Author: Valerio Castellini (Page 2 of 2)

Through delays, expirations, and “voluntary” departures, the United States is redefining the limits of humanitarian protection for Ukrainians, leaving thousands in limbo between legality and expulsion.

In 2022, the United States opened a dedicated humanitarian parole pathway—Uniting for Ukraine (U4U)—allowing Ukrainians to enter quickly if a vetted U.S. sponsor agreed to support them. The program paired expedited entry with access to work permits and, in many states, driver’s licenses and social services, signalling an intended, if provisional, welcome. By September 2024, more than 221,000 Ukrainians had arrived through the program, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. 

Three years on, the policy environment looks very different. The Trump administration, after taking office in January 2025, suspended new U4U admissions and paused renewals for many existing parolees, introducing bureaucratic barriers that have made basic life functions—employment, transportation, and access to services—progressively harder.

Even where formal status is not yet revoked, the loss or delay of work and driver’s license renewals creates an incentive to leave. The result is a covert attempt to push refugees, who are technically allowed to stay but cannot survive without income or mobility, to self-deport.

“By international law, once someone reaches your border, you have to offer them protection until you adjudicate their case,” explained sociologist Filiz Garip, who studies migration and deterrence. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine has settled into a grinding stalemate. After early advances and later counteroffensives, Ukrainian forces now face mounting fatigue, while Russia consolidates its hold over occupied regions. Displaced Ukrainians abroad are therefore caught between a homeland they cannot safely return to and a host country whose legal hospitality is evaporating.

Garip sees in this case a mirror of global patterns. “What’s happening to Ukrainians all around the world is reflecting a more general trend on asylum protections,” she said. “Countries are trying to prevent migrants from reaching their borders and from being even considered for asylum.” She pointed to how governments increasingly outsource or bureaucratize deterrence, constructing “workarounds to deny people’s rights” through visa rules and administrative bottlenecks rather than overt deportations.

In the summer of 2025, that tension peaked. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) email, later deemed a clerical mistake, erroneously instructed some U4U parolees to depart within seven days. Officials walked it back, confirming that U4U was not terminated at this time, but the episode triggered panic across communities already facing work authorization lapses. 

The government’s concurrent rollout of “Project Homecoming,” which offers a $1,000 stipend and travel assistance to those who voluntarily confirm departure through the CBP Home app, only deepened suspicion that the policy goal was quiet repatriation rather than protection. Officials insist participation is voluntary, but for those unable to work or access housing, it can feel less like an offer than an ultimatum.

“A lot of these people are under temporary protection status,” Garip noted. “By definition, those statuses can be revoked. As soon as that program expires, you lose those rights.” That fragility, she added, means permission to remain depends entirely on conditions set—and removed—by administrative decree.

What makes Ukrainians a particularly revealing case, Garip continued, is how cultural proximity shaped their initial welcome. “In the Ukrainian case, cultural proximity played a huge role—you can actually tell this from the way politicians talked about it,” she said. But when enforcement logic takes over, sympathy becomes a short-term asset, not a policy foundation.

The shift is also perceptual. According to Oksana Nesterenko, a Ukrainian legal scholar and visiting research fellow at Princeton, Ukrainian media have tracked these changes in distinct phases. “The first stories appeared when the Uniting for Ukraine program was paused—that created a burst of news and a lot of uncertainty about what it meant for people already in the U.S.,” she explained. “Later, attention shifted to delays with renewing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and, more recently, to the growing concern over the loss of work authorization.” 

Nesterenko noted that coverage differed by geography. “Outlets in Ukraine mostly reported the facts in a neutral way, sometimes noting that people might return home or move to Europe,” she explained. “Meanwhile, Ukrainian media in the U.S. wrote about the issue with more empathy, focusing on how the loss of work authorisation affected people’s daily lives and stability.”

When asked whether Ukrainians in the media compared the U.S. system to the EU’s Temporary Protection framework, Nesterenko said such parallels rarely appear explicitly. “In Ukrainian media, especially those based in Ukraine, the focus has been more on how European countries—particularly Poland and Germany—are now encouraging Ukrainians to return home voluntarily,” she said. “So the discussion is less about comparing U.S. and EU policies, and more about Ukraine’s own challenge of creating conditions for people’s return.”

Still, many Ukrainians abroad understand the precariousness of their situation. Those who filed TPS renewals on time generally keep their work authorisation while cases are processed, but others—especially those outside U4U or TPS—face severe uncertainty. “For them, it’s not only about losing the right to work but about their overall legal status in the U.S.” Nesterenko said. “Many who lose their work authorization tend to leave and move to Europe, because they don’t want to face legal problems and need to be able to work to pay for housing, access healthcare, and send their children to school.”

As such departures multiply, the line between voluntary and coerced becomes blurred. The system no longer orders people to leave, instead eroding the conditions that make staying possible. For those without savings, Nesterenko said, “they are the first to leave, while others with some financial cushion try to adjust their status—though the options for doing so are quite limited.” The policy’s quiet efficiency lies in transforming endurance into choice, until leaving feels like the only rational act left.

This strategy marks a new frontier in migration governance, fine-tuning attrition instead of enforcing mass expulsion. It preserves the façade of legality—no roundups, no deportation flights—but achieves similar outcomes through slow suffocation. By making lawful life impossible, the government avoids the optics of deportation while shrinking protected populations.

Ultimately, the moral and legal challenge lies in accountability. If a state engineers departure without issuing removals, who bears responsibility for the outcome? The U.S. approach toward Ukrainians has lost its humanitarian inspiration, revealing an administrative future of asylum governed less by borders than by expiration dates.

Watching Nuremberg left me thinking less about the film itself and more about what it means to stage justice. It’s one thing to know that the trials happened, and another to see how fragile and procedural the search for accountability can feel. The movie turns something as monumental as the prosecution of the Nazi leadership into something unnervingly ordinary. So much of it is just people talking, interpreting, taking notes. That ordinariness is what struck me most.

What surprised me was how uncertain everything feels. You expect moral clarity from a film about Nuremberg, but instead you get hesitation and moments when law itself seems to wobble under the weight of what it’s asked to contain. The movie isn’t about heroes or villains so much as about people trying to invent a language for crimes that didn’t yet have names. 

I also kept thinking about spectatorship and what it means to watch horror mediated through rules, translation, or evidence. The film doesn’t really rely on shock. It shows how bureaucracy becomes the medium through which the world processes atrocity. And that’s what makes it unsettling: it feels familiar. We still live in that same world that trusts documentation and procedure to stand in for understanding. There’s something both comforting and disturbing in that faith.

Even with its flaws—the occasional sentimentality or simplified moral tone—the movie reminded me that history is always filtered through performance. The trial was both a legal event and a global broadcast, and that duality feels relevant today. It’s also something that affects journalistic work: how to represent suffering without turning it into a sensational spectacle, but still making it appealing to your readership. Storytelling, even in different fields, seems to always walk along the same line.

More than anything, Nuremberg made me aware of the distance between knowing and feeling. Facts were never the problem; everyone knew what had happened. The challenge was how to live with that knowledge, how to turn evidence into meaning. That, I think, is what the film captures best through the uneasy awareness that justice is a process, not a conclusion.

Idea 1: Roma displaced from Ukraine

The war in Ukraine displaced millions, but not all Ukrainians have been received equally. Roma families fleeing the conflict often face a double burden: the trauma of war and the persistence of deep-seated prejudice. A report from the Migration Policy Institute notes that Roma have struggled at border crossings and in host countries, with officials questioning their legitimacy as refugees. The European Roma Rights Centre documented cases of Roma being segregated in shelters, excluded from aid, or denied access to medical care. This pattern fits into a longer history of anti-Roma discrimination across Europe, but it feels especially stark against the backdrop of Europe’s widely praised openness to Ukrainians.

In Germany, Ukrainian refugees are often portrayed as “model” newcomers—European, Christian, culturally proximate. Even if lately the narrative has started to shift due to growing discontent. But in general, Roma refugees, by contrast, remain at the edges of this narrative. Reports suggest that Roma in Germany encounter suspicion in housing offices, barriers in schools, and a lack of targeted support. The Roma advocacy site Rroma.org highlights how German authorities sometimes treat Roma Ukrainians as economic migrants rather than as legitimate war refugees. I’d like to explore how these disparities play out on the ground, impacting housing, education, but also the marginalisation from the rest of the Ukrainian community. Many are undocumented, making asylum processes practically impossible. Yet, many family men are at the front, fighting in the ranks of the Ukrainian army. Berlin is known to be acceptive of a wide range of communities, but centuries of stigma make the Roma a different, unique case, and to this day Europe’s most marginalised minority.

Idea 2: LGBT Chechen Refugees in Berlin

For years, Chechnya has been notorious for its persecution of LGBT people. Beginning in 2017, reports of “anti-gay purges” described men being detained, tortured, and even disappeared. Some survivors have reached Europe, often through networks of activists and NGOs. In 2021, The Guardian reported on a German NGO filing a legal case against Chechen officials for orchestrating these purges, and the Associated Press has noted that Germany granted humanitarian visas to some gay Chechens as early as 2017. Berlin, with its reputation as a queer capital, has become one of the main destinations.

But exile does not erase fear. Many LGBT Chechens in Berlin remain in hiding, afraid of being targeted not only by distant Chechen authorities but also by members of their own diaspora communities. A 2019 piece in The Atlantic described the reach of Ramzan Kadyrov’s regime, which extends into exile through surveillance and intimidation. In Berlin, queer Chechens often keep their identities secret, sometimes even from other refugees, to avoid harassment or worse. NGOs such as Quarteera e.V. and Schwulenberatung Berlin provide support and safe spaces, but the need far exceeds the available resources.

My idea, whose feasibility I need to assess in the coming days, is to understand what it means to escape persecution from your home region, just to essentially be in the same situation as before. The police in Berlin will not kidnap you from your home for being gay, but extremists in the Chechen diaspora are just as hostile as at home. In Chechnya, it is normal for families to kill their own son if found to be gay, and family networks and allegiances are strikingly extensive. Those who have managed, through accidental and highly dangerous paths, to reach Germany, still find themselves in a space where safety is never absolute.

One detail from the Human Rights Watch investigation into the Kramatorsk train station bombing was particularly striking: Alina Kovalenko realising her mother had been killed not through an official phone call, but because she saw her photo circulating online. That moment shows a new reality of war today that I believe we are still not used to entirely. Evidence and trauma surface on social media before institutions can confirm what has happened. The timelines have changed, and so did the consequences.

Across the readings, the recurring theme is how open-source methods are reshaping both journalism and accountability. The Listening Post described Syria as the “world’s first YouTube conflict,” where researchers sifted through millions of videos to geolocate chemical attacks or reconstruct bombings. The Syrian Archive, for instance, catalogued more than 2 million videos and used tools like Google Earth to confirm the location of chlorine barrel bomb strikes. Forensic Architecture went further, building 3D models of prisons based only on survivors’ memories and acoustics. This is particularly relevant in my opinion, allowing human testimony and digital tools to be combined when cameras aren’t permitted inside. It also reminded me of some similar works I read this summer while reporting from Greece, where the inhumane conditions that European governments kept migrants in inside refugee camps were exposed, something one would not automatically expect from “progressive” countries. 

The Ukraine case studies show this process at scale. HRW and SITU Research examined 200 videos and satellite imagery from Kramatorsk to demonstrate that a Tochka-U missile carrying cluster munitions came from Russian-controlled territory. Meanwhile, Ukrainian OSINT groups like DeepStateUA monitor Telegram channels around the clock, creating interactive maps that the Ministry of Defence itself uses to track troop movements. In general, the line between professional intelligence work and citizen research has blurred.

But open-source work doesn’t simply exist in a vacuum, as it has to fit in the larger media environment. The FT essay on “tech lords and populists” points out how digital platforms tilt the balance of power, empowering both grassroots investigators and authoritarian leaders who flood the same channels with disinformation. The Bellingcat documentary makes the same point in practice: Eliot Higgins and his colleagues pieced together who shot down MH17 using only online traces, but the evidence still faced skepticism, especially among audiences primed to distrust anything contradicting Moscow’s narrative. Proof alone doesn’t settle debate when publics are fragmented.

What stands out to me is less the technology than the discipline. Open-source work is not about being first, but about being able to demonstrate a pattern that holds up under scrutiny. In that sense, open-source journalism feels like a response to two crises at once: the crisis of press freedom, where traditional reporters are barred from the field, and the crisis of trust, where governments and media outlets are no longer assumed credible by default. The tools matter, but what matters more is the persistence behind them. Even in a saturated information space, the innovation of the craft still makes it possible to establish facts. The harder question is whether people, and policymakers, are willing to act on them.

Questions for AfD

1. Migrants make up a large share of Berlin’s service and care workforce. How would AfD address labor shortages if the party also seeks to significantly reduce immigration?
2. Since the beginning, AfD has presented itself as “the people against elites.” But as AfD has now gained significant influence and institutional power, do you see AfD undergoing a transformation? What does that mean for your identity as a party?
3. What does successful integration look like to you and what factors do you think determine it? Can you share examples where you think it has worked well in Berlin?

September 22, 2025

BERLIN – Two German Eurofighter jets intercepted a Russian surveillance plane flying through international airspace over the Baltic Sea on Sunday, NATO officials said, in the latest of a series of tense encounters with Moscow’s air force. 

On Sunday morning, the German air force stationed at Rostock–Laage airport in Northern Germany received NATO orders to investigate a Russian aircraft “without a flight plan or radio contact”. A pair of Eurofighters from the NATO Quick Reaction Alert Force was scrambled from the base to identify the aircraft flying close to NATO airspace. After identifying it as a Russian IL-20m surveillance aircraft, the two Eurofighters handed over the escort to two JAS-39 Gripens from the Swedish airforce, which completed the operation. The action followed NATO’s standard procedure for incursions: intercept, identify, escort, hand off.

“It’s definitely not accidental. These systems operate under quite good control, so it’s not accidental,” said Jacob Shapiro, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. 

The incident occurred during days of heightened tension due to encounters between Russian and NATO air forces. On Friday, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets entered Estonian airspace for 12 minutes near Vaindloo Island. Similarly to the IL-20m, the aircraft had no flight plan and were unresponsive to radio communications. Under NATO’s Baltic Air Policing, with Allies rotating through regional airbases, Italian F-35s took off from Ämari, Estonia, to intercept and escort the Russian jets out of the Alliance’s airspace. The incursion sparked outrage across the Allies: Estonian PM Kristen Michal requested Article 4 consultations under the North Atlantic Treaty, which members can invoke when they believe that their territorial integrity or security has been compromised. The consultations, scheduled for this Tuesday, will address the recently growing number of Russian airspace violations.

The Russian Ministry of Defence is yet to comment on Sunday’s occurrence. However, the Ministry has denied accusations related to Friday’s incursion, declaring on Telegram that the “the flight was conducted in strict compliance with international airspace regulations and did not violate the borders of other states.”

Julian Hayda of the Ukrainian advocacy group Razom said the incursions test more than air defenses. “Russia is probing Europe’s resolve,” he said. “The danger is that governments hold back weapons for Ukraine in order to keep them at home. Why give up scarce air defences if Russian planes are showing up in your own skies?”

Hayda added that the incidents reinforce a lesson Ukrainians have already drawn. “We cannot count on others for our survival,” he said. “But Europe and the United States also need Ukraine to learn how to fight wars of scale, because future conflicts will look like Russia’s — wars of attrition.”

Professor Shapiro identified two major plausible causes for Russia’s violations: intimidation over NATO’s support for Ukraine, or intelligence gathering. “Poking NATO air defences, you’re creating the need for them to talk, communicate, coordinate, all of which create opportunities to collect on their tactics, to identify potential nodes that could be attacked in case of conflict,” he explained.

The Baltic region sits at the frontline between NATO and Russia, making its skies uniquely tense and vulnerable. Narrow corridors of international airspace thread between the Baltic states and Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, leaving little margin for errors when military aircraft fly without flight plans. NATO has strict protocols on how to approach such incidents, but the past few weeks have registered a pattern of increasing incursions that is worrying the Allies. In September, Russian drones have already violated the airspace of both Romania and Poland, causing the latter to also invoke Article 4 consultations.

German and Swedish officials framed Sunday’s interception as routine, part of NATO’s standing quick-reaction system, but emphasised the seriousness of repeated Russian flights without flight plans or radio contact. In Tallinn, pressure is growing: Estonia is calling for a stronger deterrence tactic from NATO. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna highlighted that this Friday marked the fourth violation of their national airspace in 2025, but defined this one as “unprecedentedly brazen.” 

Moscow, by contrast, insists the West is exaggerating and stands firmly by the claim that its aircraft operate lawfully over international waters. The clash of narratives will feed into NATO Council discussions in the coming days, with Baltic governments lobbying hard for a firmer collective stance. 

Professor Shapiro emphasised that there is still not enough information to evaluate the Allies’ response. “It’s impossible to know whether the response has been appropriate or not without having access to some of the underlying intelligence on Russia’s decision making and their command and control processes,” he said.

The flare-up over the Baltic brings the Ukrainian war back to international attention, reminding Europeans that the conflict reverberates far beyond the front lines. Each interception signals a larger struggle of NATO’s credibility on its Eastern flank. Strategically, NATO has to maintain vigilance and reassure frontline Allies, while avoiding miscalculations that could spiral into direct confrontation.

What struck me in the first chapters of The Beekeeper was how small details carry the weight of entire lives. When Mikhail pauses over the letter N, it is the symbol ISIS painted on Christian homes, a single red mark that forced families out after fifteen hundred years. She doesn’t tell her students this, but as a reader, the contrast hits hard: something as innocent as a letter suddenly becomes a marker of death and exile. That tension between the ordinary and the horrific runs throughout Nadia’s story, where picking tomatoes for her thirsty children leads straight into capture by ISIS.

What stayed with me most was Nadia’s survival after being sold, raped, and forced to make rockets with her children. The details of Nadia’s story are unbearable (a five-year-old daughter tasked with tying detonation lines!) but they also reveal how war seeps into every corner of life. Even escape was fragile, depending on the kindness of a shopkeeper who let her use the phone and a smuggler who knew the right back roads. Reading this, I kept thinking about how survival isn’t an ending. Nadia herself admits she still wakes up at night from nightmares. Survival is ongoing, messy, and never fully secure.

This sense of uncertainty echoed in the article about Syrians in Germany. Anas Modamani, who once symbolized Merkel’s “We will manage it,” now has a German passport, but politicians still talk about sending people like him back the moment Assad falls. In his words, “Berlin has become my second home, I will definitely stay here.” Just like Nadia, he wants stability, not the constant threat that safety can be taken away. Even those who have “made it” still live with the possibility that the ground will shift beneath them.

The New Yorker piece on Khaled al-Halabi was also interesting in relation to this. His story is messy: a Syrian intelligence officer who both carried out regime orders and sometimes tried to soften them. He survived by maneuvering between sides, and his escape was brokered through back channels and political deals. Reading about him alongside Nadia and Modamani complicates the picture: it’s not just victims and villains. War creates these murky spaces where survival means compromise, and no one comes out clean.

Together, these readings made me think about exile less as a fixed condition and more as something unstable and shifting. For Nadia, it meant an unlocked door that could either imprison or free her. For Modamani, it’s a passport that doesn’t fully guarantee belonging. For Halabi, it was a uniform that first made him powerful and later made him hunted. What ties them all is that survival doesn’t end with escape, but evolves into a lifelong negotiation with memory, fear, and the constant question of where one truly belongs.

For the Afghans waiting in limbo or the families mourning airstrike victims, words like “humanitarian protection” and “precision” must sound bitterly ironic. Western governments present themselves as careful guardians of safety and rights, but the readings show how fragile those claims become once tested by political shifts or flawed intelligence. What remains is a collapse of trust in the very institutions that claimed to offer protection in the first place.

In the German case, the breakdown of trust is immediate and personal. Reuters shows how Afghans like Kimia, who risked their lives as women’s rights activists, entered a program that promised resettlement, only to be abandoned when the new government suspended it. Politico notes that women, LGBTQ+ people, and educators deemed “particularly vulnerable” were stranded after Merz’s government froze flights. Euronews emphasises the punitive framing of deportations (all 81 deportees had criminal records) but that framing blurs into a wider deterrent logic. Trust is eroded at two levels: Afghans who believed German commitments discovered those promises were politically reversible, and German society is told that humanitarian admissions are incompatible with “integration capacity.” What began as a moral obligation is reframed as a discretionary favor, withdrawn when electorally inconvenient.

The American case similarly exposes how the military’s narrative of precision collapses under scrutiny. The Pentagon records analysed by the New York Times document case after case where flawed intelligence produced lethal civilian casualties. “Men on motorcycles” mistaken for fighters, a “heavy object” actually being a child. The Mosul strike that killed the Zeidan family shows how assessments of “no civilian presence” were treated as fact despite contradictory evidence. Here too, trust was central: U.S. leaders sold drone warfare as “the most precise air campaign in history.” But the investigation shows that precision rhetoric masked systemic failures and allowed officials to sidestep accountability. The very technology that was supposed to guarantee moral warfare became a tool for sustaining illusions.

The broader question that kept coming up during these readings is: what happens when states systematically break the trust of those who depended on them most? The Afghans waiting in Islamabad, the families killed in Mosul. Both are emblematic examples that represent people who had no power over the policies that determined their fate. Their safety depended on the reliability of German promises and American intelligence. Instead, they became expendable to political calculus or military convenience.

This erosion of trust has long-term consequences that are not widely understood, yet. It undermines the credibility of Western claims to moral leadership. When Germany tells activists to “just wait” while shutting the program down, or when the U.S. dismisses civilian deaths as inevitable mistakes, both are implicitly saying that Afghan lives are conditional, valued only when politically or strategically advantageous. The deeper question raised by these readings, then, is whether humanitarian and military commitments are ever more than provisional tools of statecraft. If protection can be suspended at will, and accountability indefinitely deferred, is trust in such commitments anything more than a fiction?

Reading through the articles and listening to the reports, what struck me most was how Europe keeps failing the very test it set for itself: the idea of unity in times of crisis. Migration has become the clearest mirror of that failure. On paper, refugees are different from economic migrants. By international law, you can close the door on someone seeking work, but you cannot do the same for someone fleeing war or persecution. There is a moral and legal obligation to protect them. And yet, when push comes to shove, states still reach for their own interests before thinking about the collective good.

Germany is the perfect example. I kept coming back to how, in 2015, Merkel opened the borders to Syrians. It was framed as an act of moral leadership, and for a while it seemed like Germany had both the resources and the political courage to carry that weight. But today, the tone has shifted dramatically. Deborah Cole’s report on how attacks on refugees and shelters more than doubled in 2024 compared to the previous year was the concretisation of how the rise in violence has been fueled by the same rhetoric we’ve seen before: asylum seekers as a threat, a drain, an alien presence. The far-right AfD feeds on that, turning fear into electoral gains, and in the process drags mainstream politics toward harsher measures. Even Scholz’s progressive ex-government, as described by the Migration Policy Institute, had reinstated border controls with nine neighbors. Legal under Schengen, but devastating to the ideal of open borders.

The Ukrainian case has only added to the strain. As reported in the Kyiv Independent, Germany has taken in over one million Ukrainians since 2022, spending more than €20 billion on their accommodation and integration, and even opening “Unity Hubs” in Berlin to provide jobs and education. At first this showed that the Union can, when pressed, mobilise impressive resources and coordination. But it also revived old tensions, as governments questioned how long such commitments can last, and whether similar efforts should—or could—be extended to other groups. Each new wave becomes a trigger for the same unresolved debate.

That’s why democracies are so vulnerable here. Populist parties thrive on moments of crisis, promising to halt the “invasion” or defend “our culture,” without ever offering workable solutions. Catastrophic talk of ethnic substitution or cultural war resonates far more than the dry details of integration policy. Mainstream governments, fearing electoral loss, bend to that pressure. And so the cycle repeats: more restrictions, more resentment, more fear.

In the end, all these crises prove that Europe is only as united as it is comfortable. The Dublin system entrenched inequality between border and interior states, and no one has been willing to fix it. Merkel’s gamble in 2015 was an exception, but the backlash has made Germany itself more cautious. Every new wave reopens the same wound. Unless governments are finally willing to put the Union’s collective good ahead of national calculations, no real solution is possible. Crises will keep exposing the cracks, and “unity” will remain more slogan than reality.

This week’s readings trace the steps the Trump Administration has taken to tighten its grip on the press. Many of them reported resistance attempts from more enduring outlets and political veterans. However, to me, what was most striking was what was not reported: the public’s reaction. Or rather, the lack of one.

As Rebecca Hamilton points out, “in a democracy, the public serves as the ultimate check on State power.” Yet, today, that check seems absent. No large-scale demonstrations, no widespread outrage on social media. The Trump administration’s efforts to control information are not shocking in themselves. Silencing unfavourable coverage is a perennial temptation for those in power. The striking fact is that the administration can get away with it. The issue is not only their will, but the collective silence of the most.

Hamilton warns that censorship need not take the form of government bans. Instead, she calls attention to the emergence of what she calls “self-censorship.” The examples are telling: the WP suppressing a critical cartoon, the LA Times altering a submission about a controversial appointee. Such choices arise less from explicit White House orders than from a climate of anticipated punishment. Flimsy lawsuits against CBS, ABC, and Meta serve as warnings. As Hamilton notes: “Risk crossing Trump at your peril.”

What makes this dynamic more troubling is how official actions reframe the very role of journalism. The May 2025 executive order ending federal support for NPR and PBS insisted that “no media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies” and characterized these institutions as “biased.” The order does not outlaw reporting. Instead, it shifts the logic: independence becomes partisanship, survival tied to profitability or government-approved neutrality. The press is recast as a market commodity.

And yet—where is the public? Under ordinary circumstances, such executive overreach might spark protests, letters, campaigns. Instead, the broader population seems disengaged. Gibbs offers a sobering explanation: mainstream journalism is no longer the central shaper of public opinion. Most people consume information through fragmented channels—friends, family, influencers—that lack the expertise and impartiality to build a comprehensive picture. When news travels primarily through these fractured networks, attacks on press independence register as just another headline in the feed, quickly absorbed and quickly forgotten.

This fragmentation helps explain why even dramatic events, such as CBS paying millions to settle Trump’s lawsuit and canceling Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, have been absorbed by audiences as corporate maneuvering rather than democratic backsliding. The missing outrage stems not just from apathy but from an ecosystem conditioning citizens to see journalism as entertainment—consumable, and eventually discardable.

Together, these developments suggest that the crisis of press freedom is not only about state power but about public disengagement. The Trump Administration exploits legal loopholes and corporate vulnerabilities, but it succeeds most fully because the public no longer treats journalism as essential to democracy. Freedom erodes not only through censorship but through indifference, when the press becomes just another product on the shelf and citizens no longer feel compelled to defend it.