When refugees are neither here, nor there What happens to the millions of

tellem nobody gives a shit.

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.

When you exist between a home you can’t return to and a closed door to a fresh start, some are stuck with nowhere else to go.

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.
Kia, a Kurdish refugee who fled Iran and arrived in Denmark via Italy, requested that his full identity remain protected for this story. | James Walker for the Deseret News