The Migrants in the Ancient Forest
Last August, Ahmed found himself in Belarus, at the Polish border, watching a smuggler lean a ladder against a very high wall as members of the Belarusian border guard looked on. Ahmed, a nineteen-year-old Somali, is tall and lanky, with close-cropped curly dark hair. At home, in Mogadishu, he liked to watch Manchester City football and TikTok videos. One day, members of the terror group Al Shabab came to his house to recruit his father in their fight to overthrow the government. When his father refused, they killed him. Soon, they came for Ahmed, too. His uncle had heard about a new route to immigrate to Europe; a travel agency in Mogadishu was advertising tickets. Ahmed’s family bought him a three-thousand-dollar package that included flights to Russia on a tourist visa and a taxi to neighboring Belarus, where a smuggler would help him cross to Poland. Now the smuggler, an Afghan man, urged Ahmed to climb the wall and jump.
This story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism and by the Pulitzer Center.
The wall was eighteen feet tall, made of steel, topped with concertina wire, and equipped with cameras and sensors. Built by Poland in 2022, it cuts through the heart of the Białowieża Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is Europe’s last great lowland primeval forest, largely untouched by humans. The forest, which straddles Poland and Belarus, is famed for its old-growth trees and its rich biodiversity: it is home to thousands of plant and animal species, from endangered fungi and lichen to lynx, wolves, and the largest free-roaming herd of European bison. In the past four and a half years, Białowieża and neighboring forests have also become a route for thousands of migrants, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, seeking to enter Europe. Ahmed (his name, like those of the other migrants in this story, has been changed for his safety) climbed the ladder and jumped into Poland. He fell on his arm and his shoulder, fracturing bones. Then it was time to run.
Ahmed told me that in the next two days he traversed some twenty miles of Polish woodland with other Somali teen-agers. They were trying to reach the edge of the forest, where a smuggler’s van would meet them. They encountered shaggy elk and snuffling wild boars, which ran at the sight of them. Taking cover behind towering oaks, alders, and ash trees, the teen-agers hid from border guards and from local villagers, some of whom turn migrants in to the authorities.
Exhausted and in pain, Ahmed often wanted to give himself up. Six months earlier, he could have tried to claim asylum instead of crossing illegally. But, in March, Poland had suspended that right for most people. Now, if he were caught, he would likely be sent back to Belarus or be deported to Somalia, where, he was certain, he’d be killed by Al Shabab.
On the second night, the Somalis reached the meeting point with the smuggler, a twenty-one-year-old Romanian man. He drove them northwest, toward Białystok, the closest city. According to a police report, sometime after 9 p.m. the smuggler tried to circumvent a police roadblock near Białystok and veered into a ditch. Photographs taken by the police show the van on its side and a group of young Somali men, including Ahmed, handcuffed and lying face down in the grass.
It was in the summer of 2021 that people from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and other countries with ongoing conflicts began showing up in the Polish woods. Many had children with them. They entered at the Belarusian border, through perhaps the world’s most politically engineered migration route. Months earlier, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian President, had diverted a plane carrying a journalist, triggering sanctions against him by the European Union. In response, Lukashenko announced, “We stopped drugs and migrants. Now you will have to eat them and catch them yourselves.”
The Belarusian regime began advertising to people in high-conflict countries the promise of easy entry into the E.U. On social media, state-run Belarusian tour agencies promoted enticing travel packages. One post offered pickup at the airport and a week in a hotel, promising that “you will feel safe.” Belarus also loosened its visa rules, lowered application fees for tourist visas for “hunting” or “spa” visits, and added flights on the state airline to Minsk, the capital. Migrants quickly appeared at Belarus’s borders with Latvia and Lithuania, and, in the greatest numbers, with Poland. When Poland constructed a barbed-wire fence at the border, Belarusian guards reportedly gave migrants wire cutters.
In August, 2021, thirty-two Afghans who had fled their country just before the Taliban took over arrived at the border, hoping to claim asylum. Poland refused to process them. So the Afghans, stranded, sat in a muddy no man’s land, flanked by armed border guards on both sides. Technically, they were already in Poland, in a tiny village called Usnarz Górny. There was no fence there, so locals and journalists could interact with the refugees. Images of an Afghan woman camped out with a gray cat went viral. The European Court of Human Rights soon ordered Poland to give the migrants assistance and temporary shelter.
Within weeks, Poland announced a state of emergency and closed areas near the border to medics, humanitarian workers, and reporters, among others. The Polish journalist Aga Suszko, who helped with the reporting for this piece, recalled, “I’m in a democratic country, covering something happening before my eyes that’s very significant, and suddenly: ‘You cannot see it, so you cannot report on it, because you cannot see it.’ ”
The weather in the forest cooled, and rain set in. The Afghans were sleeping on the ground. That September, Poland’s interior minister held a press conference, aired on national TV, in which he displayed a photo, purportedly of a man having sex with a cow, and claimed that it had been discovered on a device confiscated from a migrant.
In October, migrants attempted more than ten thousand crossings (the Polish border guard counts crossings, not people), and Poland passed a law effectively legalizing “pushbacks.” In a pushback, authorities force migrants back across the border immediately after they arrive, often violently, without considering asylum claims or other needs. (The guards often send them through access gates.) The law appeared to violate E.U. and international law’s principle of non-refoulement, which forbids returning people to places where they face threats to their life or freedom. The Afghans would clearly be in danger if sent home. Even if they were returned only to Belarus, they would be at risk: border guards there regularly beat migrants who failed to complete the journey to Poland. Yet Poland pushed back the thirty-two Afghans, including a fifteen-year-old girl, arguing that they had remained outside Polish jurisdiction the whole time, so non-refoulement didn’t apply.
The next month, hundreds of desperate and marooned migrants, freezing in makeshift encampments on the Belarusian side of the border, tried to break through the barbed-wire fence to Poland. Polish border guards responded with tear gas and water cannons. “I had my life before 2021 and my life after,” Suszko, the journalist, told me. She’d grown up hearing the story of how, in the nineteen-eighties, the Solidarity movement had heroically overthrown the oppressive Communist regime, transforming the country into a democracy that generally respected human rights and the rule of law. “It was the death of Poland as I knew it,” she said.
Since 2021, Poland has built the permanent border wall that Ahmed crossed; razor-wire fences stand on both sides of it. Thousands of security officers are now stationed there, along with cameras, thermal and motion sensors, night-vision devices, and other surveillance tools.
These days, most migrants don’t make it to Poland on their first try. Often, they are pushed back to Belarus, where they get stuck in forest encampments along the border or in Minsk, in a kind of dangerous purgatory. Others die on the journey or disappear, leaving behind only traces—a water bottle, a shoe.
Still, the so-called Green Border remains a safer route to Europe than crossing the Mediterranean. With the help of smugglers, many migrants eventually make it to Poland or farther into Europe. Among those who do, nearly half arrive with physical trauma, and the majority are in psychological distress, according to a recent brief by Doctors Without Borders. The group attributes these injuries to the militarization of the border, including a rise in violence by guards. Many pushbacks are performed by masked officers who use pepper spray, strip searches, and beatings to force migrants back, though the Polish border guard maintains that they do not use physical violence, and that measures such as pepper spray are used only in retaliation against attacks from migrants.
Suszko looks back on her initial disbelief about the treatment of the Afghans at Usnarz Górny as naïve. “Because it has only changed for the worse,” she said. “And we let it happen.”
In fairy tales, the forest represents both refuge and danger—a site of respite or a place where you might be devoured whole. During the Holocaust, many Jews hid in the Białowieża Forest, constructing shelters from natural materials or hunkering down in swamps. As Rebecca Frankel writes in “Into the Forest,” an account of the Rabinowitz family, who survived for two years in Białowieża, “It was unthinkable that anyone would choose to hide here—madness even to try,” in part because of the treacherous wetlands.
In recent years, according to a Polish humanitarian collective called We Are Monitoring, more than a hundred people have died crossing from Belarus to Poland, mostly owing to hypothermia or exhaustion. The true number is likely higher, since the government is not closely tracking the situation; nonprofit groups have tried to fill the void. We Are Monitoring said that at least twenty bodies have been pulled from rivers in the forests, which migrants often try to wade through because the border wall does not extend into the water. On a list of deaths maintained by the collective, the first entry is a man from Iraq who drowned while trying to cross, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter. In July, 2025, several guards noticed a body floating in the Bug River, along the border; when they approached it, they found a second body. Many people who died had been pushed back by border guards. Some bodies are too far decomposed to be identified.
Grupa Granica (Border Group), a Polish humanitarian-aid coalition, found a pregnant Kurdish woman named Avin Irfan Zahir unconscious after she’d spent days wandering through the woods with her husband and five children. She had advanced hypothermia, and when she was taken to a hospital she was diagnosed with acidosis. Zahir had a miscarriage, and then died. Her body was sent to Iraq for burial, and a Muslim group in Poland buried her baby.
Since the wall was built, fewer women and children have been crossing the border, but some still make the journey. A woman I’ll call Amara told me that she fled Cameroon to escape her husband. He was so violent that a therapist had advised her not to relate the details, to avoid being re-traumatized. We were talking by phone, and her voice was slow and heavy. Later, she sent me a document that she’d written on arrival in Poland, summarizing what she had endured. She couldn’t bear to reread it. The account described months of rape by her husband, who beat her when she fought back. He said that if she left him he’d track her down and have her killed.
Amara said that she was able to get a visa to study Russian at a university in Moscow, out of her husband’s reach. But in Moscow she discovered that she was pregnant, and the university kicked her out. Her visa was revoked, so she went to neighboring Belarus. There, a new friend suggested that they try the route to Europe together and paid four thousand dollars to a smuggler for their passage.
The journey, in 2024, went poorly from the start, according to Amara. It was May, but the forest was bitterly cold. She was seven months pregnant. A group of migrants stole her food, and she became exhausted. She realized that she would be unable to scale the first razor-wire fence. She saw tracks on the ground where other migrants had crawled along it. “So, I worked out, that was what we had to do”—crawl until they found an opening to go under.
Amara and her friend ended up in the no man’s land between the first razor-wire fence and the wall—an area that some migrants refer to as “the jungle” or “the death zone.” Independent monitors are not allowed to access it; when people die there, according to a humanitarian worker, other migrants dig their graves. Amara encountered people from around the world in the death zone, all stranded in front of the biggest wall that she’d ever seen.
A day later, still stuck there, Amara started to feel ill. She had consumed only an energy drink and some river water, and was experiencing severe gastrointestinal issues. Her friend began yelling to the Polish border guard. She pulled up Amara’s shirt to show her swollen belly, and the officers allowed her through.
I met Amara in September, in Białystok, where she had applied for asylum. She was living in a camp for migrants—a drab building across a highway from a chemical plant—with her son, who was now a year old. Visitors weren’t allowed, but she could come and go while she awaited a decision on her case. In July, anti-migrant demonstrations organized by the far right had been held across Poland, with chants like “Stop the migrant invasion!” and “All of Poland, only white!” Amara said that she and her son had stopped going out; at home in Cameroon, protests were typically followed by violence. Still, Amara considered herself lucky—many people at the camp had worse stories. Around the time Amara crossed, an Eritrean woman had given birth alone in the forest.
When Amara and I went out for a meal, she wore a curly black wig and blue press-on nails, and said that she was working hard to become the person she’d lost during her marriage. Someone joyful. She was learning Polish, had found a job cleaning houses, and kept herself busy with her son, who took his first steps inside the camp.
In September, Russia sent some twenty drones into Poland’s airspace, an incursion that Poland’s Prime Minister described as the closest the country had come to open conflict since the Second World War. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Poland has been on high alert, fearing that it will be the next target. Three days after the drone incident, Russia hosted the Zapad (West) military exercises in Belarus, amassing thousands of troops at the Polish border for defense simulations.
The migrant crisis in the forest and Russia’s war in Ukraine are intimately linked, according to Franak Viačorka, a politician in the Belarusian opposition, who spoke to me from exile in Vilnius. He is one of many people who believe that Russia, in collaboration with Belarus, has orchestrated the migrant crisis from the beginning. The situation, he said, is “very advantageous to Russia, because, instead of supporting Ukraine, the European Union spends money on border protection.” The Polish border wall alone cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Plus, he said, the crisis has helped Russia discredit the E.U., making it look inhumane to those fleeing violence and “creating anti-migrant moods in the society.” Poland, which is overwhelmingly white, has long been averse to non-Western migration.
After the war in Ukraine began, the Polish government welcomed millions of Ukrainian refugees, offering them food, shelter, and temporary permission to remain. Poles could identify with these refugees, with whom they shared not only history and culture but also a common enemy. Today, more than 1.5 million Ukrainians live in Poland. But the country has continued to turn away the thousands of desperate people of color arriving at its Belarusian border, referring to them as “living weapons” in a “hybrid war,” sent by Russia and Belarus to destabilize the country. Some Poles also believe that migrants who come for economic reasons are gaming the asylum system to get to Europe. Even support for Ukrainian refugees has started to wane. A recent survey by the Polish research firm Opinia24 showed that three-quarters of Poles oppose accepting migrants into the country, regardless of their background. (The majority of Europeans are now worried about uncontrolled migration.)
Fundacja Dialog (Dialogue Foundation), a nonprofit in Białystok, helps both Ukrainians and people who entered from Belarus. Białystok, because of its proximity to several borders, has long hosted people from elsewhere; it has also long been the site of racist and antisemitic attacks. I met Ahmed, who was allowed to stay in Poland after his arrest because of his fractured shoulder and arm, in the hallways of Dialog. (When Poland suspended the right to asylum, it made exceptions for the seriously injured, for pregnant women, and for children, though those guidelines aren’t always followed.) Ahmed wore a black T-shirt, flip-flops, and navy-blue gym shorts; his eyes darted around constantly. He had a cast and a sling on his left arm. Ahmed said that it was his job to send money home and to protect his mother and siblings from Al Shabab. “I’m a man,” he told me, though he couldn’t yet grow a beard. He knew that he’d arrived in Poland at a bad time, with asylum suspended and anti-migrant sentiment climbing. His chances of being able to stay were close to zero.
In Dialog’s courtyard, I met two other men who had recently crossed from Belarus and were accepted into Poland because of severe injuries. “From the border, all the broken ones,” Dialog’s front-desk worker told me. One of the men, an Afghan who said that he had fled the Taliban, sat hunched on a bench as he described how the Belarusian border guards had beaten him so badly that they broke his back. (The Belarusian border guard said that coverage of the migrant crisis is “often biased.”) The other man, a young Senegalese footballer, said that he had been held for weeks in a forest camp in Belarus, where he had been beaten daily. Many migrants are held on the Belarusian side as they wait for an opportunity to cross, such as when the wall is breached or a patrol is distracted. “When he tired, he brings a dog,” he said of a border guard, laughing at the sheer absurdity of his situation. He kept rubbing his jaw, which he said was broken, and on his arms and legs he had scars that he attributed to dog bites.
All three men had arrived after Poland suspended the right to asylum, joining Finland, which had first done so in July, 2024. Greece soon followed, and other European countries are considering doing the same. Even the European Commission, the E.U.’s independent executive branch, has voiced support for the move. Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s executive vice-president, has argued that “exceptional measures” like suspending asylum are needed, at least temporarily, to respond to the “weaponization” of migration by hostile states.
Kevin Allen, the head of the United Nations Refugee Agency in Poland, who works closely with the Polish government and the E.U., argues that suspending asylum is not the solution. Allen, who is American, served in both the Peace Corps and the Marines before joining the U.N. He told me that he has been advocating for the Polish government to establish better border-screening procedures, to identify which individuals merit asylum and which should be humanely returned to their countries of origin. Meanwhile, Allen’s agency is encouraging Poland to streamline the application process for economic migrants; this could ease the pressure on the asylum system and discourage smugglers. Poland is on the verge of becoming one of the world’s twenty largest economies, and, Allen said, thousands of additional workers are needed, given the country’s aging population. At Dialog, Ahmed told me that he wanted to work as a driver; trucking is one of the industries affected by the labor shortage.
Yet public dissatisfaction over migration and political pressure from far-right gains throughout Europe make Allen’s proposals a hard sell. In December, the E.U. approved new measures that will, among other things, fast-track deportations and create “removal hubs”—offshore detention facilities—for migrants.
In the village of Białowieża, in the heart of the ancient forest, a pair of souvenir stalls sell magnets, handcrafted wooden spoons and cutting boards, and bison and elk stuffed animals. Tourists and researchers come from across Poland and around the world to see the forest; it’s the reason I started visiting Białowieża, two years ago. On my most recent trip, the stalls’ shopkeepers—a new mother and an older woman sitting under an umbrella in the beating sun—were happy to discuss the migrant problem. They spoke primarily about crime, rehashing stories pushed by far-right politicians which framed migrants as violent rapists incapable of assimilating to Polish society. The new mom, herself a migrant from Belarus, said that she feared for the safety of her baby boy and for her friends’ daughters.
The conversation turned to an incident, from 2024, in which a Polish soldier was stabbed to death through the border fence. Polish authorities said that the perpetrator was from the Middle East but never revealed his identity. At the height of the migrant crisis, the women said, the plaza had been used for an Army kitchen. They acknowledged that they had never seen any violence in Białowieża by migrants, though thousands of them had passed through.
As we spoke, another local, Jaroslaw Bajko, who was wiry and bald, rode up on a yellow bicycle. He said he was disturbed by the litter that migrants left in the forest. Humanitarian-aid workers, who Bajko alleged were helping migrants “for money,” often found discarded water bottles, food cans, clothing, and more. Far-right citizen patrols briefly sprang up at the border in 2024, and I asked if he’d joined one. (The Polish border guard has made it clear that citizens cannot make arrests.) Bajko hadn’t, but he and a friend had once informed the border guard of a group of Arab people he saw being sheltered in a local house. “Europe is too small to take all of Africa, right?” he said, shaking his head.
Poland had recently held its Presidential election, and Bajko had voted for Grzegorz Braun, a far-right politician who has called the gas chambers of Auschwitz “fake” and launched a campaign against Ukrainian refugees. (Karol Nawrocki, a conservative former boxer and ex-football hooligan, won the election.) Just as in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe, the politics of migration have forced moderates and progressives to rethink their platforms. Donald Tusk, a center-left former president of the European Council, became the Prime Minister of Poland in 2023; during his campaign, he contemplated anti-migrant proposals that rivalled those of the incumbent right-wing government. Once in office, his government adopted a strategy called “Take Back Control. Ensure Security,” which led to a marked increase in deportations.
The strategy has not succeeded in defanging the right wing, whose politicians regularly share inflammatory videos on social media of migrants beside burning cars or smashed windows; one showed a Black man licking a knife. In July, 2024, a leader of the far-right political coalition Confederation posted a photo on X of a group of men in the forest, soaking wet and covered in dirt, eyes cast down as they made bunny ears with their fingers above their heads, at the order of the guards. He captioned it “New rabbits.” Hamid, an Afghan migrant I met in Warsaw, saw the post. “I suddenly recognized the people and the photo, and knew myself,” he told me. “I said, ‘Oh, this is me, this is me and my friends . . . posing like animals.’ ” While crossing the border, Hamid had run out of food and water and collapsed, but the worst part of the ordeal, he said, was how the border guards had treated him.
I met a unit of the border guard in the town of Krynki, where Ewelina Lewkowicz, a press officer, agreed to take me out on patrol. As we drove in a Land Cruiser toward the wall, on roads slick with mud, Lewkowicz brushed off the bunny-ears incident, saying there was no confirmation that the picture had been taken by Polish border guards. Around us, things seemed peaceful. We passed stands of birch trees swaying in the wind. A three-toed woodpecker called out; a herd of bison ambled by. But Lewkowicz told me that the border guard had blocked five thousand crossings in August. Finally, we came within sight of the massive wall. An excavator was levelling the ground to build more fortifications. A message popped up on my phone: “Welcome to Belarus.”
At the wall, we met two men and a woman who had just joined the border patrol. Each was equipped with a 9-millimetre Glock handgun, a bulletproof vest, handcuffs, and pepper spray. Patrols had been made easier by a new surveillance system that used thermal imaging and night vision to detect people on the move. Lewkowicz claimed that they were now stopping ninety-six per cent of migrants. The guards were jokey and unapologetic. Defending their homeland and the E.U.’s eastern flank against people illegally trying to enter was not morally ambiguous to them.
Lewkowicz insisted that border guards always considered the “human factor”: any migrant who was hurt, she said, got medical aid. (I had read many migrant testimonies that suggested otherwise.) When I asked her about the humanitarian-aid groups that assisted people with their journeys, Lewkowicz said that there was a “thin line between helping someone in need and aiding in an illegal crossing”—that is, human trafficking.
A humanitarian organization called P.O.P.H. (Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Emergency Service), found Hamid lying motionless near some abandoned train tracks after he crossed the border a second time. He was alive but in shock, too dehydrated and exhausted to continue. “Angels in the forest,” Hamid called the volunteers.
Since 2021, one volunteer group has received more than twenty-six thousand requests for help. Migrants use their phones to drop pins with their locations so that they can be found in the dense forest. Aid workers bring them food, water, phone chargers, sleeping bags, and, sometimes, medical help, all of which are legal to provide. If they house or transport anyone, however, they risk being charged with assisting in an illegal border crossing.
During my visit, Ewa Moroz-Keczyńska, who was born nearby, in Hajnówka, and works as an anthropologist in the education department of the Białowieża National Park, was on trial, with four other people, for giving assistance to illegal migrants. In March, 2022, she had provided food, water, and clothing to a Kurdish couple, their seven children, and a young Egyptian man. Then the four others had agreed to transport the group to the nearest town. They were pulled over by border agents, who testified that after they stopped the vehicle they saw movement in the back, where they found migrants hidden under blankets. The volunteers faced up to five years in prison.
“Everybody that I meet is asking me, how am I feeling? How the fuck am I supposed to feel?” Moroz-Keczyńska told me, when we met. “The incident that we’re talking about took place sometime in 2022. It was one of hundreds of interventions that I participated in. And now it’s 2025.” Even if a decision in the case was delivered soon, it would likely be appealed. “I live in this awful iteration of a state that’s persecuting its own citizens,” she said.
Aleksandra Chrzanowska works for the Association for Legal Intervention, a member of Grupa Granica. In September, she agreed to take me along on an “intervention” like the ones Moroz-Keczyńska participated in. Chrzanowska had previously worked with asylum seekers in Warsaw. Now she was more often in the forest than in the city, and migrants sometimes stayed in her Warsaw apartment.
“The forest is a kind of an ally,” she told me. “If you go out of the forest, out to the village or a field, you can be quite easily found, whether you’re a person on the move or a support. When you are deep in the forest, you’re safe.”
One morning, Chrzanowska messaged me that Grupa Granica had received a call from an Afghan man with a wounded hand. I met her and two of her colleagues in a parking lot in Białowieża. Chrzanowska, who was suntanned and tired, sat in the passenger seat, navigating for a young volunteer as we made our way down a narrow forest road. A woman with a gray-and-white braid sat beside me in the back seat. Everyone wore muted shades of green and brown.
After a while, the driver pulled over, and the three of us ran into the forest. The Afghan man had dropped a pin just a hundred yards from the road, so we had to be careful not to be seen.
For the next hour, we searched in widening circles. We found a Belarusian water bottle and a candy wrapper with Arabic writing, but the man was nowhere to be seen. The group’s helpline had lost contact with him, and when Chrzanowska called out only a woodpecker replied.
The two women sat down and rolled cigarettes. The forest floor was soft, blanketed with moss, pine needles, and clover. Little white mushrooms and sprigs of grayish-green lichen dotted the ground. The women discussed what to do, messaging back and forth with the helpline, until— “Contact,” the woman with the braid whispered. The Afghan had dropped a new pin, across the road. When we arrived, we found three circular patches, where bison had recently lain, but no migrant.
After three hours, the women decided to leave a backpack for the man, hoping that he’d find it later. They packed nuts, crackers, chocolate, water, phone chargers, a sleeping bag, clothes, and bandages for his hand.
As we got back to the car, a young man with curly dark hair darted into the woods in front of us. The sight was jarring. Here, in the middle of the Białowieża National Park—a primeval forest, a tourist destination, a place where Polish villagers foraged mushrooms to fry in butter and salt—was a man on the run from the border guard. A local had compared the village of Białowieża to Twin Peaks, because nothing there made sense.
“Please, don’t call police,” the man whispered in English with his hands up as we approached. He was from Afghanistan, but he was not the man who’d called the helpline. His sneakers were falling apart but he was warmly dressed, with a single, ripped glove. He said that he was trying to find his smuggler’s car. “Poland good,” he said, with a thumbs-up, and paused. “Belarus guards bad.” He was twenty-three, wearing glasses that had fogged up. He hadn’t eaten in two days. Chrzanowska gave him what supplies she had left, including a power bank for his phone, and wished him well. He nodded and disappeared into the trees.
No one knows how many migrants are trapped in Belarus. Hope & Humanity Poland estimates that the number is in the thousands. Aid workers say that, ever since the border wall was built, the true crisis has been out of sight.
On WhatsApp, I connected with Desta, a young man who’d fled Ethiopia for Belarus and had been stuck there for nearly a year. He said that he’d left his country after being kidnapped from a bank where he worked and taken to a detention center for Tigray people, who have been the victims of ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia since 2020. Desta eventually escaped, flew to Russia on a tourist visa, then travelled by car to Belarus. He’d attempted to cross into Poland twice. In early 2025, he tried to organize a peaceful march to the border with other East African men, to raise awareness about their need for asylum. A Polish humanitarian worker dissuaded him, saying that a few hundred Black men marching to Poland’s border likely would not go over well. So Desta again tried to cross, with five other people. In August, he said, he crossed somewhere north of Białowieża; like Ahmed, he climbed a ladder and jumped from the border wall, fracturing his foot. An alarm on the wall went off, and Polish border guards quickly surrounded his group.
Desta told me that he asked for medical attention, since he couldn’t walk, but the Polish officers responded by confiscating his phone, power bank, and wallet, and pushing him back into Belarus, through a door in the wall. It is illegal for border guards to take migrants’ belongings, but aid workers say it is a common practice, intended to discourage people from attempting to cross a second time. (Guards also often take people’s shoes, which has resulted in numerous amputations of legs and feet, owing to frostbite.) I asked the border guard if I could see the surveillance footage from the day Desta crossed, but a representative told me that the guard had recorded dozens of attempts to illegally cross the border that week, including by Ethiopians, and that no one required medical attention or had asked to see a doctor.
While Desta recovered from his injury, he stayed in a cramped apartment in Minsk with seven other migrants, including several women who were trying to cross into Latvia, because the route to Poland had become too difficult. But pushbacks have been effectively legalized in Latvia and Lithuania, and when I reached one of the women on WhatsApp she sent a picture of herself in the forest, red-eyed and wearing a hood, with the message “I’m going to die here.”
Desta said that the Minsk police were going from apartment to apartment, rounding up migrants who had failed to cross and sending some to detention facilities to await deportation; others have been sent to the Russian border and conscripted into the Army, to fight in Ukraine. He told me that an officer had recently come to his door and peered through the peephole; he and the others inside stayed motionless, and eventually the officer left. “I really afraid this time and stress is going up,” he wrote to me, in October. In January, police arrested Desta at his apartment, then left him at the Russian border in the snow. Yet Desta made his way back to Minsk, and Hope & Humanity helped him secure a temporary order from the United Nations Human Rights Committee which prevents Poland from expelling him.
In October, I messaged Ahmed to see how he was doing at Dialog. He replied, “Hello sister. Am in Germany.” He had become increasingly uneasy about staying in Poland, after more anti-migrant protests, so he had hired a smuggler taxi to drive him to Berlin. There, he said, he submitted an asylum application and was sent to a refugee camp in Bremen, in the northwest. His arm was still healing, and he had learned that he’d also broken his hand. Ahmed remained worried about another Somali teen, who had been sent to a detention center in Poland. “Please, help my friend,” Ahmed wrote. Nearly every migrant I interviewed was concerned about someone who had accompanied them.
Ultimately, the five Polish aid workers were acquitted, but the verdict was recently appealed, and the group faces further legal proceedings. The forcible return of the thirty-two Afghans led to a legal case, filed in 2021 at the European Court of Human Rights by the Association for Legal Intervention. The case alleged that the migrants had faced “collective expulsion, denial of the right to seek asylum, and exposure to real risk of harm in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.” In 2024, the case was referred to the Grand Chamber, where it awaits a decision. A couple of dozen similar cases are also pending with the court. These decisions could impact how Poland—and the rest of Europe—treats the people arriving at the border.
Despite Europe’s rightward swing on migration, perhaps the “precious institution of asylum,” as the U.N.R.A.’s Kevin Allen called it, can still be preserved. “You can build walls very strong and very high,” he told me. “And people will still get around them.” Late last year, the Polish border guard found tunnels dug under the wall. Many humanitarian workers say that no barrier will keep people from coming. Chrzanowska, of the Association for Legal Intervention, said, “Once open, a migration route does not close.” Desta said he had no choice but to keep trying. “My home, there is active war,” he wrote to me. In February, he crossed into Poland, with only his phone, two T-shirts, and a pair of pants. “I really miss the day to speak loud my problems,” he added. “To walk freely across any place.” ♦