Before dawn on August 25th, Rafi jolted awake to the sounds of police outside Spirou Trikoupi, a building where he was squatting, in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia. A muscular twenty-eight-year-old from Kabul, Rafi had been an interpreter for the U.S. military. In 2015, he made the punishing journey across Iran, Turkey, and the Aegean Sea, until he found himself in Exarchia, where anarchists and refugees were transforming abandoned buildings into self-organized sanctuaries. For two and a half years, Rafi had lived alongside ninety Eritreans, Iranians, Afghans, and Kurds, at Spirou Trikoupi, “like a family,” he said.

That morning, Rafi peered out his window. Police had massed on both sides of the street. He sat calmly on his bed, and listened to the clang of the bolt cutters on the locks. After a few minutes, Greek police, wearing black, with their faces covered, stormed in. Rafi recalled that when they entered the room, they pointed their guns at his head. Police herded the residents into vans, and then into police headquarters. The families waited hours without food; police demanded money for water. “When we asked what the fuck was going on, they told us, ‘Be quiet! Sit!’ ” Rafi said, mimicking their shouts. Late that night, police took the refugees to a hotel. After a few more days, they were sent to camps around Greece.

Rafi had been dreading this day since June, when Kostas Bakoyannis, a member of the right-wing New Democracy Party, was elected mayor of Athens. Bakoyannis had promised to bring law and order to Exarchia, and after taking power he quickly announced a five-year, ten-million-euro plan to subdue the neighborhood. Traditionally, police had stuck to Exarchia’s periphery, but Bakoyannis stationed police officers at major intersections in the neighborhood. Then he sent workers, guarded by riot police, to tear down banners, clean graffiti, and plant weedy shrubbery in Exarchia Square. Other incursions followed: friends told me about the beating of a bartender, and a late-night police raid on K-Vox, a squatted café and radical social center, that left the windows shattered and the interior filled with tear gas.

Spirou Trikoupi was the first squat that police raided. Over the next two months, they shut down at least seven more squats in or near Exarchia. The details of the raid that Rafi described were repeated: doors broken in before dawn, guns drawn, rooms ransacked, families herded onto buses, with the undocumented locked in closed detention centers, and those with papers shunted into far-off camps.

The rise of anti-immigrant politics in Athens was only the latest development in more than a decade of political reactions and counter-reactions in Greece, beginning with the 2007 debt crisis and the European Union-imposed austerity that followed. In 2015, voters cast their ballots for the center-left party Syriza, which promised to stop austerity and stand up to the E.U. Though Syriza won the election, it failed on both counts. Meanwhile, more than a million migrants and refugees arrived in boats and rubber rafts on the beaches of Grecian islands; around seventy thousand remain in the country. A month after Bakoyannis won in Athens, New Democracy dominated snap national elections, after running on a series of simple promises: to fix the economy, bring back law and order, and halt the arrivals of refugees. The new Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (an uncle of Bakoyannis), has vowed to deport ten thousand people by the end of 2020. In his first week in office, Mitsotakis banned immigrants from receiving social-security numbers and merged the Ministry of Migration with the Ministry of Citizen Protection. For refugees and immigrants in Greece, the party posed an immediate threat. “When New Democracy came to power, they wanted to separate people,” Rafi told me. “They broke community.”

In Athens, the neighborhood of Exarchia is synonymous with solidarity. For nearly a century, artists, writers, and activists have made their homes there, drawn by the nearby Polytechnic University. In 1941, the communist National Liberation Front was founded on Mavromichalis Street to resist the Nazi occupation. In 1944, these same guerrillas traded bullets with the British Army during the bloody days of the Dekemvriana, when the United Kingdom sought to suppress the rise of communism in newly liberated Greece. In 1973, an uprising at the Polytechnic University helped take down Greece’s military junta. In 2008, police murdered a teen-ager named Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the leafy intersection of Mesolongiou and Tzavella Streets; the neighborhood riots each year on the anniversary of his death. Rocks fly one way, tear-gas cannisters the other.

For nearly a century, artists, writers, and activists have made their homes in Exarchia.

Today, Exarchia is a graffiti-bedecked anarchist stronghold, home to squats, cafés, bookstores, and social centers—to the self-managed Navarinou Park, where, in 2009, anarchists wrested gardens from a broken concrete parking lot, and to Steki Metanaston, the twenty-year-old bar founded by leftist organizers and immigrants. Because police seldom ventured beyond Exarchia’s outskirts, and anti-fascist groups have made the neighborhood a no-go zone for members of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, Exarchia’s streets have also long been an oasis for immigrants without papers. After the mass arrival of refugees in 2015, anarchists teamed up with migrant activists, to provide refugees with a roof over their heads while they waited for smugglers to help them reach the German promised land. In the years since, thousands of refugees lived in squats in and around the neighborhood. Walid, an undocumented Afghan man, told me, “Exarchia is a super-nice place. It is peaceful for me here—there is no one to arrest me.”

Recently, drug cartels began to take advantage of this freedom. Cartel leadership was largely European, but many of the dealers who worked Exarchia Square were impoverished men from North Africa and the Middle East. Ecstasy, weed, and cocaine were the drugs of choice, sold to European tourists by youths with frayed nerves and elaborately jelled hairdos. When I stayed at a hotel off the square last year, fights between rival gangs woke me up most nights. Conservative media blurred together the figures of anarchist, refugee, and dealer into a spectre of degeneration. An article in EleftherosTypos, written after the Spirou Trikoupi raid, described raids on squats and raids on drug dealers as part of a single effort to “limit the phenomena of delinquency and drug trafficking.”