Drivers Licenses

NAIROBI, Kenya — The family was startled awake by a loud bang in the middle of the night on the gate of their home on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Police officers barged in without a warrant, ransacking the living room and looking under the beds. They seized three members of the family, among them a 76-year-old, one-legged amputee yanked from bed while his sons begged to go in his place.

“They showed him no mercy even after he cried, ‘I am disabled and diabetic,’” said the man’s nephew, Kirubel, who would give only his first name for fear of reprisals.

The family is among hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Ethiopians belonging to the Tigrayan ethnic group who have been rounded up and detained in the capital and beyond in recent weeks.

routed the Ethiopian army in Tigray, swept south, recently captured two strategic towns and threatened to advance toward the capital.

On Nov. 2, the government declared a state of emergency, and the resulting roundups have swept up anyone of Tigrayan descent, many of whom had no ties to the rebels or even affinity for them. They were not just young men and women, but also mothers with children and the elderly, according to human rights advocates and interviews with nearly a dozen family members and friends of detainees.

They have been seized off the streets, in their homes and even in workplaces — including banks, schools and shopping centers — and taken to overcrowded cells in police stations and detention facilities.

Tigrayans have been targeted by the police based on a mix of hints: their surnames, details listed on identification cards and drivers licenses, even the way they speak Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia.

said Tuesday through a spokeswoman. “Its provisions are extremely broad, with vague prohibitions going as far as encompassing ‘indirect moral’ support for what the government has labeled ‘terrorist groups.’”

The ethnically motivated detentions come amid a significant rise in online hate speech, which is only adding fuel to the civil war tearing apart Africa’s second-most populous nation. Reports of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual assault by all sides in the conflict have undermined the vision of Ethiopian unity that Mr. Abiy, the prime minister and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, promised when he rose to power more than three years ago.

The war between Ethiopian federal forces and their allies and Tigrayan rebel fighters has left thousands of people dead, at least 400,000 living in famine-like conditions and millions displaced. It risks engulfing the whole of Ethiopia and the wider Horn of Africa.

Mr. Abiy’s determination to prosecute the war seems to have been only hardened by economic threats from the Biden administration, which has imposed sanctions on his military allies in neighboring Eritrea and suspended Ethiopia from duty-free access to the U.S. market.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who is traveling to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal this week, has expressed worry that Ethiopia could “implode.”

defend the capital “with our blood” even as African and Western envoys sought to broker a cease-fire.

Police officials have defended the arrests, saying they were seizing supporters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the country’s former dominant party, which Ethiopia now classifies as a terrorist organization.

Activists, however, say the state of emergency provisions are so nebulous that they give security officials unfettered latitude. The provisions allow for the search of any person’s home or their arrest without a warrant “upon reasonable suspicion” that they cooperate with terrorist groups.

Laetitia Bader, the Horn of Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said “the state of emergency is legitimizing and legalizing unlawful practices” and creating “a real climate of fear.”

Many ethnic Tigrayans say they now fear leaving home. Almost all those who agreed to be interviewed declined to be identified by name for fear that they might be arrested or face retaliation.

Insurance companies routinely check your credit when signing you up, so it was baffling that Progressive would have issued my wife a policy without her thawing her file. But it listed TransUnion as “the financial responsibility vendor” — an amusing euphemism if you know how long consumer advocates have been complaining because insurance companies use credit data to set rates — and sure enough, my wife’s frozen credit file indicated that Progressive had pinged it this month.

How? Incredibly, an exception often allows insurance companies to check your credit even if you want nothing to do with them. As we learned, that exception meant that Progressive could help itself to my wife’s file — which in turn helped someone pick the pocket of the State of New York and its taxpayers, like us.

In its wisdom, Progressive considered my wife responsible enough to warrant coverage. Fortunately for us, Mr. Pasternak was paying! The second page of our welcome packet said that “the authorization you gave for your first installment payment” was to come from a bank account with his name on it.

So meet our new best friend. With a name like Shiran Pasternak, he was a quick internet search away. Was he the thief? We wondered. But if he was, he was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. Like my wife, he had a “Welcome to Progressive” package and notes from the state about a mysterious unemployment claim that he had never filed. (The bank account and routing numbers in his Progressive packet were identical to ours, but neither had any connection to institutions where any of us do our financial business. Because the numbers were truncated, it was impossible to figure out if they came from a third person or were made up.)

Once we put all of that together, Mr. Pasternak — coincidentally a former New York Times employee — breathed a sigh of partial relief up in Irvington, N.Y., and let me push forward finding out what had happened to all of us.

Here’s how it works.

Automobile insurers — even the ones you don’t use — already know a lot about you. They share claims information among themselves to help weed out unprofitable or reckless customers who try to jump to another provider. They can also get access to your driver’s license number, your current auto policy data, and the make and model of your vehicle. Often, they buy this information from states (which end up sending money right back out when the buyers are careless and unemployment fraud proliferates).

The insurers want to make applying for a policy as easy as possible. So once you start entering information, they like to help you along and fill in some of those blanks for you. For some unfortunate victims, it was as simple for the scammers as copying down the driver’s license number that popped up, although it usually required more technical know-how.

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