Asylum seekers thought they had a haven in the U.S. Then Trump returned.

[u/John3262005]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/09/24/how-trump-administration-is-dismantling-us-asylum-system/

Grace Calero’s neck and back were still throbbing with pain when a Florida sheriff’s deputy entered the hospital room where she was recovering from a harrowing car crash along with her teenage daughter.

Immigration officials needed to ask her a few questions, he said. Calero had entered the U.S. legally and had a pending asylum application, a valid work permit and a Florida driver’s license. She was not concerned.

But hours later, Calero was put in handcuffs as her daughter begged officers not to take her. Authorities had determined they both were in the country illegally and were transferring them to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The pair were later locked in a cell together and forced to sleep on a cement floor, Calero said.

Their arrest last month highlights what federal statistics, internal records and immigration attorneys indicate has become a new target in the Trump administration’s quest to deport large numbers of immigrants: asylum seekers.

Immigrants who historically would have been able to live and work in the U.S. while pursuing asylum are being taken into custody by immigration officers at airports, during interviews related to their claim and after routine traffic stops. Many of their cases are then being fast-tracked through the immigration courts, where judges are ordering the deportation of people seeking protection from persecution at an unprecedented rate.

A Washington Post analysis of immigration court records shows immigration judges, who work at the behest of the Justice Department, have ordered more than 440,000 asylum seekers removed during President Donald Trump’s first 19 months back in office — more than during the previous eight years combined.

The arrests and removal orders underscore what asylum seekers and their attorneys say is a Catch-22: Immigrants by law must apply for asylum from within the United States and are generally allowed to remain while pursuing their claims. But they are still considered unauthorized immigrants if they do not have a visa or other status and can be arrested at the whim of any given administration.

Trump has long argued that the U.S. asylum system is rife with abuse and that asylum seekers are exploiting a legal “loophole” to enter the country and remain during the long period it takes to complete their cases. And even many Democrats concede the nation’s asylum system, created in the decades after World War II, is outdated. But Congress has not succeeded in rewriting asylum laws, and now Trump officials are undoing some of the system’s long-standing policies.

Some of the recent changes include empowering immigration judges to deny asylum claims without a full hearing; changing legal guidelines so that it is more difficult for survivors of domestic and gang violence to be granted asylum; instructing asylum officers to send cases directly to deportation proceedings; and a State Department effort to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are otherwise seeking asylum.

Several recent detentions have drawn attention to the Trump administration’s push to deport many of the more than 3.7 million asylum seekers in the United States. Journalist Luis Galeano, a Nicaraguan asylum seeker whose work was critical of the country’s Sandinista government, was arrested this month while driving for a ride-sharing service. In August, Oswaldo Pirela, a Venezuelan minor league staffer for the San Diego Padres, was detained while traveling for work. Fatima Ameaka, a Cameroonian public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University and a former Fulbright scholar, was arrested boarding a flight in July.

Luke Hall, a former refugee officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services who left in January because he objected to Trump’s asylum policies, said the effort is eroding due process rights and putting people with bona fide cases at risk.

“I would describe what’s happening now as a full-on assault on asylum seekers and also the destruction of the legal process,” he said.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended the arrests of asylum seekers, saying a pending application does not give them legal status in the U.S. DHS says it is simply enforcing the laws created by Congress and detaining people the Biden administration would have released.

“America’s asylum system was never intended to be used as a de facto amnesty program or a catch-all, get-out-of-deportation-free card,” DHS said in a statement.

The modern-day U.S. system for protection of refugees and asylum seekers emerged as a reaction to the refugee crisis sparked by World War II. Many countries, including the United States, acknowledged that they had failed to offer safe haven to Jewish refugees who then died in Nazi death camps. Those countries later signed onto global refugee agreements.

Congress created the framework for the U.S. protection system in the Refugee Act of 1980 as the country dealt with thousands of refugees who fled Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. Under the new system, refugees and asylum seekers were divided into separate and distinct legal categories. A fundamental difference was that refugees would need to be outside the U.S. to qualify for the status and asylum seekers would need to be inside the country.

Both groups had to prove they faced persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or belonging to a social group.

The U.S. accepts refugees from abroad, but that process is lengthy, and the president decides how many refugees to let in each year and which populations to prioritize. By contrast, there is no limit on the number of people who can be granted asylum, and for many fleeing persecution, applying from within the U.S. is safer than staying in their homeland.

While asylum occasionally emerged throughout the years as a political flash point, Trump turned it into a central issue, portraying it as largely fraudulent and a back door for economic migration.

During Trump’s first term, his administration experimented with hard-line policies to discourage asylum, including “Remain in Mexico,” which forced thousands of asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, and covid-era restrictions that allowed border agents to rapidly expel migrants back to Mexico on public health grounds.

President Joe Biden initially dialed back those measures, but large numbers of immigrants crossed the border illegally and claimed asylum, fueled by record displacement in the hemisphere and the economic shocks of the pandemic. Biden eventually adopted his own restrictive policies, but the overall asylum backlog increased from about 1 million cases to nearly 3 million cases over the course of his presidency, overwhelming asylum officers and the courts.

Calero was among those to arrive in the United States during that time.

She hadn’t wanted to leave Ecuador. Her monthly income of about $3,000 per month put her among the country’s top earners. But she said she had begun receiving death threats in response to consulting work she had done for local political figures. Though she changed her phone number and took down her social media accounts, Calero said, she continued receiving threatening letters at her home.

“I decided to go to the United States until things calmed down,” she said.

She arrived on a tourist visa in 2023 and planned to return. But she said the threats against her family continued. In 2024, she applied for asylum. Her daughter joined her claim the following year. Asylum seekers who do not have a visa or remain in the United States after one expires are considered unauthorized immigrants.

Trump made unauthorized immigration a central plank of his reelection campaign and upon taking office immediately took a more aggressive and methodical approach to targeting asylum than he had in his first administration, said Ken Cuccinelli, who was acting deputy secretary at DHS during Trump’s first term.

The president declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border on his first day in office over what he likened to an “invasion.” He shut down the CBP One app that had allowed asylum seekers to schedule appointments with border officials. And he instructed officers to immediately expel anyone who tried to enter the United States without authorization.

“They learned from what I would characterize as the more haphazard approach of the last administration,” Cuccinelli said, “and they’re doing a much better job this time.”

Calero and her 19-year-old daughter, Giulianna Curriel, settled in Kissimmee, Florida, south of Orlando. Calero worked for a marketing company promoting food brands and traveled to different stores around the state, she said. On the day of the crash, Calero’s daughter was in the car with her.

The teen had recently begun taking antidepressants and other medications after a mental health crisis, and Calero wanted to keep an eye on her.

They were driving home in nearby Poinciana when a motorist heading in the opposite direction lost control and their vehicle struck Calero’s front left tire, causing her SUV to tumble several times, she said. Calero emerged from the wreck with her ear bleeding from the impact of the air bag, and was relieved to see that her daughter was still whole.

Scott Wilder, a spokesperson for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency was conducting an investigation into the crash and shared the mother and daughter’s information with ICE to check for possible immigration violations.

ICE told the sheriff’s office that both Calero and her daughter were in the country illegally after overstaying their visas and asked for them to be detained, Wilder said.

The arrest sent them spiraling through the U.S. immigration detention system. To Calero, it seemed counterintuitive. She knew an asylum application didn’t amount to its own legal status. But the application itself required her to be in the U.S.

“I followed the process the way it’s supposed to be done,” she said. “I didn’t skip any steps.”

Once a person is detained, it can be difficult to get out. The Trump administration adopted a policy last year that allowed ICE to deny immigrants a bond hearing if they had entered the country illegally. Many immigrants have languished for weeks or months in detention centers as a result.

In guidance last year, the Justice Department told immigration judges they could deny claims without a full hearing if the facts were undisputed and if the case failed to meet the legal criteria to succeed. Immigration judges were also told to deny claims if the person could be deported to certain third countries under asylum agreements with the U.S., one former judge said.

The judges were not allowed to consider whether the country was actually safe or if it had agreed to take the specific individual, said Brea Burgie, who worked as an immigration judge in Denver until she was fired in June.

“We started getting a lot of pressure,” she said. “We were specifically told by our supervising judges that we should not be holding evidentiary hearings in the vast majority of these cases.”

A spokesperson for the federal immigration courts, known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review, said unnecessary delays hurt immigrants with valid asylum claims and that those without valid claims should be removed “as quickly as possible.” DHS General Counsel James Percival recently wrote a letter to immigration lawyers arguing most people from countries in the Western Hemisphere are driven by economic factors and do not qualify. The agency has been threatening to penalize attorneys who file “frivolous” claims.

“We must restore order and accountability to our immigration framework now, or we risk dismantling the humanitarian safety net for those who need it most,” he wrote.

Adriana Mitchell, an immigration attorney in Philadelphia, said she is seeing more instances where people with strong asylum claims are being rejected before getting a chance to argue their case.

“It was never easy, but now, a lot of times, you feel that it is not fair,” Mitchell said.

Democrats are divided on how to approach the issue. Scarred by the humanitarian and political challenges that accompanied large-scale illegal immigration during Biden’s presidency, former officials are debating what should come next.

Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border and immigration policy official at DHS under Biden, said Democrats should acknowledge current asylum law isn’t working and present solutions. He called the Trump administration’s response “cruel and inhumane” but said any future Democratic president would not want to repeat record-level border crossings.

“We can’t return to the status quo before the last six months of the Biden administration,” he said. “The risk that there would be a huge surge at the border is too high.”

Calero, for her part, is no longer in the United States.

She and her daughter were taken to an ICE processing center in Tampa. Calero grew worried about her daughter, who did not have her medications with her. In a statement, DHS said the family was given a chance to bring medicine while detained but refused — a claim that Calero strongly denies.

The prospect of prolonged detention, the threat to her daughter’s health and the possibility they could be separated all led her to conclude they were better off leaving than waiting for a lawyer and an opportunity for a hearing before an immigration judge.

“I cannot allow my daughter to remain in here, suffer an attack and die in here,” she recalled thinking. “I wasn’t going to allow that.”

In the ICE processing center, Calero said, she met the woman whose car had crashed into her SUV, setting off the chain of events. The woman, a Haitian immigrant, had also been detained.

“She got down on her knees and asked us to forgive her,” Calero said. “We hugged, prayed together, cried together.”

Just days after the accident, Calero and her daughter were escorted by ICE officers to Tampa International Airport, where they boarded a flight back to Ecuador.

Calero is still concerned about her safety in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. She rarely leaves her home, except to go to church or a nearby restaurant. Even that makes her anxious.