used public benefits or qualified for them based on income could be deemed a public charge. The Biden Administration then ruled to standardise the principle as someone who relied on government aid as their major source of income.

On July 17, the Trump administration undid it.

Too Expensive to Live Here

For the recently arrived, becoming self-sufficient takes time— and money.

Jennifer Chacón, a case manager providing job placement services at Catholic Charities, knows it firsthand.

“I had to find out on my own; what do I do? Is my title valid here? Looks like it doesn’t; Is there a way to validate it? Oh, you can’t”.

Now she helps newcomers navigate these questions.

“Not everyone knows that they can do it […] and secondly, not everyone can access these services”. Professional accreditation is one example: “We’re talking about a process that could cost you five to six hundred; only to validate a bachelor’s”, Chacón says.

But, as Chacón says, many cannot afford to support their livelihoods, much less validate their degree. “They can’t just survive on their salary […] a household earning a minimum wage in New York City, which is seventeen dollars an hour, to pay rent food, and everything else is simply not possible.”

Chacón estimates that “ninety-eight, to not say a hundred, per cent of our clients receive public benefits”. Yet, many have been increasingly deterred from getting them. Indeed, researchers estimate loss of coverage will have a disproportionately higher impact among eligible noncitizens.

“Many are scared,” she says. “Our legal team mentioned that while the law says they are not subject to public charges, anything can happen, and it can change tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.”

Too Expensive to Support You Here

The agencies providing Refugee Resettlement Services are bearing the weight of budget cuts.

As recently as September 25, the Trump Administration proposed a ‘Pocket Rescision’ of $810 million targeting funds that directly support refugee and immigrant services. The breakdown: $567 million for the Refugee and Entrant Assistance account, which funds Office of Refugee Resettlement programs under HHS; and $10 million from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Citizenship and Integration grant program that provides ESL services.

For resettlement organisations, the cuts are mounting on years of financial stress. As Chacón puts it, “The little funds we still have are provided by the state. We were a team of between 100 and 80 people; today we are 15.”

Too Expensive to Care?

For newcomers, refugee resettlement organisations are a vital source of support.

Father Fabián Arias, a volunteer at New Sanctuary Coalition and Saint Peter’s Church, where budget cuts have reduced legal-clinic services, continues to build community.

Increasingly, he fears, the “Trump administration has targeted sanctuaries”. Arias not only worries about providing basic services, but also about a sense of security.

To him, these rulings are preventing “the community from feeling that it is a safe space, that ICE will not enter there”.

Though his eyes water, he still jokes about the importance of accepting help: “I’m sorry for whoever thinks of themselves as Superman, who thinks they don’t need to be taken care of”.

When Jackie Chan’s parents moved from Davao City in the Philippines to New York around 1965, tennis was not a sport they followed. Earlier this month, they sat in the stands at the U.S. Open for the first time to watch Alexandra “Alex” Eala, the 21-year-old who has become the Philippines’ first major tennis star.

“It was a really special experience for our family,” said Chan, 46, a hair salon owner in Queens who went to Eala’s second- and third-round matches with her parents.

Eala’s season has drawn Filipinos to a sport many of them had never watched, both in the Philippines and among the roughly 10 million Filipinos living abroad. Her matches in Melbourne, Dubai and New York this year have filled with fans carrying Philippine flags, many of them overseas workers and immigrant families.

On Monday, Eala beat Thailand’s Patcharin Cheapchandej 6-1, 6-0 at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, to reach the quarterfinals. She chose to represent the Philippines there instead of playing the WTA’s China Open, a mandatory tournament, and could be fined up to $10,000 for skipping it.

Eala began the year ranked No. 53 in the world and has since climbed to No. 18. At Wimbledon in July, she beat defending champion Iga Swiatek to reach the fourth round. In August, she beat Jessica Pegula in the DC Open final and became the first Filipino to win a singles title on the WTA Tour.

At the U.S. Open, Eala reached the third round for the first time. Chan and her parents were in Louis Armstrong Stadium for her second-round win over Ukraine’s Oleksandra Oliynykova, when Filipino fans filled the stands with flags and chants.

“It was amazing seeing how many Filipinos showed up,” Chan said. “You could feel the support throughout the stadium, and it made the match feel like more than just a tennis match.”

Eala lost her next match to American Iva Jovic. Chan said her family was disappointed but still proud. “Seeing a Filipino player make it that far meant a lot to us,” she said. “Though this was my family’s first time really supporting tennis, [we] will definitely keep following her.”

Nicolas Wright, 20, a Filipino-American sprinter who runs the 60-meter dash for the University of Connecticut, had not watched much tennis before Eala. He started following her through watch parties hosted by a Filipino student club on campus.

“I’m only half Filipino, but being involved with the Filipino club at UConn has helped me connect with that side of myself,” Wright said. “Seeing Eala compete at that level made me proud.”

Wright said his family now watches her together when they can, especially during big tournaments. “It’s something that gives us another reason to connect with our Filipino side,” he said.

Eala faces Joanna Garland of Chinese Taipei in the Asian Games quarterfinals on Wednesday. The winner of the women’s singles event will earn a spot at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, provided she stays in the top 500 through June 2028.

Chan said she would go see Eala play again. “I hope she keeps improving and gets more experience playing against the best players,” she said. “I’d love to see her make another deep run at the U.S. Open and represent the Philippines at the Asian Games.”

NEW YORK– NY 

On September 23rd, leaders in the humanitarian sector convened at the annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York City for a panel discussion on conflict and disaster recovery as international funding diminishes. The session, called “Rewriting the Humanitarian Playbook,” featured International Rescue Committee executive director David Milliband, actress and humanitarian Carey Mulligan, and CEO of The LEGO Foundation Sidsel Marie Kristensen, among other speakers.

“Humanitarian needs are outpacing resources,” said Barham Salih, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in his opening address. “We are speaking today at a time when there is an unprecedented record of forcibly displaced people around the world. Nearly 25 million refugees have been displaced for 5 years or more and around 14 and a half million remain dependent on humanitarian assistance for basic needs.”

As the refugee crisis grows, donor governments are retreating. In July of 2025, President Trump officially dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), exacerbating humanitarian crises worldwide. Just a few months before, the UK government announced a reduction in their foreign aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of the gross national income, the lowest level in decades.

Philanthropists are stepping up where they can. Several foundation leaders announced new commitments to action at the Clinton Global Initiative on Wednesday. 

Dr. Nahla Gadalla, CEO of the Sudanese American Medical Association, spoke about establishing a permanent humanitarian relief center in eastern Chad, which will provide essential services to over 1 million Sudanese refugees who fled the ongoing civil war. Laura Miller, CEO of the War Child Alliance, revealed a $100 million grant going toward mental health and wellbeing for 10 million children affected by conflict, to be distributed over the next decade. Direct Relief CEO Amy Weaver is launching a $40 million campaign to allocate towards maternal health in conflict and disaster zones.

Initiatives that focus on long-term recovery and delivering resources beyond food, water, and shelter, are a newer development in the humanitarian sector, where “emergency” is narrowly-defined, explained Carolyn Makinson, former executive director of the International Rescue Committee UK and the Women’s Refugee Commission. In an interview, she described early challenges she faced fundraising for maternal health. “In most places, they didn’t even have help for women with childbirth,” she said. “There was a kind of mindset in the humanitarian community that this was inappropriate for emergencies.”

At the conference, Salih encouraged the UNHCR’s partners to take the long view on recovery. “I do believe strongly that we really need to move beyond the concept of managing displacement year on end. We need to have a pathway to giving people the agency they deserve.”

But with budgetary restraints, long-term recovery might have to take the backseat. The rollback of foreign aid has problematized meeting even basic needs for survivors of war and disaster.    

“This is painful. Lives are being lost. Lives will be lost because donors don’t want to put in sufficient funding to provide basic life-saving and life-sustaining aid to people,” said Princeton lecturer Doug Mercado, who has decades of experience directing emergency operations and post-conflict recovery.

He emphasized the importance of reestablishing a disaster response agency. “I’m not talking about USAID with all of this development programming, peace-building, economic development. I’m talking about an agency that’s solely dedicated to emergency response overseas.” 

During this week’s readings, I kept noticing how much someone’s life was dependent on the label they are assigned. Whether you’re a “vulnerable Afghan,” a deportee with a criminal record, or a Dublin case that belongs to Sweden decides almost everything that happens to you next, and it seemed like those labels were often settled before anyone took a close look at the actual person.

The Reuters numbers made this pretty concrete. Approval rates for Afghan asylum claims dropped from 74 percent in 2024 to 52 percent in early 2025, even though the government says it has no policy of cutting Afghan numbers. Lawyers told Reuters there’s an assumption that Sunni men aren’t really at risk under the Taliban, and a Berlin legal adviser said the outcome was “simply about luck.” That’s a hard thing to hear about a system that is supposed to assess each case individually. Meanwhile Kimia, the artist waiting in Islamabad, had her embassy interview cancelled with no explanation of when it might come back. She said her whole life comes down to that interview, and I believe her.

The Times piece on church asylum in Steglitz surprised me, mostly because of Pastor Martens. I went in expecting a progressive activist, and instead he’s someone with fairly conservative views on migration who has pushed back on the AfD trying to claim his work. Amir’s story also shows how the categories stack on top of each other. He lived in Sweden for ten years and worked as a nurse, then got swept up in a Swedish policy aimed at young Afghan men, and under EU rules Germany could send him right back there. What also stood out to me was how small the numbers are. There were fewer than 3,000 church asylum cases last year against roughly 250,000 applications, and yet it turned into a public fight between the mayors of Hamburg and Berlin. Since we’re going to Berlin, I’d be curious to see how people in that neighborhood actually feel about the church and what it’s doing.

Azmat Khan’s investigation felt like the odd one out at first, but I think it ties the rest together. So many of the deaths she documents came from the military seeing what it expected to see, like a family’s car read as a car bomb or a cotton gin read as an explosives factory. The Band-e-Timor section hit hardest for me, where young men who ran from raids to avoid being held for ransom were killed from the air as suspected Taliban. It made me think about how Germany’s resettlement program only existed because of the West’s twenty years in Afghanistan. I don’t see how that obligation just ends because the politics at home shifted.

Reading these side by side, I also noticed how differently the outlets handled the same policy. The Euronews piece mostly passed along what the Interior Ministry said and gave critics a sentence or two towards the end of the article, whereas Reuters and Politico built their stories around people on the ground like Kimia and Shakerah Baresh. Khan’s story came entirely from checking what the official government—in the case the Pentagon—records say.

Throughout these readings, I noticed that help for Afghans more often came from journalists, courts, and organizations than from the governments that had made commitments to them.

Alissa Rubin describes The New York Times scrambling in August 2021 to protect both former and current Afghan staff, since the Taliban would not care that someone had left the paper years earlier. Abdul Wahid Wafa, whose family got out through a joint effort by the Times and the Mexican government, calls the U.S. withdrawal “hasty” and “irresponsible.” He says Afghan journalists “were helped, finally, by these individuals, companies, and the civilian side. Not the American government.”

Germany’s admission program fared little better. Reuters reports that fewer than 1,600 Afghans arrived through it in two years, and it was suspended in 2025 after Friedrich Merz took office, leaving about 2,400 approved Afghans waiting in Pakistan. Kimia, a 25-year-old artist in Islamabad, told Reuters, “It’s like you just breathe, but you don’t live.”

Politico explains the reasons behind the German suspension, including pressure from the AfD and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment spurred by widely publicized attacks blamed partly on Afghan migrants. I was struck by the mixed messaging – Germany’s foreign minister promising to keep “legally binding admission commitments” while a spokesperson from the interior ministry said they were trying to “terminate voluntary admission programs to the degree possible.”

The U.S. had a much more robust evacuation and admissions program, enacted through Operations Allies Refuge, Allies Welcome, and Enduring Welcome, through which over 70,000 Afghans were initially evacuated from Kabul and nearly 200,000 in total were resettled in the U.S., compared to 36,400 in Germany.

But as I witnessed first-hand working in military-run refugee camps during Operation Allies Welcome, there was a major gap between official process and reality – and particularly after reading Azmat Khan’s series, I question how much credit should be given for a messy solution to a crisis the U.S. had a major hand in creating.

Regardless, the U.S. has now sharply restricted Afghan migration, suspending refugee admissions and barring Afghan nationals from entry. In contrast, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled earlier this year that admission pledges cannot be revoked en masse.

For me, these readings highlight the importance of watchdogs and third-party oversight. A government commitment, whether a casualty review process or an admission pledge, means little without journalists, advocates, and courts to hold officials accountable. Meanwhile, people like Kimia remain stuck in dangerous situations with their lives on hold.

Written by Leila Leibert

Reading this week’s passages provided a glimpse into how institutions determine what is considered a threat as well as how little accountability and questioning follows once those decisions are made. What struck me most was Azmat Khan’s investigation into U.S. airstrikes, built on more than 1,300 of the Pentagon’s confidential civilian casualty assessments and visits to more than 100 casualty sites. Particularly, how the records repeatedly point to a pattern of confirmation bias. The incriminating lens in which seemingly normal activity, such as ordinary family routines, distorted real enemy activity from the innocent daily realities of civilians stood out most. People streaming toward a fresh bombing site were assumed to be ISIS fighters rather than rescuers, and in Ramadi, an “unknown heavy object” dragged into a building was discovered to have been an innocent child. The military’s own investigation estimated 7 to 24 civilian deaths, while Khan’s reporting found that more than 120 villagers were killed. Yet not a single record included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action, and the families left affected were left largely unnoticed. I found his reporting revealed what happens when corrections are never made, the current methodologies of these investigations, and the stakes are human lives. 

The Reuters podcast “Drone Wars” left me wondering how political leaders could hold machines accountable as warfare becomes more autonomous. Khan’s reporting suggests the problem began much earlier, and in many cases, the command that approved a strike was also responsible for examining it. The Times, by contrast, did what military officials admitted they had not done: analyzed the assessments in aggregate to uncover patterns of failure. As we turn toward an AI-driven future, the harder question is how targeting systems built on assessments like these will be diligenced for bias, and whether their errors will ever be corrected or simply just iterated upon. 

This “due diligence” carried into this week’s reporting on Germany. Euronews reported the deportation of 81 Afghan men on a flight coordinated with Qatar, with the Interior Ministry stating that all of them had criminal records and were legally required to leave. Each was given up to €1,000, a legal loophole, since German courts can block removals if returnees face destitution, a detail that says a great deal about the conditions awaiting them. Likewise, Politico described Afghans who had been promised resettlement left in limbo in Pakistan as German migration policy continues to harden. In both cases, decisions about who is safe enough to welcome and who should be removed leave little room for the voices of those affected to be heard.

Across these readings, the Times piece on church asylum offered a different picture providing readers a look into ways communities have fought to protect these groups. As the state moved to deport refugees, communities of faith opened their doors and sheltered them. It left me wondering what happens when the only accountability left comes not from governments, but from journalists like Khan and congregations willing to take people in and provide a voice to their stories.