Today in the Kaizen Blog: Germany and four other EU countries want to house rejected asylum seekers outside Europe - human rights groups warn that Europe is pushing its responsibility elsewhere. In Russia, the teen messenger Blink is coming under pressure over location data and close ties to VK.
In the United States, a federal judge has once again stopped Trump's attack on mail-in voting. At the same time, the Justice Department has been ordered to reveal who came up with the $1.8 billion fund for people who claim they were unfairly prosecuted. And three Stars and Stripes journalists can, for now, still be fired.
„Willkommen in Trump Country“ – "Welcome to Trump Country" - Germany and four other EU countries want to house rejected asylum seekers outside Europe
Germany, Austria, Greece, Denmark and the Netherlands want to jointly create centers outside the European Union where people whose asylum applications have been rejected in Europe would be housed. The first of these so-called return centers could begin operating as early as 2027. The five governments are still keeping secret which countries they are talking to. The only thing known so far is that countries in Africa are the main candidates. Rwanda had already said in early August that it was perfectly open to talks with European governments about taking people in. What for a long time was passed around as a political demand by individual governments is now becoming a concrete joint project involving several EU countries - and Germany is right in the middle of it.
Denmark's immigration minister Morten Bødskov is calling it a fundamental change in European asylum policy. People who have no right to remain in the EU but cannot be returned to their country of origin would in the future be housed in a third country. Bødskov rejects the word camp and is selling the model as a "new opportunity" for these people. What that opportunity is actually supposed to look like remains unclear. Where the centers will be located, how long people will have to stay there, what rights they will have and who will be responsible when those rights are violated has not yet been settled. Another statement is particularly striking: Denmark points to the International Organization for Migration and the UN Refugee Agency as bodies that could oversee the facilities. Neither organization has agreed to take on such a role. The UN Refugee Agency even said that the five countries had not approached it with such a proposal at all. The International Organization for Migration likewise speaks only of initial talks and makes clear that any involvement would depend on protecting the rights of those affected and complying with European law.
The political groundwork for arrangements like this was already laid at the end of 2025. At the time, the EU expanded the possibilities for rejecting asylum applications and sending people to so-called safe third countries. That means countries can now come into play even if the person affected has no personal connection to them at all. That is exactly where the legal fight begins. Human rights groups and lawyers have been warning for months that Europe could simply move its responsibility beyond its own borders. A government does not stop being responsible just because the person concerned is then housed several thousand miles away. Who decides whether a country is genuinely safe, who monitors detention conditions, medical care and access to lawyers, and what happens if a third country later stops honoring its commitments? So far, there are far more political declarations of intent than solid answers to any of those questions.
The human rights organization PICUM therefore describes it as an old idea in new packaging: people are supposed to disappear from Europe's field of view while European governments simultaneously try to push their own obligations as far away as possible. This is exactly where it will become clear what the term "return center" actually means. Will people there be voluntarily prepared for a return, or will facilities be created outside the EU where rejected asylum seekers are held indefinitely because neither their country of origin nor Europe wants to take them? The five governments call it a new approach. As long as the location, legal status and oversight remain unresolved, it is above all a plan to house people Europe does not want to keep somewhere outside Europe.
In the United States, the court system has repeatedly stopped Trump's deportation policies through massive resistance and investigations and has actually forced people to be brought back. In 2025, we ourselves traveled to El Salvador several times. With the European "return center" model, by contrast, a system is now being built that is deliberately designed to house people outside Europe's legal space - while there is still no clearly recognizable practical obligation to bring someone back if they were sent there unlawfully, and so far there is barely any resistance.
Pentagon can fire three Stars and Stripes journalists for now
A federal judge in Washington has refused to temporarily stop the firing of three employees at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte sued the Pentagon after they were set to lose their jobs following an interview about the paper's editorial independence. The court currently sees no sufficient basis for concluding that their free speech rights were violated.
Judge Trevor McFadden said the journalistic independence of Stars and Stripes is not fundamentally at stake in this case. He also said the plaintiffs had not sufficiently shown that the Pentagon's actions intimidated other newsroom employees or kept them from speaking critically. That means the firings can move ahead for now, even though the main case has not yet been decided. Slavin says he was fired for alleged insubordination after warning in a television interview about possible military censorship. Korte took part in the same interview. In their lawsuit, the three accuse the Pentagon of also punishing them because Stars and Stripes had reported on worsening conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.
The dispute hits a newspaper that is partly funded by the Pentagon but has insisted on editorial independence for decades precisely because of that relationship. If journalists there have to fear for their jobs the moment they speak publicly about possible political or military pressure, then this is no longer just about three firings. It becomes a question of how independent a military newspaper can still be when the institution funding it also gets to decide personnel and consequences.
Teen messenger Blink sends location data to VK - and runs on its infrastructure
Blink is especially popular with young users and is built around friends being able to see where each other are at any given moment. Those exact data apparently do not go only to Blink itself. During active use, coordinates are transmitted every few seconds, together with altitude, speed, direction of travel, location accuracy and the phone's battery level. The data also go to MyTracker, an analytics service operated by VK. That makes it possible to connect a location to a specific account and device, and in some cases even to individual actions inside the app. What makes this especially sensitive is that Blink has constant access to location data, identifies places a user visits regularly and records things such as home, school, workplace, overnight stays and previous movements.
Publicly, Blink presents itself as an independent service and even gets into public fights on social media with VK projects. Technically, the separation looks much less clear. Maps, profile pictures and user photos are loaded through VK's network, and Blink's central server is hosted in VK Cloud. That alone does not prove that VK owns Blink, but there are also personnel connections. At least eight senior Blink employees previously worked at VK, and there are indications that some of those ties may still exist. Four out of five VK corporate email addresses linked to Blink employees and found in public data were still active.
The financing also raises questions. Blink generated 36.8 million rubles in revenue in 2025 but posted a net loss of almost 500 million rubles. Even so, the company did not take out loans or other debt. Instead, its shareholders committed to putting in a total of 1.53 billion rubles, 680 million of which had already been paid. Who actually owns Blink remains unknown because the company is registered as a non-public joint-stock company and does not have to disclose its shareholders. At the same time, Blink said it had already reached around ten million monthly users worldwide by August 2025. In July 2024, 72 percent of its users were between the ages of 11 and 24.
That is exactly why the connection to VK is more than just a technical side issue. VK works with Russian security agencies, is required to store user data and must hand it over to authorities in cases provided for under Russian law. Human rights groups have documented criminal cases for years in which posts and user data from VKontakte played a role, especially in prosecutions over criticism of Russia's war against Ukraine. In July 2026, the European Union put VK on its sanctions list and accused the company of providing technical support for Russian repression. The VK-linked company behind the state messenger MAX was sanctioned as well, and that service also collects user location data. For Blink, one simple question remains: Why does a service used by millions of young people present itself as independent when so many of its technical and personnel links lead straight to VK?
Federal judge stops Trump's attack on mail-in voting ahead of the midterms
Donald Trump wanted to tighten mail-in voting rules before the midterms, but a federal judge has once again blocked the White House. Judge Indira Talwani on Friday extended the ban preventing the Postal Service from carrying out Trump's order and replaced her previous temporary ruling with a broader court injunction. The administration has already said it will appeal to the federal appeals court. But time is running out for Trump. North Carolina began sending out its first mail ballots on Friday, and more states will follow in quick succession. Nearly one-third of American voters cast their ballots by mail, and election officials have been warning for weeks that the systems cannot be changed this close to an election without causing major problems.
Talwani wrote that the states bringing the lawsuit are legally required to mail millions of ballots within fixed time windows. Changing the system now would be highly likely to result in eligible voters not receiving or returning their ballots in time, or not being able to vote at all. States are free to use the Postal Service's new system voluntarily, but not a single state has announced plans to do so. Trump has spent years trying to restrict mail-in voting even though he regularly votes that way himself. His claim that mail ballots cost him the 2020 election because of fraud remains unsupported to this day. An earlier order in which he tried, among other things, to require additional proof of citizenship for voter registration had already been blocked by federal courts.
The Supreme Court overturned Talwani's first injunction in late August, but it explicitly did not rule that Trump's actions were lawful. The conservative majority merely said the original lawsuits had been filed too early because the Postal Service had not yet issued its specific rules. It has done so now, the lawsuits were refiled - and just weeks before the midterms, Trump is once again running into the same judicial wall.
Judge forces Trump's Justice Department to reveal who came up with the $1.8 billion fund
The proposed fund is officially dead, but the question of who came up with the idea of paying out $1.8 billion to people who say they were unfairly prosecuted by the Justice Department is still following the Trump administration around. A federal judge in Virginia has now ordered the Justice Department to disclose who designed the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund. That is exactly what the department had spent weeks fighting to avoid. The fund was supposed to use taxpayer money to compensate people who say they were investigated or prosecuted for political reasons. Opponents of the plan, on the other hand, see it as an unconstitutional distribution of public money designed to benefit Donald Trump's political supporters. Todd Blanche established the fund in May and scrapped it only last month after the proposal triggered opposition from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Read our article as well: Trump: Corruption Now Has a Name, an Address, and the Seal of the Department of Justice
Judge Ivan Davis rejected the Justice Department's attempts to dodge the issue. The decisive question, he said, is simply who came up with the model. Those names must be provided to the plaintiffs and their lawyers, even if they remain under seal for now and may only become public if the case eventually goes to trial. The department had argued that the names were irrelevant to the case or protected because they involved confidential discussions between attorneys and government officials. But it had not even formally invoked such a privilege in court. For the plaintiffs, the names are crucial because without them, they cannot know whose records to request or which people involved should be questioned under oath.
So far, five administration officials are known to have been involved in the project: Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, IRS chief executive Frank Bisignano and acting deputy attorney general Trent McCotter. Whether one of them came up with the idea or whether other people were behind it is exactly what the disclosure is supposed to establish. The Justice Department suffered a second defeat as well: Davis ordered it to turn over all relevant records dating back to January 2025. The administration wanted the search cut off on May 23, effectively limiting it to the period before the lawsuit was filed. The judge rejected that request too.
The Justice Department is now trying to get both rulings overturned by federal judge Leonie Brinkema and would prefer to have the entire lawsuit thrown out. Its argument is that the fund no longer exists and that Blanche has since confirmed its death under oath before Congress. But that still does not make the other question disappear: How did a plan to set aside $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for people who see themselves as victims of political prosecution come into existence inside the American Justice Department in the first place, and why is that same department now fighting so hard to keep the people behind it from being named? The fund may be gone. Who created it and how that money was supposed to be handed out is far from settled.
