Category: Uncategorized (Page 10 of 20)

By Raphi Gold

10/16/2025

 GUMMERSBACH— I am now in Mike Bible’s “circle of care.” This man, seated next to me on a plane five days ago by fate (he’d say God), now wants to know when Miriam and I get back safe tonight. He also wants to be my pen pal. “I’ve been getting into snail mail,” he pauses his enthusiastic drilling to tell me, “Let me write to you in New York.” I find myself promising “sure!” because saying “sure” to Mike is what got me here. 

Here, in this abandoned cinema soon-to-be church in Gummersbach, Germany, the scene won’t synthesize. Everything is out of place: half-stripped walls, stray work gloves, faded mosaic tiles, a coffee machine in Ukrainian, a ticket box in disrepair. There’s no trace of Germania Lichtspieltheater online, but we can guess the year it closed by the last movie it showed: Indiana Jones 4, tickets £4.50. 

The people don’t quite match either, least of all ourselves. Pastor Nickolas Skopych was born in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was visiting a friend in Gummersbach just before the war broke out; his two-week trip has turned into a nearly four-year stay. Hundreds of his congregants followed. Gummersbach is now home to as many as 3000 Ukrainians, according to Skopych (German Census data is unavailable past 2022). His new congregation bears the same name as its counterpart in Ukraine: Almaz, meaning “diamond.” 

The Americans who have come to help convert the theatre into a church for Almaz hail from the First Baptist Church, a megachurch in Hendersonville, Tennessee. The Ukrainians all speak at least three languages and have experienced traumatic upheaval. The Americans just speak English, and some have never left the country. Last night, the Americans walked five miles just for McDonalds. German McDonalds.. Still, they’re all evangelical Baptists; their parallel stories of finding God in times of need align perfectly. 

Before we know it, they’re inviting us to lunch. We’re devouring scrumptious messy Ukrainian cream puffs, and I’m chatting with Ukrainian refugees Liza and Viktoria about American television and evangelical Valentines day traditions. I venture upstairs with five Americans including Jeremy, the mission leader who is clearly fed up with the college kids on the trip. Their work ethic leaves something to be desired. We sweep for a bit, halfheartedly, then pause to explore the attic. We tear giant sheets of rubbery wallpaper into chunks. We lower an ancient control-panel from the window, then hold some rolls of film up to the light. The boys guffaw — one of them is a porn film.

It’s time for something else. Downstairs, people load bins with wooden planks. I glimpse Miriam hoisting a massive branch. Another chat with Mike leads me to a facetime interview with his Ukrainian “daughter,” Tania, whom he sponsored via U4U. Suddenly realizing it’s 5pm, I interrupt Miriam’s conversation with trip-leader Jeremy. It turns out he has a secret he’s not quite ready for the others to find out about: he’s actually a Baptist who practices Jewish ritual and learns Torah. He wears tzizit in the Sephardi style and keeps kosher. I want to know everything. 

Alas. We board the train home, which of course gets cancelled, so we pile into an Uber with a Polish couple. I write this from what I pray is our last train of the evening. With Deutsche Bahn’s fickleness, we were lucky to make it to Gummersbach in the first place. Or was it thanks to God? Either way, I know who I’m texting when we get home safe tonight.

By: Siyeon Lee

10/15/25

BERLIN — “I feel like I’ve lived three lifetimes in one day,” my friend and colleague Alex Norbrook told me as I joined him in the dining room at half past ten. The ends of my pants were soaked and ragged, disintegrating from the rain; a gaping hole now adorned my leather bag. Indeed, I felt like I had traversed multiple different worlds within the span of 12 hours — from French patisseries, Palestinian bookstores, to the Berlin Wall, the only unified aspect of my striking day was my constantly drenched hair.

I started off the morning with my classmates Josie, Raphi, and Miriam visiting the Berlin Wall. Plastered in layers of graffiti and underwhelming in its physical stature (especially in comparison to its overwhelming historical one), we engaged in ranging conversations, from the meaning of a Princeton education to the implications of Bari Weiss’ appointment as CBS’ Editor-in-Chief. As per the recommendation of Raphi’s friend, we then headed to a French patisserie with outdoor seating and ate lunch.

After lunch, Raphi, Miriam and I then headed to Sonnenallee, the most famous Arab neighborhood in Berlin. We visited a Palestinian bookstore and an eccentric second-hand clothing store with a not-so-eccentric name (‘Second Hand’); I then departed to conduct my two interviews for the day. 

My first conversation was with Berit Ebert, a professor of EU law and the politics of gender equality in Europe. Ten floors above ground at a hotel bar, Ebert and I ordered a coffee and spent the hour speaking about her work, the intricacies of the EU’s procedures, and Israel-Palestine coverage in Germany. Afterward, I headed back to Sonnenallee for my interview with Hesham Moamadani, Syrian refugee and former investigative journalist who now works at Bard as a ‘Civics Engagement Officer.’ 

Sitting in a levantine restaurant with steaming chicken kebabs in hand, the 30-something Moamadani wore a toothy smile and a handsome face that betrayed little of his harrowing life story. For the next four hours, Moamadani recounted the experience of his escape from war-ridden Syria in 2015. He spoke about his protests against the Assad government that nearly led to his death, as well as his 8-hour-long swim from coastal Turkey to Greece. 

Speaking about his other interview experiences, he said, “I don’t like it when people reduce my life just to my experience as a refugee,” pulling a brown leather pouch from his pocket. “I’m more than just that identity, you know?” 

As Moamadani grabbed a pinchful of tobacco leaves from his unzipped pouch and expertly rolled then lit his cigarette, I idled at the edge of the restaurant entry, knowing little to say nor do. 

Rainwater had accumulated into a wide, ocean-like puddle beneath the restaurant stairs — we were trapped. “Just jump,” he said. “You got it.”

Josephine Wender

10/15/25

BERLIN — After approximately an hour and a half of wandering the streets of Neukölln looking for anyone, anywhere willing to talk to us, Alex, my dejected classmate, and I head to “The Blue House,” owned by the non-profit Give Something Back to Berlin. Amid the chilly, misty fog – as the name suggests – a bright blue building emerges from the haze. Huddled around a small white table in The Blue House sit approximately fifteen people from all over the world, pouring tea into small ceramic cups and eating cherry tomatoes and blueberries from a white plastic bowl, all gathering to practice their English skills. Today, a Japanese film crew is there to film the evening’s programs. 

Yara is from Russia, we learn. She left Russia at the beginning of the Ukraine War in order to escape the inevitability of her husband’s conscription. Her feelings about Germany are complicated, she explains. Berlin is more accepting than the smaller city of Hannover, but she still cannot find a job here. She likes German food, but her Ukrainian friends don’t. German apartments are weird, she says, because they come completely unfurnished, not even with lightbulbs in the sockets. 

Sam is from Syria. He has been attending these English language table events for eight years and recently finished his linguistics PhD program in the UK. This is more than just a way to polish language skills, he asserts to newcomers. This is a way to meet and connect with an international community open to talking about the pains and joys of their everyday lives, forming a family. “There were even twenty students from the U.S. in a journalism program who visited a few years ago,” he exclaims to the film crew. As our class trip has been active for many years, we have a pretty good idea who those students could have been. We keep that to ourselves. 

Najib is from Afghanistan. He has been in Germany for three years, prior to which he worked in the Afghan foreign ministry. He got to travel a lot in his old life, he muses with a smile. While working as a diplomat, he was able to visit Japan, India, Pakistan, China, and several countries in Africa. It is clear he misses the job. He is currently in the process of writing a book about Afghan diplomacy and how important it is for young people to learn about foreign affairs. He promises he will send it to me as soon as it is finished and translated into English. His kids aren’t with him and, despite his extensive experience and impressive resume, cannot get a job in Germany. So here he is, practicing his English and German in the hope that this can change. Still, he explains to me, there are positives and negatives to any country. 

These events are weekly, with new groups of people descending upon The Blue House every seven days. At tonight’s language table sat Yara, Sam, and Najib. Chance would say that there is no reason these three would ever interact, yet alone share chuckles at the bureaucratic inefficacy of the German refugee system and bond over their shared love of Turkish kebabs. Still, tonight, here they sat, kindly sharing their stories with us and each other and therefore inducting Alex and me into this new family.

By: Amna Cesic

10/15/25

BERLIN — Today I wandered through the Sonnenallee, a stretch of Berlin located in the Neukölln district. The street is commonly referred to as “Arab Street,” but I quickly realized that it is so much more than that. It is layered with identities. Palestinian, Syrian, Afghan, and countless other flags line the street, blanketing the city in black, green, red, and white. The people, constantly on the move, enter and exit stores with a familiarity and ease that made me feel instantly comfortable.

The air hums with languages that don’t quite blend together, yet somehow coexist. Arabic, Dari, and even Farsi text cover the signs of grocery stores, restaurants, and bakeries, which all smell faintly of pistachios and cinnamon.

Drawn by the aromas, my classmate and I quickly ducked into a small pastry shop at the center of the street. The man behind the counter smiled knowingly as I ordered two pieces of baklava covered in chocolate and pistachios. It tasted like the desserts I always eat at home, a unique connection I realized I had with people in a country I had never been to before. Around us, people chatted in German and Arabic, creating a sound that was distinctly Berlin but undeniably foreign too. I thought about how food has the power to dissolve borders, offering community among all those who share it. In that moment, I realized that something as simple as a dessert could bridge the distance between cultures more effectively than any politician ever could.

We took a break from food and stopped at Refuge Worldwide, a community radio station tucked between cafés and grocery stores. We met a woman who worked there, someone involved in amplifying refugee voices through sound. She handed us her contact information, and it felt like being handed an opportunity. Her willingness to speak with us was a reminder of how dedicated many people are to supporting and uplifting refugee communities.

Later in the afternoon, we stopped for lunch at a traditional German restaurant. I ordered veal schnitzel and fries. It was a simple dish, but somehow it felt symbolic of much more. Eating something so German after a morning immersed in a predominantly refugee neighborhood highlighted how cultures intertwine and overlap, creating spaces that are unique.

The day concluded with a phone interview with an Afghan woman now living in Chicago. Her voice was remarkably strong and determined. She spoke about the refugee process and the uncertainty she struggled with the most. “You never really stop being a refugee,” she said.

Her words lingered long after our conversation ended. I thought of the Afghans and refugees I’d seen today, gathered around each other laughing. Berlin seems like a place for new communities to form and for refugees to have a voice. The city understands what it means to rebuild, which might be why so many are drawn to its streets.

10/14/2025

Justus Wilhoit

 BERLIN –  “Ard fussball rechts”, “Babelsburg 03”, “Neonazis in stadion,” and “Berlin dynamo – BFC.” These are not just random phrases you’d hear from an everyday football fan in Germany. They’re the names of various football clubs around Berlin, and perhaps more interestingly, the names of Youtube videos recommended to me by Nabil Rayk, a server who became our cross-cultural host. He explained how neo-Nazism and far-right rhetoric have seeped into a sport so deeply loved across the country.

During our nearly four-hour dinner at Ebn Tamshah, a small, lively Palestinian restaurant named after Nabil’s great-grandmother, each student took turns sharing their ideas for our final reporting project. As we did, our special guests, journalists Joshua Yaffa and Barbara Demick, offered thoughts on how each story could take shape.

When I presented my idea about far-right rhetoric in German soccer, Yaffa and Demick shared their opinions, but so did Nabil. Between serving plates of hummus and sweet potatoes, he urged me to pay attention to the symbolism behind club colors and recalled his own childhood playing football in Berlin when he was 10 years old. It was often the parents, he said, not the players, who fueled hostility. They would tell their kids to “kick that Arab, kick that N-word,” he recalled. 

After dinner, I stayed behind to keep talking with Nabil, eager to learn more about Germany’s soccer culture. When I asked why he thought parents so often perpetuate conflict, he didn’t hesitate. “Sport is a replacement for war,” he said.

Nabil isn’t surprised that racism and xenophobia have found a foothold in soccer through the rhetoric of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “This sh** was there before,” he said. He told me he sees the party’s influence most clearly at smaller, amateur clubs, where public scrutiny is minimal. “‘We can’t kick them out of the country, it’s too complicated, but we can f*** them today,’” he said, mimicking what he’s heard shouted on the sidelines.

He also noticed how players of color are treated differently depending on their performance. “When a Black player does well, it’s like, [clapping] ‘nice’… But if he plays bad, it’s [imitating monkey noises], ‘you ape!’” he said. “They throw bananas and stuff.”

When I asked why sport so often becomes a stage for hate, Nabil claimed that people “need a reason to get drunk, … to get this inner demon out.” 

After years of being targeted for his skin color and Palestinian background, Nabil has developed what he calls an “I never get hit by racism” mindset, and hopes players at larger clubs can do the same. 

Still, he’s aware of the contradictions: those who harbor resentment toward immigrants and people of color also depend on them. “They need us, they need African players,” he said.

By Miriam Waldvogel

10/14/25

My first pro-Palestine protest in Berlin was even smaller than the puny demonstrations I’ve seen at Princeton.

I decided on a whim with Alex, Raphi, and Siyeon to forgo most of the German Historical Museum visit in favor of a protest in Urbanhafen, which we had seen advertised online. After seeing videos of huge pro-Palestine protests in Berlin over the weekend, we all assumed it would be standard fare: a big crowd of people, keffiyehs and flags, chants. But what we found was not at all expected.

It was so small we almost missed it: half a dozen people on the bank of the Landwehr Kanal standing around inflatable boats. They would have looked like everyday boaters except for their keffiyehs and a sign or two propped up against a tree. Lilith Kocharyan, one of the organizers, told us that they were going to paddle down the canal in solidarity with the various flotillas that have attempted to bring aid to Gaza in the past couple weeks.

Lilith describes herself as an “unapologetically feminist lgbtq ally environmentalist berlin-addict” in her Facebook bio. She had organized around Armenian communities in Berlin, running a tech company that helped Armenia-based startups break into the German market, ranging from UI/UX to computer vision to blockchain platforms. Lilith’s activism pivoted to Palestine after Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

Today, there were about a half dozen protesters, with four boats and signs. And, it turns out, something had already gone wrong: the person who was supposed to bring the pumps hadn’t showed.

We ambled away for a few minutes, and by the time we came back they had sprung into action, pumping up the boats and affixing their banners and signs to their watercrafts’ fronts and backs. I noticed a police boat parked on the other side of the canal, and soon after a smaller inflatable raft with three police officers drifted by. We wondered if the activists were taking a risk by boating down the canal. But Lilith assured us that, in fact, the water police in Berlin were quite friendly and willing to let them be.

As we talked with Lilith and the other protesters, I was surprised by the cultural and regulatory differences with demonstrations in the U.S. In Germany, it’s illegal to say “from the river to the sea” because it was ruled by a court that the phrase calls for the erasure of Israel. One of the protesters had previously been arrested for saying something like “from all the rivers to all the seas,” Lilith told us.

The police were surprisingly relaxed. If you tried the equivalent in the U.S., it’s likely they would immediately demand your boating license and then make it a huge problem when you didn’t comply, because all you wanted to do was float a small rubber boat down a river.

By Cora LeCates 

October 14th, 2025

BERLIN—Tonight, our class filled up the entire indoor seating area at Ebn Tamshah–a Palestinian restaurant in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood. Inside, mosaic lanterns and tapestries are layered against portraits of Che Guevara and Shireen Abu Akleh; decorative mirrors and ceramic plates framed pictures of the owners’ family. The evening was dedicated to a conversation with journalists Joshua Yaffa, Jakub Laichter, and Barbara Demick. 

Over plates of pita and pitchers of lemonade, we took turns discussing our ideas and plans for migration reporting this week in Berlin. As we were still in the first few days of the trip, shaking off jet lag and locking down our sources, some projects were in more certain states than others. Nonetheless, every piece offered a distinct lens on the story of migration in Germany, blending political and legal concerns with the more humanitarian, sociological, or religious elements of migrant communities. Some of us are interested in Palestinians or Afghans, while others are choosing to write about Ukrainians or Syrians. Still others veer into the more political realm, tracking manifestations of right-wing extremism in local football clubs, or reporting on the rising popularity of the AfD amongst German youth. 

Occasionally, overhearing our conversation, Rayk Nabil—our waiter, and the son of the chef at Ebn Tamshah—would chime in with a word on his own experiences. Nabil is well-acquainted with the political landscape for migrants in Germany at present. He studied history in school, and his social world includes a network of many migrants from different parts of the world. Hearing our interests in residents of Berlin from different backgrounds, he recommended several friends for interviews off the top of his head. The combination of the advice of Joshua and Barbara and the serendipitous input from Nabil reminded me of a phrase we’d heard earlier today in a very different context: “Coincidence and circumstance.” 

At the German Historical Museum, our afternoon tour of the “Roads Not Taken” exhibit provided a compelling—if controversial—lens for looking at German history. The exhibit’s overarching premise, our guide explained, is to outline centuries of German history with an eye on alternative outcomes. What were the key moments in German history where a single decision shaped the lives of millions? Where were its most important mistakes or accidents? And what might have happened if German leaders had chosen differently? The exhibit views the study of history as an examination of a long series of decisions—and their repercussions. In a country with a history as influential and haunted as Germany’s, the exhibit is daring. 

“Coincidence and circumstance,” our guide kept repeating this afternoon, arguing that these two elements were responsible for some of the most transformative, catalytic, or devastating moments in human history. I disagree. A national history cannot be illustrated as merely a series of forks in the road; there are too many people implicated and involved in its every event and “decision” to allow for such a reductive portrayal. Especially in the country responsible for, as our guide himself called it, “the singular insanity of human history” that was the Holocaust, the notion that entertaining alternative histories might be worthwhile can seem insensitive—or, at minimum, a fruitless attempt to imagine what might have been. 

Still, our dinner conversation today emphasized the importance of “coincidence and circumstance” on the level of the individual, and indeed for the profession of journalism. Joshua and Barbara underscored the importance of critical, uncontrollable factors in their own careers, from the timing of a story to the unpredictable or erratic behaviors of their sources. Meanwhile, the very setting of Ebn Tamshah, and Nabil’s coincidental connections to many of our stories, spoke to the huge potential value of random events and circumstances in reporting work. Journalism is challenging because it is so unpredictable—yet, this volatile quality is also what makes it exciting. 

Today’s activities reminded me to approach the remainder of our time in Berlin with coincidence and circumstance in mind—to control, as far as I can, the conditions in my reporting, and to keep an eye out for leads and stories wherever they might appear. 

By Cecile McWilliams

October 13th, 2025

FRANKFURT—Here are a few titles of recent notes entries in my phone: “Kabuli pulao,” “Nazira transcript,” “Berlin visits.” New entries have accumulated since Friday afternoon when, in the airport, my classmates and I were hit with the sudden panic of feeling unprepared. 

With over two hours to kill in gate B62, most of us pulled out our laptops. Midterms would last until midnight; people had papers to finish and lab reports to edit. For my part, I searched for places in Berlin where I might interview Afghan refugees. Another classmate and I, allied in our desperation to schedule interviews two weeks ago, pledged to stick together. We thought hanging around in Berlin’s Afghan restaurants and carpet stores would feel less intrusive together than apart.

“Women’s Café,” the note titled “Berlin Visits” reads. “A casual women-only get-together for chatting over coffee and cake.” The item was snatched from a list our professor gave us called “Where to find people to talk to.” 

I found a contact weeks ago on Instagram. I texted her a polite request to talk, signed with a star emoji. Our chat migrated to a WhatsApp thread, then a phone call, and finally a café in Frankfurt. I pasted “Nazira Transcript” into my notes after we talked on the phone. “When I was 12 years, I began sports with my sister,” I transcribed from one of our conversations.

I met Nazira and Nazima, her sister, at a cafe along the Main River in Frankfurt. Nazima’s story was just as intriguing as the one I heard from Nazira on the phone. After Nazima traveled alone for the first time, to Pakistan, she couldn’t tolerate life at home. For two months, her packed suitcase sat in her room, and each day, she fought with her parents, who insisted she stay home. Early one morning, her younger sister, Nazira, lugged her suitcase as the pair walked thirty minutes to the bus station. Months later, Nazira joined her sister in the capital city of Kabul, fleeing her hometown of Bamyan when the Taliban arrived.

Even before the Taliban’s official takeover in 2021, the jihadist group severely restricted women’s rights in Afghanistan. The Taliban targeted women who failed to comply with its strict interpretation of Islamic law. Women who went to school, learned English, or played sports were particularly at risk. Women of the persecuted Hazara minority––a group that tends to allow women more freedom––were vulnerable, too.

Nazira and Nazima checked all of these boxes. 

At 11 years old, Nazira won a 10k race. When Nazira was twelve and Nazima was fourteen, they recruited friends and classmates to start the first girls’ soccer team in their city. Nazima and a friend became the first women to summit Afghanistan’s second-highest peak. In Kabul, Nazira guarded the goal for the Afghan Women’s National Team. 

Nazima had already left the country when the Taliban reached Kabul. Since she didn’t have a passport yet, Nazira stayed behind. Soon, she managed to escape to Italy, where she lived in government-sponsored refugee housing and played for FC Milan. Meanwhile, Nazima waited in Pakistan for a German visa. 

As we spoke, Nazima and Nazira tweaked details from each others’ stories, refining time stamps, city names, and dates. They corrected each others’ English, sometimes turning to me for a final verdict. They spoke English well but German even better, they said. Our conversation was a game of triangulation, where words in German, English, and Dari stood as signposts for key moments of the past four years. I tried to decipher the meaning of words they only knew in German: “Embassy?” “Hostel?” “Swollen?”

Shortly after Nazima arrived in Germany, she was hospitalized. For months, she was plagued by spells of dizziness, migraine, and nausea, which she thought were symptoms of stress. Doctors in Frankfurt found a tumor at the bottom of her brain, jammed next to her spinal cord. They operated on her twice and clipped nerves by accident. Her family joined her in Germany, with Nazira spending nights on the ground next to her sister’s hospital bed. Once out, Nazima moved in a wheelchair and then with a walker. She says it still feels like her right arm is weighed down by stones. 

Over the five hours we talked, the sky turned from gray to blue. Each time the coffee grinder whirred, I said a tiny prayer that my voice memo app still picked up the sisters’ voices. When the conversation turned to the xenophobic attitudes of some Germans, Nazima tapped her sister and gestured to the blonde lady next to us, who turned the pages of a photo book. I asked about asylum and illness, but also boyfriends and food. “Kabuli pulao:” a dish I should’ve tried at an Afghan restaurant, had I been in Frankfurt longer.

By Valerio Castellini

October 13th, 2025

NUREMBERG—Visiting the Nazi Party Rally Grounds and Courtroom 600 back-to-back felt like transitioning through two disparate sides of the same story: the pursuit of power, and the effort to judge it. Even if incomplete, the Rally Grounds feel immense, hollow. They make you feel subdued, each individual rendered invisible, absorbed into the spectacle of unity. The courtroom, on the other hand, is sober and grave. It conveys both the weight of justice and the difficulty of defining it in the face of crimes that had only recently been codified and never been tested. 

The Nuremberg Trials offered a fragile sense of justice after unthinkable atrocities, establishing that crimes against humanity were more than wartime excesses—and deserved to be publicly judged as moral ruptures. 

For years afterwards, the subject haunted Germany. The sense of collective guilt was so strong that it simply remained unspoken. Yet, over decades, Germans turned remembrance of their darkest period into a shared civic duty, and responsibility became woven into public life. No politician in Germany over the past half century would have ever made apologies for Nazism, and there has been a common consensus around its condemnation. 

It was not the same in Italy, where I grew up. After Mussolini’s fall, there was no equivalent reckoning, no public trial to lay out and process the crimes committed by the regime, and, most importantly, to separate guilt from complicity. Fascism faded, but it was never fully denounced. Instead, it was absorbed into the grey zones of nostalgia and political convenience. Many of the same institutions, and even some of the people, survived the transition to democracy. What remained quickly became normal again. Today, the word “fascist” is treated as a partisan insult rather than a moral line. Without a moment of public condemnation, the past hovers unresolved, and its lessons become negotiable and contextual. 

Precisely because of Germany’s painful honesty, the rise of the far-right Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) feels especially unsettling. The party draws support from legitimate (if often sensationalized) fears—uncontrolled immigration, high inflation, rising energy costs—but translates them into resentment and exclusion, not viable solutions. Then-AfD leader Alexander Gauland has famously referred to Nazism as “just bird shit on the 1000 years old, successful German history.” The language trivialises the very crimes Nuremberg sought to define.

It is not surprising that the party’s strongest results come from regions of former East Germany, where cultural resentment feeds on economic stagnation and the sentiment of being left behind after  national reunification. In those areas, the long project of Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—has failed at becoming a shared national story. The moral narrative from the West side is perceived as something imposed, not chosen. That distance now gives the AfD space to claim authenticity against the “moral hypocrisy” from Berlin.

There is something unique about this revival of the past. It is not direct; instead, it erodes the moral vigilance that used to keep that past at bay. The AfD does not seek to rewrite history as much as to empty it of its consequence. The revival is not a return to nazism, but to indifference.

On Thursday, Apple removed ICEBlock — a popular crowdsourced app that tracked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent sightings — following pressure from the Trump administration. The move ignited criticism from immigration experts and follows a string of the administration’s decisions that have extended federal influence in the private realm.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App store — and Apple did so … ICEBlock is designed to put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs, and violence against law enforcement is an intolerable red line that cannot be crossed,” said DOJ Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement to Fox News.

Joshua Aaron, app developer and creator of ICEBlock, has since requested Apple to reinstate the app.

Before its removal, ICEBlock was the most popular ‘ICE tracking’ app on Apple’s App Store. The app allowed users to report and make publicly available sightings of ICE agents. Each report registered onto the app by a user would notify all other users within a five-mile radius. After 4 hours, the location of the report would be automatically deleted and made unavailable to all users.

Aaron told CNN that “[The Trump Administration has] been looking for every excuse to take the app down” and that “they want their paramilitary force [ICE] to act with impunity … and an app like ICEBlock does not allow that to happen.”

The DOJ’s move followed a shooting on Sept. 25 when 29-year-old Texas man Joshua Jahn opened fire at a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement field, allegedly targeting ICE agents. The shooting killed one detainee and wounded two others. According to a report by ABC News, FBI Director Kash Patel said that Jahn engraved his bullets with anti-ICE messages and allegedly “searched apps that tracked the presence of ICE agents.”

Aaron criticized Apple’s compliance with the Trump administration’s orders in a CNN interview. The app’s features, he says, are no different from the features on Apple’s own Apple Maps, where users can report ‘speed traps’ — police-enforced speed limits using timing devices to identify speeding drivers — for other users of the app. “Whether it’s a speed trap or an ICE agent, … you’re just [pointing out] on ICEBlock — or Apple Maps — … [where] something in public … is,” he said.

The question of government overreach — whether it be in the realm of businesses or the individual — has been a recurrent topic during the Trump presidency. In the first few months in office, Trump instructed governors to deploy members of the National Guard in Democrat hotspot cities allegedly to suppress crime and illegal civil demonstrations; the action faced strong condemnation from state leaders and community organizers who claimed that the federal government was using militaristic intimidation tactics to suppress political dissent. Immigration enforcement has targeted student protestors and foreign scholars for political speech that is protected by the first amendment. Law firms which have challenged Trump have been targets of legal and business sanctions, losing access to government contracts and federal buildings.

Joanne Gottesman, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic and Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers University Law School, explained that apps like ICEBlock have gained more political relevancy in recent years as the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — but especially on guarantees of free speech and individual liberties — have intensified. “It’s not [as much of] an immigration issue, then, but a business one. It’s troubling to see the government apply pressure on private businesses to remove these apps,” she said.

But Gottesman, who founded the immigration clinic and has provided legal services to immigrants and low-income individuals in Southern New Jersey for over 20 years, added that while the app’s removal was concerning for the realm of individual liberty and free expression, the tangible benefits these apps provided for immigrants, too, remain dubious.

“[ICE] enforcement is so widespread … the [app] probably had a marginally [beneficial] impact, but as you’ve seen, the numbers of enforcement and the [number of] people swept up in these actions is incredibly high,” she said.

According to the experiences of one immigrant rights grassroots organizer, ICE Tracking apps failed to provide even the marginal benefit to immigrant communities that Gottesman highlighted. In fact, says Lucía Armengol, a Student Committee co-chair of New Jersey-based volunteer organizing network Resistencia en Acción NJ, they’ve brewed a frustrating atmosphere of “confusion, misinformation, and fear.”

“[We] have our own rapid response team that operates 24/7 by a Know Your Rights trained operator. When the operator receives a report of an ICE sighting [at a specific location], they contact a trained team of rapid responders who know how to interact with ICE [in person].”

Armengol proceeded to describe the intricate steps that rapid responders must take to verify and potential ICE presence before sharing the information with community members. In contrast, she says, apps like ICEBlock have no ‘confirmation process’ that renders its information reliable nor useful for many.
“A lot of people in the [New Jersey immigrant] community would share information from these apps in community chats. There would be a lot of confusion,” she said. “There’s no confirmation process. There’s no response. There’s no mechanism in place. It’s just anonymous information sharing that contributes to a lot of misinformation.”

Armengol added that many immigrant support networks around the country — including her own — expressed minimal surprise at Apple’s decision to concede to the Trump administration’s pressures. It was “inevitable,” she said, that large corporations such as Apple would concede to federal pressures; she thought it was precisely why immigrant communities have relied on grassroots support. And apps like Aaron’s, she says, are not assisting these efforts — at least not in any tangible way.

“[Imagine] there’s a fire, and people aren’t calling 911 and [instead] using an anonymous fire reporting app that doesn’t even call the fire department,” she said. “Wouldn’t you think the app is useless?”