When Europe opened its borders to Syrian and other refugees in 2015, Tímea Kovács was at the front line. At night, she was at the Szeged railway station, just inside Hungary’s border with Serbia, meeting with refugees anxious to learn the steps required to seek asylum. The next morning, she’d be in the immigration office and the courtroom, representing scores of asylum seekers each day. “She was hardly able to sleep more than three or four hours a day,” says Erno Simon, Hungary spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who was working with the new arrivals in the border city then and couldn’t go anywhere without running into Kovács.
In other words, she’s exactly the kind of person who Hungary’s increasingly nativist government had in mind when it drafted its latest “Stop Soros” anti-immigration law.