Critical State: Trump's Mass Deportations Give Europe Cover to Harden Borders

At Politico Europe, Aitor Hernández-Morales explores how last month’s “surge of migrants” attempting to reach the Spanish exclave of Ceuta has revealed just how far Europe’s political mainstream has moved toward hardline border enforcement. More than 100 people died trying to enter the Spanish city in Morocco.

The event has prompted migrant rights groups to reconsider their approach. Unlike past crises, when European leaders split along more predictable lines, the Ceuta event drew a nearly unanimous response favoring stronger deterrence, from far-right parties to center-left governments.

Twenty-two national leaders have called jointly for tougher enforcement against unauthorized migration, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has framed the outcome as a success because no one reached the Spanish mainland, a framing that left the deaths unmentioned.

The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in the US has also reshaped the political calculus in Europe, according to analysts. Florian Trauner of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel said the US’s turn toward large-scale removals has also given European leaders political cover to brush aside domestic criticism, since they can point to the world’s dominant power pursuing an identical approach.

That shift builds on ground already ceded within the bloc: Trauner said a small group of right-wing governments, including Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Poland’s Law and Justice party, had earlier managed to stall EU integration efforts and force a broader pivot toward border control.

European Parliament lawmaker Estrella Galán, of the Left group, said the divide that once separated mainstream conservatives from the far right has all but disappeared, freeing far-right parties to push further, including toward mass removals of immigrants already settled in Europe, a policy sometimes labeled “remigration.”

With humanitarian framing no longer moving the political needle, LeVoy described a shift toward litigation and away from public appeals alone, alongside a search for allies well outside the traditional rights sector. In Spain, a recent push to regularize hundreds of thousands of unauthorized migrants won backing from the country’s main employers’ association and the Catholic Church.

LeVoy also argued for changing the underlying narrative, urging advocates to highlight the far larger population of migrants already settled and working in Europe rather than the smaller, more visible group crossing borders irregularly, a strategy she compared to how marriage equality campaigns humanized LGBTQ+ people to the public.

If You Read One More Thing: Ukraine Wants EU Money for US Interceptors

At MilitaryTimes.com, Katie Livingstone writes that Ukraine has formally asked the European Union to tap its €90 billion loan for PAC-3 interceptor missiles, the first request to use the fund for US-made weapons.

• European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has confirmed the request alongside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, writing that the EU would keep supporting Ukraine “including with European air defence and PAC-3 Patriot systems.”

• The request came as Russia entered a second week of near-nonstop aerial strikes on Kyiv, Odessa, and other cities amid a dire interceptor shortage.

• The €90 billion loan allows for €60 billion for defense procurement but capped non-EU content at 35%, requiring Kyiv to seek a formal exemption for the US-made PAC-3s.

• Ukraine already secured a similar carve-out in April for Chinese-made drone components, which officials cited as EU states weighed the new request.

Far Right AfD’s Historic Win Shakes Germany

At The Guardian, Kate Connolly reports from Magdeburg that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has won nearly 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt’s state election, a historic high that has left residents grappling with fear, resignation, and grief over the country’s direction.

• Maryam, a teenager whose family came to Germany from Syria in 2015, said she fears her family could face deportation once the AfD’s platform to remove migrants deemed irregular takes effect.

• Voting data shows AfD support dropped sharply among voters over 70, many of whom lived through Germany’s postwar reckoning with Nazism firsthand.

• Some AfD supporters, including a Magdeburg resident named Doreen, blamed refugees for the backlash against them and said they hoped the party would end protections for Ukrainian refugees.

Deep Dive: Hundreds of Millions of Women Live Near a Deadly Conflict

Nearly one in five women alive today spends her days within reach of a war she did not start, according to a new report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

The report, entitled “Women Exposed to Armed Conflict, 1990-2025,” has found that 756 million women worldwide lived within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of a deadly conflict event in 2025, a population larger than the United States, Brazil, and Mexico combined. The number has nearly tripled since 1990, tracking a broader surge in global conflict that has pushed violence to its highest level in decades.

Sub-Saharan Africa has become the epicenter of that shift. A third of all women living near conflict now reside there, and the regional total has grown fivefold since 2010 alone. Unlike shorter, more visible wars elsewhere, many of these conflicts have settled into decade-long stalemates: Nearly 9% of women in the region have now spent more than 10 years living in areas touched by armed violence, a duration that reshapes entire childhoods and careers rather than interrupting them briefly.

PRIO’s data suggests that the gap between visibility and scale is only widening as Africa’s conflicts deepen and the international mechanisms meant to respond to them continue to erode.

Siri Aas Rustad, PRIO’s research director and the report’s author, said conflict is now reaching more women than at any point since the end of the Cold War. “These figures are more than a measure of violence — they reflect millions of lives shaped by insecurity, disrupted healthcare, lost education, and fewer opportunities,” Rustad said.

The data is a combination of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s Georeferenced Events Dataset, population figures from Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network and the UN’s 2025 World Population Prospects. The report sets out to measure not just where wars are fought but who lives inside their blast radius. Their proximity to conflict increasingly means women navigating collapsing health systems, interrupted schooling, and eroding personal security rather than combat itself.

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The report links that exposure directly to measurable declines in women’s welfare. Countries with the heaviest concentrations of conflict-affected women also score substantially worse on the global Women, Peace and Security Index, a composite measure of women’s inclusion, justice, and security spanning more than 170 countries.

But the question of where the world’s attention goes and where its wars actually are runs through the report. Ukraine and Gaza have absorbed the overwhelming share of international media coverage and diplomatic energy in recent years, but PRIO’s data shows conflict spreading fastest across parts of Africa that rarely make international headlines.

Compounding the problem, PRIO’s researchers found, is a shrinking international response at precisely the moment when need is rising. New United Nations peacekeeping missions have become rarer even as conflicts multiply, and development assistance to fragile states has fallen sharply in recent years.

Meanwhile, arms transfers into some of the same conflict-affected regions have increased, a combination the report warns risks deepening instability rather than resolving it.

Rustad frames these findings as a warning rather than a fixed outcome. Reversing the trend, she argues, would require renewed international commitment to conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and multilateral cooperation.

Without that commitment, she warns, the number of women living in the shadow of war is likely to keep climbing.

The report offers no single policy fix, but argues that treating women’s exposure to conflict as a footnote to broader security statistics obscures a crisis now measured not in the thousands but in the hundreds of millions.

For now, the 756 million figure sits largely outside the frame of major diplomatic summits, overshadowed by conflicts that generate more coverage but touch fewer lives in aggregate.

Show Us the Receipts

At Inkstick, Tyler Hicks reports that Islamophobia “has become a fixture” of Texas politics ahead of the midterms, with Republican lawmakers warning of an “Islamic takeover” and the supposedly looming imposition of Sharia law. Hicks documents a shooting that pierced the windshield of Sabah Mooswi, a mother and community organizer, at the time she typically drove her son. There was also a stabbing in Austin, an attempted drowning of a three-year-old, and a 2025 total of more than 8,600 Islamophobic incidents reported to the Council on American Islamic Relations. That is the highest in nearly three decades. Muslim American candidate Shehla Faizi said the fear of retribution made it “hard for other Muslims to come to the forefront.”

Also at Inkstick, in a piece originally published by Responsible Statecraft, Mila Halgren and Alex Rewegan reveal that at least 30 US universities have conducted more than 70 research projects for the Israeli Ministry of Defense since 2009, spanning robotics, drone swarms, missile guidance, and surveillance. The projects were procured as defense sales under the Foreign Military Financing program, the same mechanism Israel uses to buy F-35 jets. Analyst Christian Sorensen explained that Israel used the money to “purchase goods and services from US war corporations and research from US academic institutions.” Some published papers omitted military uses disclosed in internal IMoD proposals, and Israel’s defense ministry declined to comment.

At The World, Manuel Rueda covers the hundreds of Colombians who have joined Ukraine’s army since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, drawn by wages that could reach $7,000 a month compared with Colombia’s roughly $500 average. Rueda profiles Jennifer Roman, whose brother Jhonatan disappeared in February during a mission in the Donbas region, one of nearly 450 Colombians who had gone missing while fighting for Ukraine, with 160 more missing on the Russian side. Human rights lawyer Carlos Ramirez said that recovering bodies is difficult because “it’s hard to retrieve corpses when they’re in disputed areas.”

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Critical State is written by Inkstick Media in collaboration with The World.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news, and insights from PRX and GBH.

Inkstick Media reports on how security decisions shape everyday life, following the money, power, and consequences of war.

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.