With her collective Kotti Cares, Simsim Abdo supports undocumented migrants around Berlin’s Kottbusser Tor and builds relationships with global struggles for migrant justice. We spoke with Simsim about her work to learn more about the daily experiences of criminalization faced by migrant youth in Berlin. As she details, the harmful, racist impacts of the War on Drugs as it is waged locally and globally are on full display at Kottbusser Tor.

Justice Collective (JC): You work closely with young migrantized people around Kottbusser Tor, a so-called crime hotspot (kriminalitätsbelasteter Ort). How present are the police and punishment system in the lives of the young people you support and what kinds of interactions do they typically have with the police?

Simsim Abdo, Kotti Cares (KC): The boys are constantly experiencing the violence of getting stopped and arrested. A big part of policing is the spectacle. Boys are often arrested in front of onlookers in a very show-oriented way. Groups of officers gather them for searches in spots where the search is very visible to everybody. For young people, this is a very embarrassing situation. There are also broadcasters and journalists who follow police officers and record arrests. It becomes highly performative, almost like a display of force.

Berlin as a whole, and Kottbusser Tor in particular, are major destinations for tourism and partying. The police are careful not to target this crowd, as they want to avoid controlling tourists and party-goers. Instead, there is a constant “cat-and-mouse” game, with the police focusing on familiar faces for stops and searches. Even when these controls do not lead to arrests, repeated stops over time allow the police to gradually recognize who the boys are, along with their names and profiles. Because the police station overlooks most of Kottbusser Tor, it is easy to send officers downstairs. There are also undercover officers who pass on information to their colleagues and sometimes make arrests themselves.

JC: So is there a clear racial profiling aspect to who they decide to control and who they don't control at Kottbusser Tor?

KC: I think so. Most of the young people I work with, and most of those who get stopped, are non-white individuals. If you have a certain “look” — like a clothing style that also signals your class position — you are more likely to be stopped. I think there is a strong element of racial profiling affecting Arab men from a certain social class. Arab men who speak French or English or who are seen as “better integrated” don’t get stopped there. So it’s a mix of classism and racial profiling.

JC: Kottbusser Tor is often framed as a dangerous area with a lot of drug-related offenses, and it is also a historically migrantized neighborhood. We argue that drug prohibition is often used to control racialized communities. How do you see this War on Drugs logic relating to the criminalization of undocumented people?

KC: The framework of the War on Drugs is similar everywhere: it has historically been used to target migrantized people, but also to break migrant communities and political movements. When Palestinians and Arabs came in the 1970s and ended up with a temporary toleration status (Duldung), they could not study or work or do anything. Drugs then filled these spaces, and people took up highly criminalized labor.

In Berlin, the War on Drugs is especially selective. It is a city where drugs are everywhere. Everyone takes drugs. But it does not affect everyone’s lives in the same way. In places like Berghain and similar clubs, you see an open exchange of drugs all the time. I think it is a racialized thing, but also a class thing, in the sense that undocumented young people are constantly stopped and searched by police in specific public places and neighborhoods like Kottbusser Tor, while similar behavior in more middle- and upper-class nightlife spaces is not policed in the same way.

JC: What do you see as the main reasons that some people have to rely on illegalized survival strategies?

KC: There are multiple structural conditions that push young people into these survival strategies, and they are deeply interconnected. Many of the people I work with come from countries that are classified as “safe third countries” (sichere Herkunftsstaaten), which makes their chances of receiving asylum extremely low. Even when they receive some form of temporary toleration status (Duldung), it is often very short-term and unstable.Their daily lives are also heavily regulated. Access to social welfare requires constant physical presence at administrative offices, and housing conditions are often highly restrictive. Many are placed upon their arrival in remote accommodation in rural areas where they experience isolation and racism, which they often try to leave as quickly as possible. On top of this, many of the young people arrive in Europe as minors and move through several countries before reaching Germany. They may go through Spain, Belgium, France, or Switzerland, often spending time living on the streets or in extremely precarious conditions. By the time they arrive in Berlin, they have often already experienced multiple forms of exclusion and criminalization.

In this context, formal employment is rarely accessible. Some have limited or no education, many are not literate in any of the languages they encounter, and they are navigating systems they do not understand. Even when work permits are theoretically attainable, in practice there are many barriers that make them inaccessible. As a result, survival strategies such as begging, theft, or selling drugs become the only viable ways to generate income. These are not chosen alternatives to work, they come from a lack of any realistic legal or institutional options.

JC: We have documented the disproportionately harsh application of criminal law against racialized and migrantized people, including overuse of pretrial detention and prison. How do these forms of punishment impact young people’s lives, particularly their futures, safety, and ability to remain in Germany?

KC: A lot of the young people I work with go to pretrial detention. Until now, I have never worked with a young person who got sentenced to prison without being held pretrial. Being in pretrial detention is horrible because you do not have a court date. If they are not caught with something obvious like drugs, it is often unclear to impacted people why they were arrested or where the accusations came from. We had a boy who went to jail last August, got sentenced in October or November to eight months [in prison]. We thought that his sentence was almost over, but it turned out to be eight months from the court date. So there is a lack of clarity and a sense of arbitrariness.

When they get out, they are missing all of their belongings because they have been confiscated: no phone, no clothes, no shoes. One boy had a jacket he loved, and it was taken and never returned. He still cannot get over it. Once released, the young people usually go back to Kotti because that is where people they know are. They try to rebuild their lives.

There are social programs after jail, but the boys associate them with the establishment. The psychological damage of being detained is irreversible. A boy who was very sweet and caring can come out very angry, traumatized, and hopeless. Therapy is also difficult because it requires insurance and is institutionally structured in a way that is not suitable for marginalized people. Where there are existing institutional programs, it is very hard to get young people to go there if they feel too “official”. There are many steps before they can even think about joining educational programs or language courses. So there is a lot of work to be done to make support truly accessible to this group.

JC: You also publish fictionalized stories to raise awareness about the criminalization of young migrantized people. What do you hope readers take away from these stories?

KC: I write them because I think the first step is integrating the boys into existing migrant communities. They are also criminalized and stigmatized within migrant communities, so my series targets those diasporas and activist communities, people who are already engaging a bit with these spaces. I find that people have a very fixed image of the boys who hang out at Kotti, and almost everyone in Berlin claims to know who they are. But people are not really curious about their lives and why they end up at Kottbusser Tor. If you are yourself from a migrant community and you see these young people all the time, why not stop and have a conversation?

Openness from existing migrant communities would solve many problems: newer migrants could meet different people, have broader contacts, and get out of a very homogeneous peer group. I want people to read more about these realities and to stop when they see a young person bullied by the police. Even if they do not intervene, they can just stand by and show that they are watching. If there are more people watching, the police are more likely to leave or treat the boy more humanely.

Simsim Abdo is a Berlin-based writer and activist, supporting migrant communities impacted by criminalization. She organizes with Kotti Cares, a collective that supports undocumented migrants locally and is building relationships with global struggles for migrant justice.