Asylum not found: Why Russians are being deported from the United States

The practice of detentions continued under the Trump administration as well. According to immigration lawyers, once people are placed under arrest, their chances of being released and of having their asylum applications approved drop dramatically. This is due both to the way immigration judges view those detained at the border and to the difficulty of obtaining legal assistance, especially if migrants have no relatives or acquaintances at liberty who could help find an attorney.

As Nikolaeva notes, people in migrant detention centers often waive their right to appeal because it is “inevitably associated with several more months, or even years, of waiting for results. People who are free do not face this problem — they can continue living and working while the appeal is under review.”

Under Trump, the option to apply for asylum directly at the border was also eliminated, and the CBP One app that refugees previously used to schedule an appointment at a border crossing in order to request asylum is now used only to arrange migrants’ self-deportation.

In addition, to reduce the number of potential asylum seekers, an expedited deportation procedure was introduced. If immigration officers determine during the interview that a migrant has failed to demonstrate a risk of potential persecution in their home country, the person is immediately deported — without access to an immigration court.

As a result, the number of people attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in an open manner has fallen sharply. “Compared with several thousand refugees a day under Biden, the number of people seeking asylum has now dropped by several times, to the hundreds per day. Russians make up an extremely small share of them,” Dmitry Valuev explains.

However, some immigration lawyers believe that the authorities may be deliberately understating the statistics on crossings. “The figures are, of course, significantly lower than they were before. But people are still continuing to cross the border,” says Nikolaeva.

In search of asylum

There is also no information on what share of deported Russians were asylum seekers. It is known that since the beginning of 2022, Russian citizens have filed more than 15,000 such applications, of which around 72% were approved in the period up to mid-2024 — one of the highest rates among all nationalities. However, starting in the final months of Biden’s tenure, the share of approved applications began falling towards its current level of 46%, while the share of denials rose to 32%.

According to Valuev’s observations, immigration courts have increasingly been issuing decisions on asylum seekers from Russia that “completely ignored the existing threats these people face in their home country — such as criminal cases, inclusion on Rosfinmonitoring’s list of extremists and terrorists, and placement of these people in wanted databases.”

Attorney Lia Djamilova has also observed a rise in such cases: “Right now I see many Russians who clearly qualify for asylum — it was created for people like them. But they are still denied. I have a feeling that you could be Navalny in an immigration prison in America, and you would still be denied.”

Such denials sometimes force migrants to take extreme measures. Yulia Nikolaeva cites the case of a husband and wife who were held in different detention centers. Both lost their cases, after which the husband wanted to waive his appeal in order to be deported to Russia more quickly and arrested there — his hope was that the American court would then understand the danger his wife faced and approve her appeal to remain in the U.S.

Again, rather than representing a campaign targeting Russians, the current developments appear to be part of a larger trend under Trump 2.0. Approval rates for asylum applications in general fell to 14% in 2025. Over the previous three years, it had averaged 28%.

The White House has already dismissed dozens of immigration judges whom the authorities believe granted asylum too liberally (even as migration agencies are actively advertising on social media for new hires). “Naturally, those who approved asylum applications more often than others are being fired. Right now, you can count on one hand the judges with a high approval rate,” Lia Djamilova says.