"Coming here from Belarus, this is like death!" This is the last message that Aleksandra Chrzanowska, a member of the Polish NGO Association for legal intervention, received from Olga. Since Saturday, September 11, she says she has received "no more news" from the young Congolese girl. All her text messages have remained unanswered and her calls have gone straight to voicemail.

For almost two weeks, Olga and nine other people have been wandering together in the Polish forest on the border with Belarus. All of them are from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), except for one from Cameroon. There are three other women with Olga, as well as a 16-year-old boy.

The first time Chrzanowska met them was near the Polish village of Szymki. The group had just crossed the border. "Some were exhausted, and they were all cold. One person was wearing sandals, one of the women was wearing just one shoe. No one had gloves or a blanket. That night it was only three degrees," she says. "The teenager was not well, he didn't really understand what was happening to him. You could really see the fear in his eyes."

No asylum applications filed

According to Chrzanowska, another woman, "lost consciousness and vomited a lot". The members of the association then contacted the emergency services, who took her to hospital.

A few minutes later, Polish border guards arrived on the scene. They put the remaining migrants in a vehicle and said they were taking them to a small building nearby, in Michalowo, to start the asylum application procedure. "We went ahead of them," says Chrzanowska. "After two hours, their car finally arrived. But, apart from a few guards, there was no one inside. And they wouldn't tell us where the migrants were."

The next day, she received a message from the group. They say they had been taken to an office, where the guards asked them many questions about their journey. "But no asylum applications were processed. There was an English interpreter, but only one of the migrants could communicate with them, and there was no one to translate the questions into French or Lingala," she says.

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After that, the border guards took the group a little further south to Nowosady and left them there. The migrants, joined in the morning by the migrant who had been hospitalized, spent the night in an abandoned house on the border, trapped between the Polish authorities on one side and the Belarusians on the other.

Illegal deportations

Practices like this are illegal under the Geneva Convention, which obliges Poland to receive and process asylum applications. But since August 20, the authorities have changed the regulations on border crossings, which changes the situation. The new text stipulates that from that date, migrants are now "obliged to leave the territory of the Republic of Poland."

In the case of illegal crossings, they will be "taken back to the state border" and "ordered to leave the country immediately." This means that only foreigners with a right of residence or a work permit can enter Poland. This effectively excludes asylum seekers, who obviously do not already have a residence permit.

Read more: Poland slams Belarus, sends extra troops to border

"Mr. Maciej Wąsik [the deputy head of the Ministry of Interior who initiated the measure, ed. note] wants to give himself and his services a pseudo-excuse for carrying out deportations prohibited by international law. This is more than simply a scandal, it is a violation of the prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment, as required by the European Court of Human Rights," said lawyer Eliza Rutynowska to the Polish newspaper Wiadomosci.

This rule gives the border guards complete freedom to turn back migrants. With the introduction of a state of emergency in this region on September 2, which prohibits anyone from approaching the border -- including activists and journalists -- the military have carte blanche. One of them, interviewed by the news website Onet Wiadomosci, said: "If people are spotted at the border crossing point where traffic is prohibited [...] they are sent back to the state border. The application of these provisions is mandatory."

'As in wartime'

At the border, it has become impossible for aid organizations to get in touch with the migrants and provide them with help. Near the village of Usnarz Górny, where a group of 32 migrants have been blocked for a month, only the Belarusian Red Cross is allowed. "Now it is impossible to reach the place where the refugees survive. The road is blocked by cars, officers do not let anyone pass, even locals. The border guards even asked the local farmer to plow 200 meters away," says the investigative media Oko press.

"A local woman told me that it was like wartime," said a member of the Polish association Fundacja Ocalenie. "There are big trucks full of soldiers with guns passing by all the time." The Belarusian border guards regularly post information on their website about the group, which is also caught between the authorities of the two countries. It was at this same place, on the edge of the woods, that the migrants were "abandoned", according to them, by "the Polish police, without any shelter, without anything," according to accounts collected by Fundacja Ocalenie.

Since September 1, more than 2,700 people have tried to cross the Polish-Belarusian border illegally, according to Polish border guards. Among them is also another group of 26 Syrian nationals, stuck in Terespol. In videos posted on social networks, the refugees, including five women and three little girls aged six, seven and 11, can be seen surrounded by Polish and Belarusian guards. It is possible to hear screams, cries, and the barking of the soldiers' dogs. According to a text message sent by one of the exiles to Association for Legal Intervention, the group has no food, and one bottle of water for 26 people.

The Polish authorities, on the other hand, have declared that they will "firmly protect the independence and sovereignty of the country", in a video published on Twitter, even if this means people "risk their lives". With no shelter, no water, no food, and temperatures that do not exceed five degrees, the migrants are risking their lives every night.