"We live under martial law, as far as the laws and the legal system are concerned" - the war on the streets of America

It was almost eerily quiet, only sometimes the rustling of the last leaves could be heard; the outlines of the houses rose into the gray sky, and it smelled of fresh tear gas after the first ICE operation on this autumn day. And exactly in this moment I remembered a sentence. It was not a sentence for eternity, but for the moment. "What has happened?" - More than that one can hardly think. "Now you find yourself in a false world, before this I was a human being, three laughs, then hopefully it will be over." So much has become undignified in 2025 when you step out the front door again. Most of it, actually. All that struggling for the very last bit of bliss. And then these people in gas masks, who watched every glance from others with each step and pulled the trigger.

What is happening on America's streets has broken every boundary. ICE and the border agency no longer act like state institutions, but like a force that writes its own rules. Houses are stormed, cars intercepted on open streets, people taken away without anyone being able to explain on what basis. The violence has a force reminiscent of urban war scenes - rapid response teams, shouting commands, panicked families, a chaos that piles up day after day. It is no longer the cool toughness of an agency. It is arbitrariness that has developed a life of its own within a system.

It affects the old and the young, caregivers, students, people on their way to early shifts. No one is safe from a raid that tears a whole life apart within seconds. In the photos that reach us, you see men in protective vests who look as if they were preparing for a deployment abroad. But they are standing in residential streets, on supermarket parking lots, in front of schools. Everything feels like the darkest times, like an apparatus that has long forgotten what it was once created for. Instead of enforcing the law, it tramples over it.

In the meantime, there are thousands of violations of basic human dignity every day. Every single case shows how fragile the protection has become that people in this country should be able to rely on. Families break apart in minutes, children sit alone in bare rooms of police stations after a raid and do not know where their parents have been taken. Elderly people are put in handcuffs even though they could neither flee nor pose a danger. Simple questions like "Why?" or "Where to?" fade into nothing. Nobody listens.

The violence itself has also reached a new dimension. It is no longer the last resort, but the first. Doors are kicked in before anyone even knocks. Vehicles are abruptly stopped, boxed in, often forced off track by the targeted ramming of the enforcement vehicles. These are operations that appear as if they came from a guerrilla war - yet they run right through cities and suburbs as if all of this were an everyday necessity. At the same time, the mountain of cases grows into infinity. A flood of cases, documents, reports that are barely manageable. These are no longer isolated incidents. It is a system that has lost its political integrity.

This is how conditions arise that right-wing parties in Europe can only dream of. A climate of fear, carried by political coldness and the will to demonstrate strength, no matter who is hit. Especially the AfD looks at this severity with a mixture of admiration and open wishful thinking. For years it has demanded measures that go exactly in this direction - more pressure, more raids, a daily life in which deterrence stands above everything else and human dignity becomes a secondary triviality. Whoever sets out on this path finds hardly any way back.

But we do not stand by and remain silent. We document, we support the people, we research, we speak with those whose lives were torn apart in seconds, with lawyers who can hardly keep up, and with people who do not give up despite everything. Our work is no comfortable endeavor. It is a daily fight against looking away, against silence, against the claim that all this is inevitable and does not concern you. It is not inevitable. It is destructive. We expect no applause. We hope that others will join in this fight - against arbitrariness, against state abuses, against the breaking of human rights. Every contribution counts for this work. Every voice helps to keep the truth visible that so many want to suppress, because the path to Europe is closer than one thinks. For what is happening right now is nothing less than an attack on human dignity and democracy itself. And if we do not look, do not help fight it, no one will be left to tell the story, because from hell there is only a way further downward.