They Came to Help Migrants. Now, Europe Has Turned on Them.

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android . On a cold night in February 2018, Sara Mardini and Seán Binder sat in a jeep on the rocky headlands of Lesbos, their eyes on the water. As volunteers for Emergency Response Center International, a small humanitarian aid group, Mardini and Binder were looking for signs of incoming migrant boats, so they could alert the Greek coast guard and search-and-rescue groups to dispatch assistance. They made an unlikely pair: Binder is a soft-spoken Irishman, with broad shoulders and a mop of black hair; Mardini, a Syrian refugee with a nose ring and a preference for leather jackets. But they shared an easy camaraderie, bound by their playful energy and a fiercely serious devotion to their work. Just a few years earlier, Lesbos, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey, became the center of the European migrant crisis, serving as the point of landfall for more than 500,000 of the approximately 1 million asylum seekers who reached Europe by sea in 2015. Now, even as the world's attention had moved on, the crisis on Lesbos remained. Migrants continued to arrive, although… Read full this story

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