When refugees are neither here, nor there

Standing by a surveillance camera and a sign marked “Kriminalforsorgen” — Danish for “prison service” — I first notice Kia’s gray eyes. Then a look of surprise, if not disappointment, when I ask if he can show me around the Sjaelsmark deportation center. He had hoped instead for a chance to leave.
The 26-year-old ushers me to a dreary security checkpoint, where a guard checks my ID through a hatched glass window. She gives us each a simple form to fill out while she outlines the rules, saying visitors must always be accompanied and leave by 10 p.m. With that, Kia leads me inside the gates. I follow his broad shoulders and slow, purposeful gait.
An eerie silence saturates Sjaelsmark. Tucked away in the leafy countryside an hour north of Copenhagen, it was built as an army barracks at the onset of the Cold War in the 1950s, then decommissioned in 2004. Dozens of brown- and red-brick buildings line the inside of the fence like dominoes on a board, numbered and rundown, browbeaten by time and neglect.
Staff, distinguished by conspicuously red T-shirts, shuffle past and nod as we make our way down a cobbled path. “It’s not a prison,” Kia says, almost defensively, when I suggest it looks like one. He’s right; it’s not. But there is the metal fence surrounding us. There’s a young Black man in blue shorts jogging alongside it. And there’s a concrete yard, where two young men — who, like Kia, are from Iran — sit silently at one of several wooden picnic tables.
The men look toward us, attentively watching out of, perhaps, curiosity, or maybe just boredom. Movement, and those who are doing the moving, are tightly controlled at Sjaelsmark. The residents — refugees who have ended up here from all across the globe, from Ukraine to the Middle East and Central Africa, who have fled due to war, religious persecution and human rights violations — are tracked by electronic key tags, which let them into their rooms or, if they miss a curfew, lock them out. Breaking the rules can lead to a criminal conviction and time served in prison.
He leads me to Block 79, where he lives with a dozen others. Just as we are about to pass through the doorway, he turns around and abruptly apologizes. “The buildings are not very clean here,” he explains. We make our way past a communal bathroom caked in dust and mud. Cobwebs cover what the grime doesn’t.
Kia — who has requested to be identified by first name only — and the 200 or so other refugees who call Sjaelsmark home have not been accused or found guilty of any crime. However, their applications for asylum in Denmark have been rejected. “It could be that the authorities don’t believe part of the story and therefore they say there’s no risk (to remain in a home country),” says Eva Singer, director of the Asylum Department of the Danish Refugee Council. “It could also be that they believe the story but they say the risk … is not big enough.” But many of those in Sjaelsmark, she says, are what are known as “Dublin” cases. A result of the EU’s 2014 Dublin Regulation, the statute allows one EU country to refuse to process the application of a refugee who was first registered as a potential asylum-seeker in another EU country. Those seeking asylum often can’t be sent back either, as the countries they first reported to also refuse to accept them.
In the meantime, they stew in deportation centers like Sjaelsmark. When you exist between a home you can’t return to and a closed door to a fresh start, some, like Kia, are stuck with nowhere else to go.
Worldwide, refugee numbers have more than doubled in the past decade — from nearly 17 million in 2013 to over 43.4 million in 2024. We are in the midst of a crisis unlike anything known in recorded history. The global number of people forcibly displaced reached 120 million earlier this year. And increasingly, people find themselves leaving homelands that are no longer viable only to be faced with different, but still precarious and uncertain, circumstances that make settling impossible.
Currently, 76% of the world’s refugees are hosted by poor, low- and middle-income countries, and 85% of refugees live in what are considered developing regions, according to the International Rescue Committee. Countries in the Middle East and Africa — which take in the most asylum-seekers — are overwhelmed. The holes left behind in conflict-stricken nations are becoming too large for the rest of the world to patch. Even the doors to wealthy, progressive countries — like Denmark — are slowly closing. Resources are finite, they say, and the priority must be taking care of their own citizens.
In Denmark, unlike the United States, this rhetoric is inextricable from the country’s comprehensive social welfare program. Universal health care, generous unemployment benefits and robust social services all come at a cost. The system relies on a small population of 5.9 million Danes paying income taxes as high as 52% to keep the machine running. But while the United States and other countries have a lower tax burden, most still largely perceive refugees who can’t immediately contribute and integrate as a financial and social burden. If there’s no room left at the metaphorical inn, what happens to those who desperately need a place to stay?
Kia has nightmares. What would have happened if he hadn’t left Iran plays out in front of him, and he’s his own captive audience to the horrors that could have been. He sees “(the Iranian regime) executing me in front of my mother’s eyes.”
In the summer of 2022, Kia felt like his life was unfolding before him as he would have planned as a young Kurdish kid with big dreams. The eldest son of a middle-class family, he graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a university in the city of Mahabad, two hours away from his hometown of Sardasht. After graduation, he decided to move back to Sardasht — a small Kurdish city on the Iran-Iraq border — to be near his family.
Kia has always been close to his parents, his brother and his sister. During those years, they would travel every weekend to Shalmash Falls, a cluster of three waterfalls on the outskirts of town, for a family barbecue. There was joojeh kebab — skewers of cubed chicken slathered with saffron and grilled over glowing charcoal. Kia can close his eyes and remember his favorite, ghormeh sabzi, an herb-infused stew made hearty with meat and beans. Sometimes they’d play volleyball, or just laugh and talk, the mountains and their faces awash in the sun.
In between the warm moments, life can be hard for Kurds in Sardasht. The Iranian regime discriminates against Kurds because they are seen as an “existential threat” — partly due to religion — says Ahmad Mohammadpur, an Iranian Kurd and a professor of sociology at Bentley University in Massachusetts.
The most common religion among Kurds is Sunni Islam, a denomination that is the most common worldwide but is dwarfed in Iran by the more orthodox Shiite Islam. About 90% of Iranians practice Shiite Islam. Sunnis are discriminated against, often by acts of violence, including demolishing Sunni mosques, or prohibiting them from holding political office or positions of power unless they become Shiite. Kurds are passed on even for simple bank loans.
This sets a city of people who have endured generations of discrimination, and war crimes, back even further.
Known as the Second Hiroshima, Sardasht was the first city to witness a massacre of unarmed innocent civilians since World War II, when Saddam Hussein dropped four chemical bombs on June 28, 1987. More than 8,000 of the small population of 12,000 were wounded, and over 100 died.
In many ways, Sardasht has never recovered from that day, nor from the Iran-Iraq war, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. Thousands of land mines still litter the countryside, killing or injuring dozens every year and hollowing out a once-thriving agricultural industry. Like many Kurdish cities, it is devoid of investment from the Iranian regime, passed over in favor of the capital, Tehran, and other dominantly Persian regions. Today, Sardasht has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. After moving back to Sardasht, Kia couldn’t find work, despite his education.
Many young men of Kia’s age are pushed into what in Kurdish is known as “Kolbari” (porterage) as a means of survival — carrying deliveries of tax-free goods as heavy as 150 pounds on their backs across the dangerous Zagros Mountains that guard the Iran-Iraq border. There are estimated to be around 300,000 “kolbars” (smugglers) on the border, transporting millions of pounds of contraband. This year, nearly 400 have been shot by Iranian border forces, according to Iran International.
Iran is not a land of many choices for Kurds, and some, like Kia, have joined Komala — a left-wing political party that advocates for Kurdish self-determination. But the Iranian regime is quick to violently clamp down on dissent, particularly of the separatist persuasion. In 2023, at least 834 people were executed in Iran on dubious charges, some noted as “waging war against God” or “corruption on Earth.” The number of Kurds persecuted in this manner — particularly those who are registered with parties like Komala — accounts for a disproportionately high number of executions. Nearly half of the Iran regime’s political prisoners are ethnic Kurds, despite Kurds making up only 10% of the country’s total population. Kia would sometimes know those who were imprisoned or executed. “In a small city, everyone knows each other,” he says. He knew the risks of being affiliated with Komala, too. “When you are part of a Kurdish group, it’s dangerous. You know that something bad could happen.”
But nothing could prepare Kia for when he was told to leave the country. His heart sank, his body went numb. He was petrified. “They (the Iranian government) would have imprisoned me first, then tortured and executed me,” he says.
After being tipped off on his impending arrest, Kia made a plan. In the dead of night, he gave hasty goodbyes to his parents and siblings — unsure whether he’d ever see them again. With just the clothes on his back and a silver ring his brother gave him, he met the smuggler he’d arranged for, paid him $8,000, and was led away from his home and into the darkness.
Then, a blur. He doesn’t remember much of the next few days, just a loop of watching one foot fall in front of the other as he traversed the sky-grazing Zagros range along an invisible border more than 14,000 feet above sea level that held so much power — that of life and death — he could feel its weight. Then there was a safe house. Then another. He was transported between a string of cities across Turkey. Looking at a map, Kia still doesn’t know exactly where he was on any given day, or what his path would look like drawn out with waypoints. Smugglers don’t readily give out information during the journey. It’s too risky, with authorities from the EU continuously looking at ways to disrupt smuggling networks operating from Turkey, as well as Libya and other North African nations. Kia could have been a hazard to the operation, so his cellphone was confiscated and he was given no information about his journey or whereabouts. He sat, surrounded by strangers, uncertainty and silence. “You cannot ask anything. You have to have faith,” he says. “It’s the only way.”
One night, Kia found himself on the rocky Turkish coast — the point of his departure to cross the deadliest migration route in the world — the Mediterranean Sea. He traded glances with other refugees from countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Turkey — some loners like him, and others with their families. There was an undeniable tension as 100 strangers were told to board a 40-foot wooden boat to a shoreline unknown. A smuggler ushered them down into the boat’s hull. Cramped body to body, Kia could barely move in the mess of tangled legs. “No one can come out until we arrive,” the smuggler said from the deck. Then he closed the hatch.
In the corner of the hull were two toilets, one of which broke within the first few hours. It was hot. Sweaty. The stench quickly became unbearable. Over five days, he only ate a couple of apples. Fights broke out. Sometimes it was over the lack of space, other times it was over the lack of water. Then long bouts of silence. Kia sat, the boat rocking to and fro, wishing and hoping to make it to shore. He lost track of time and spoke to no one. “I was in shock, I had a lot of stress,” he says. But he didn’t regret his decision. “It was my only way out,” he said. “All I had was hope.”
What came to be known as Europe’s — and now the world’s — refugee crisis began in 2015, when more than 1.3 million people flocked to the continent from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, seeking refuge from violence, persecution, poverty and the effects of climate change. That year, at least 3,771 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea — including 800 deaths in a single shipwreck near Italy’s Lampedusa in April. A few months later, 71 people were found dead in an unventilated food truck, being smuggled near the Austrian capital of Vienna.
The influx threw Europe’s borders into bedlam. Emergency camps set up at common refugee landing points in Greece and Italy overflowed. Columns of desperate people filtered from country to country in their attempt to find a haven. The response from EU governments varied greatly. Germany accepted most of the refugees — over a million. Many others reacted by closing borders or tightening regulations. Denmark took in more than 20,000 — a notable number given its population of just below 6 million — although it accepted far fewer asylum-seekers than its neighbor, Sweden.
Since that year, Denmark — a country long touted as one of the world’s most progressive — has ushered in some of the world’s harshest policies for refugees. Current Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of the center-left Social Democrats has openly stated Denmark’s ambition to bring net migration to zero — bringing her government’s policies more in line with the country’s far right. This has included significantly tightening the criteria for granting asylum and regularly reviewing whether a refugee’s residency can be revoked. In 2019, the government deemed Syria’s Damascus region to be safe and notified 1,200 already-accepted refugees that their residency permits would be reviewed, and possibly revoked. Since then, 150 residency permits have been officially revoked, according to Reuters.
Chief in the country’s arsenal to deter asylum-seekers from coming to the country are its deportation centers. There’s Sjaelsmark, where Kia stays, and the former open prison Kærshovedgård — which former prison governor Bodil Philip says is now, as a center for asylum-seekers, “in many ways, more strict than it was” for convicted criminals.
The Danish government has been more explicit than most in saying that the conditions of these deportation centers are purposely unpleasant to pressure people whose asylum applications have been rejected, regardless of whether it is possible for them to deport or not. Inger Støjberg, former Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration, and Housing, said in 2016 that the deportation centers were meant to “make life as intolerable as possible” so that asylum-seekers self-elect to be deported back to their home countries.
Her statement ignited heated criticism over the legality and morality of the refugee detainment centers. A report from the Council of Europe Anti-Torture Committee, based in France, has criticized conditions, leading to the threat of legal action through the European Court of Human Rights for the prison-like conditions at the centers, a “carceral and oppressive” environment and “clearly inappropriate” material conditions, including rooms and sanitary facilities in a “deplorable state of repair.”
For the 500-or-so asylum-seekers still in Sjaelsmark and Kærshovedgård, many of whom are on “tolerated stay” and don’t leave out of fear of torture or execution in their home country, the wait to go “home” — wherever that is — can be interminable. “The Danish government accepts that they cannot return to their home country,” says former Danish prison governor Philip — who now works for the Danish criminal policy think tank Forsete. “They are in a limbo.”
This place — between danger and safety, the past and the future, acceptance and rejection — holds a liminal quality to it emotionally. Kia isn’t angry or scared or relieved or happy. He and the other residents have been at Sjaelsmark for such a long time he describes it as a void. “Because of our situation, nobody has any feelings.”
The sun beat down on a sandy beach off the coast of Italy, and, for the first time in weeks, Kia sighed in relief. It didn’t take long for Italy’s border police to swarm the group and march them to a nearby processing center.
When he was allowed to go, he met some fellow Iranians and another smuggler and was packed into the back of a cargo truck. Kia didn’t know where he was going. After a daylong journey, he was dropped off in a residential area. He asked some passersby where he was. “Copenhagen,” they answered. They gave him directions to Center Sandholm — the first stop for refugees in Denmark.
It was a clear night when he arrived in the fall of 2022. Staff greeted him and brought him to a clean room. When they handed him a phone, the first thing he did was call his family. It had been nearly a month since he had left. “I am alive, I’m in a good place,” he told them. His mother started crying. The call was short, and Kia was wary to give too much information in case it endangered them in some way. There was just one message that mattered for her to hear, and for him to hear himself say.
“I’m safe.”
Denmark’s decision to close its doors to refugees didn’t happen in a vacuum. “There’s a lot of political context and coincidences along the years that made Denmark the first country in Europe to go this way,” says Michala Clante Bendixen, who is the head of Refugees Welcome Denmark and editor of refugees.dk — a news site for refugees in Denmark.
Even in the early 1980s, as asylum requirements eased and expansive family reunification rights were established, an undercurrent of skepticism persisted. Danes worried that immigrants and refugees could drain their welfare system, one of the most generous in the world. In the 1990s, the Danish People’s Party (DPP) — a party that developed a staunch anti-immigration platform — ran on total refugee bans and deporting those in the country.
It was a convincing pitch for large parts of the Danish public, especially after the 2008 global recession and the accompanying European debt crisis. “Denmark’s welfare system is based on everybody paying a large part of their income in taxes,” Bendixen says. “It’s kind of a contract society, where you are part of a club and all the members of the club are supporting each other.”
Denmark’s income taxes rank fourth highest in the world, but education is free, even at the university level, where students are also given a stipend of $900 a month from the state. Parental leave is 32 weeks (with 24 weeks paid for by the state) and health care is free, among other benefits.
“So when new members apply — foreigners or refugees — we want them to pay, to contribute to the club like we do,” Bendixen says. “And very easily you get this suspicion that they’re just coming to exploit the system because the system gives you a lot of things for free.”
Bendixen explains that, at least compared to Denmark, going to America as a refugee is very different. “You have to pay your own way, find your own income,” she says. “But in Denmark, when you get a residence permit, you will have access to free education at the highest level, free government study grants … and free access to the health care system.” But residence permits for refugees are temporary, given for either one or two years at a time and can then be extended, or revoked, at any time. The amount of benefits granted to refugees is also roughly half of that given to Danes, with reduced child support and disability pension, for example. To benefit fully from the system, it’s a long eight-year wait before refugees can apply for Danish citizenship.
In 2015, the DPP found a foothold with concerns over Denmark’s stagnating economy and became the second-biggest party, taking 37 of the 179 seats in the Danish parliament during elections that year. It was a shock to Denmark’s political establishment. Since then, even parties on the Danish left have increasingly adopted the DPP’s restrictive views on refugees.
In 2019, the center-left party, led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, won the election on a plan to introduce the strictest immigration and refugee policies in Europe. Frederiksen used the same argument DPP made in the 1990s — that a generous policy betrayed the working class, and the increased presence of refugees endangers welfare — both the resources of social welfare programs and the safety of Danish citizens.
Frederiksen’s party has kept that energy, pledging that “the goal is zero refugees in Denmark.” In 2023, a total of 2,482 refugees applied for asylum, plummeting from 21,225 in 2015.
Denmark now leads a group of 15 EU member states calling for new ideas to lower migration to Europe, including advocating for partnerships with third countries if migrants can’t be sent back to their home countries. That idea — which Denmark enacted into law in 2021 with a plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda for processing, asylum and resettlement — has inspired other countries to try to do the same.
The United Kingdom, under the former right-wing Conservative government, attempted to enact its own Rwanda partnership. But that plan was sunk by the incoming U.K. Labour government due to multiple legal challenges. A similar fate befell Denmark’s plans, which were temporarily abandoned, although the government is still looking to revive them. “There is a need for new solutions that create a more humane and fair asylum system while addressing the significant consequences,” Kaare Dybvad Bek, the current Danish minister of Immigration and Integration, said last November.
At an international conference on immigration in Copenhagen in May, leaders met to discuss “durable solutions” and Denmark re-proposed the plan. This came on the tail of Italy announcing plans to build camps in Albania to house migrants trying to come ashore and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz indicating that he would be open to look into Italy’s deal. The United Nations Committee Against Torture, meanwhile, condemned the move, citing worries about the safety and rights of asylum-seekers.
Kia apologizes again as we enter his room in Sjaelsmark, which is small but tidy with two wooden beds separated by a shaggy, dark gray rug. He walks over to a black desk in the corner, pulls out two plastic chairs, and opens the window, which overlooks a small, abandoned playground. Families used to live here, but not anymore. Children at Sjaelsmark started showing signs of mental distress in 2018. Some refused to eat in the cafeteria, others had crying fits and disturbed sleep. A Danish Red Cross report found that as many as 61% of the children detained here were experiencing mental health issues serious enough to warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. In 2020, it was deemed unlawful to detain children in the center due to the poor conditions.
Kia also struggled with his mental health when he first arrived in Sjaelsmark in August 2023 and found out his application was rejected because his fingerprint was taken in Italy. He didn’t know at the time, but this automatically classified him as a Dublin case, the EU statute that determines which country is responsible for an asylum application. “(The Italian border force) just did it. They didn’t ask if I wanted to stay in Italy,” he says. But while the Danish government refuses to process his application for this reason, the Italian authorities also refuse to take him back. Faced with rejection and an indefinite amount of time spent in this deportation center, he slumped into a depression, barely leaving his room.
Kurds were historically and traditionally nomadic people before they became one of the world’s largest peoples without a state. The enforcement of national borders after World War I split the population apart. Today, there are an estimated 30 million to 45 million Kurds in the world, creating sizable minorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Searching for a sense of belonging and a place to call home has been the story of the Kurdish people in Iran and neighboring countries for a hundred years. So has rejection. “It goes back to 1925, basically to the rise of the modern state in Iran with Reza Pahlavi as the new Shah,” says Mohammadpur, the professor of sociology. “He basically declared non-Persian culture and non-Persian history as tribal, local and backward.” Kia wasn’t taught in his native Kurdish at school and was bullied. “They would say that I have no rights here and work for Persians,” he says. “That I don’t belong in this country.”
Now, the Danish government is telling him that he doesn’t belong in Denmark, either. “I thought that I could really make a new life for myself here in peace,” he says. Little did he know, he’d still be waiting for that chance over two years later.
But as we make our way to Center Sandholm, I notice a little spring in Kia’s step. Center Sandholm, the initial asylum processing center in Denmark, is a 30-minute walk from Sjaelsmark along a busy two-lane highway. Kia has walked or cycled this route nearly every day for the past few months while volunteering for the Danish Red Cross. The organization, as part of a contract with the government, helps operate both Sjaelsmark and Sandholm, as well as organize medical centers and various activities for residents. “It’s good to have that responsibility,” he says. He credits the volunteer job for getting him out of the depression he felt when he first arrived at Sjaelsmark.
“From my point of view, what we are lacking is the understanding that everybody wants to contribute,” Bendixen says. “And maybe we should help them to.” The argument that refugees are here to drain the welfare system is contradictory to current government policy that doesn’t allow refugees to begin working and supporting themselves until after their applications for asylum are processed. A state allowance of 136 KKR (roughly $19) is dispersed every two weeks to Kia and the other residents at Sjaelsmark, barely covering a coffee and a return bus ride from Copenhagen.
Some anti-immigration groups in the United States see Denmark as an example of international best practice. “Open-borders apologists usually portray mass migration as an unstoppable force that national governments are powerless to stop,” says Michael McManus, the director of research for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, in a post on the organization’s website. “However, Denmark has shown that good policies can and do reduce mass immigration and protect a country’s economy.” He added that America “can and must” look into “what can be applied in our own context.”
On the other hand, immigrants may be exactly what Denmark needs: The latest OECD Economic Survey suggests that Denmark’s aging population poses the greatest risk to the Danish social security system. Like other industrialized nations, Denmark’s birth rate has been dropping steadily since the 1960s, and the only demographic that is growing in the country are those 80 and older.
To manage its aging population, the government has rushed through measures to encourage longer working lives and address persistent labor shortages, especially in long-term care and digital service. “Easing obstacles to international recruitment in shortage areas would help,” the report adds.
If given a resident permit, Kia hopes to one day work at the center full time. He has a lot of experience, after all. “I can be a translator for refugees,” he says. “I see a lot of people like myself. They don’t have anyone. They don’t have anywhere. And I can help them.”
Inside Sandholm, we approach a group of two dozen newly arrived asylum-seekers in running gear. “These are my friends,” Kia says as he goes up to greet several of them. A Danish Red Cross employee, Rahid, approaches and invites both myself and Kia to join today’s activity — a 5K run around the surrounding countryside. Before long, two dozen of us set off.
The group is a mix of nationalities. Mehrtash, 32, is one of Kia’s friends and isn’t a fan of jogging. With short, black, curly hair and a bright red Barcelona tracksuit top, he brings up the rear. Mehrtash tells me he left his home country of Iran after getting involved in protests against the government last year, first living underground “like a ghost” for six months before escaping and, eventually making it to Denmark. Ivan, 40, is from the Kherson region of Ukraine. He left just two weeks ago, and hopes to soon reunite with his wife, who plans to join him in Denmark.
Inside Sandholm, Kia shows me where he makes coffee for the residents. He spends as much time here as possible. “I keep everything that makes me nervous in Sjaelsmark and come here to put my worries aside,” he says. “Sometimes it’s bothering me. I’m tired of the situation. But still, I have hope and I have to succeed. I will fight for that, never give up. Because this is my life.”
I see the verve fade with the sun. Every evening, Kia makes his way back to Sjaelsmark. The journey feels longer in this direction, heavier. The turnover at Sandholm means he may not see the same group next week, or even the next day, as people are moved to other camps or start their new lives in Denmark. He looks over at me, with eyes that flash the same conclusion I saw on that first sunny day. Something bright, then a fade to disappointment. “The only one who stays here every time is me.”
This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.