How does asylum work? And what has changed?

On this episode, we’re talking about the history and evolution of United States’ refugee and asylum policy. We have been a country of exclusion for about as long as we’ve projected the image of a democratic refuge. We talk about what it actually takes to secure refugee or asylum status in the U. S. and how that gargantuan task has been made so much more difficult, if not impossible for some, under the second Trump Administration. This episode features Dr. Georgie Pisano. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hannah McCarthy?

  On December 2 of 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memorandum. The subject? "A Hold and Review of All Pending Asylum Applications and All USCIS Benefit Applications Filed by Aliens From High-Risk Countries."

• 0:17Speaker 01

  There's a temporary halt for people coming in from countries like Afghanistan. And in a cable obtained by The New York Times, the State Department has issued orders to the embassy.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Asylum decisions are being halted. This means any asylum seekers attempting to flee persecution in their country, they'll now not be granted access into the U.S.

• 0:35Speaker 03

  He's also promising to expel millions of immigrants already here, revoking their legal status.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Wednesday's attack by an alleged Afghan national, President Trump is calling for a stricter crackdown on U.S. immigration.

• 0:45Speaker 04

  These are people that do nothing but complain. They complain. And from where they came from, they got nothing.

• 0:57Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:59Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nikita DiJang.

• 1:01Hannah McCarthy?

  And today, per usual, I am trying to figure out what is going on. So we're going to be talking about the history and evolution of United States refugee and asylum policy. We have been a country of exclusion for about as long as we have projected the image of a democratic refuge. We'll talk about what it actually takes to secure refugee or asylum status in the U.S. And how that gargantuan task has been made so much more difficult, if not impossible for some, under the second Trump administration. Stay tuned.

• 1:46Speaker 06

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• 2:17Speaker 07

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• 2:47Hannah McCarthy?

  Today on Civics 101, we are covering refugee and asylum policy in the United States, namely what those terms mean, what it takes to achieve that status, and how far out of reach this has all become in the past year. And to get there, per usual, I spoke with someone who knows a lot more than I do.

• 3:06Speaker 08

  My name is Georgie Pisano-Guetz. I'm a practicing immigration attorney down in Texas, and I'm also an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

• 3:15Nick Capodice?

  So if Georgie is a practicing immigration lawyer, does that mean she actually works with asylum seekers?

• 3:22Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but before we get to the seeking part, Nick, do you know what asylum means?

• 3:28Nick Capodice?

  Generally, it is when something or someone keeps you safe from something else or somewhere else.

• 3:39Hannah McCarthy?

  That's a start.

• 3:40Speaker 08

  So when students are coming, registering for a class in asylum law, what they're learning about is the protection that the US and other signatories to the Refugee Convention offer to individuals who are fleeing their home countries from persecution. So they're learning what protections are available to individuals who have suffered an extreme level of harm in their home country to the extent that they no longer feel safe remaining there.

• 4:04Hannah McCarthy?

  So those are the basics. Someone has experienced harm where they are, and they want out. And the United States has a process for that, ostensibly.

• 4:13Speaker 08

  We actually derive it from something called non-refoulement, which is a French word that I'm definitely butchering, but it means no return. And so it just means that it's a commitment that if an individual is fleeing a country where they're being harmed, usually their country of origin, that the nations that are a party to this agreement refuse to return that individual to their home country. Asylum goes one step further and gives them a path to citizenship and some other benefits within the country that they choose to resettle in.

• 4:44Nick Capodice?

  All right. And before we sink our teeth into what that actually looks like, or I guess looked like, will maybe look like again, in the United States. Hannah, can we do the briefest of histories here? Because Georgie mentioned the US signing a convention, which is, in this case, an international agreement. But from what I know about the immigration system in the United States, we must have been a little late to the international part of the game.

• 5:11Hannah McCarthy?

  That we were, Nick. Do you want to remind the people of your bona fides?

• 5:14Nick Capodice?

  I do. So I worked at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for about nine years.

• 5:20Hannah McCarthy?

  I have been there only once, and it made my archive slash Nancy Drew mystery-obsessed heart sing. I cannot recommend it enough.

• 5:26Nick Capodice?

  Me either. Highest recommendation possible. While I was working there, I learned a ton about immigration. And for the purposes of this episode, I learned how the United States has responded to foreigners during and after global disaster.

• 5:41Hannah McCarthy?

  Which is?

• 5:42Nick Capodice?

  Which is, over and over again, we walked back the whole tired, huddled masses thing.

• 5:51Nick Capodice?

  During World War I, we created a literacy test. We banned anyone, quote, "likely to become a public charge," end quote, which is one of a long list of what the United States thinks makes for a good immigrant or a bad immigrant. And we created a quote-unquote "barred zone." Which expanded on the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and banned people from almost all of Asia from immigrating to the United States. This new act of 1917 was passed by Congress, Woodrow Wilson vetoed it, and Congress overrode his veto.

• 6:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Which is not to say that Wilson was an open borders kind of guy.

• 6:29Nick Capodice?

  Oh, absolutely not. Wilson was totally down with race-based exclusion and very wary of anyone who might just be an anarchist, socialist, or pacifist.

• 6:39Hannah McCarthy?

  Hello, red scare number one.

• 6:41Nick Capodice?

  All right. And then, 1921, Warren G. Harding signed the Emergency Quota Act, which was the first time that the United States had a formula for how many people from what nations would be allowed to immigrate to the United States. We call this now the quota system. And this got even more restrictive in 1924, when America passed the big one, the Johnson-Reed Act. This act drastically lowered the quota numbers, in effect, stopping immigration from places like, for example, where my grandparents came from, from Italy, but also from Eastern Europe, other parts of Asia, et cetera.

• 7:19Hannah McCarthy?

  That was the same year that we created the Border Patrol, by the way.

• 7:22Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. Now, getting us back to that refugee convention that Georgie mentioned, because I know in 1948, after World War II, we passed the Displaced Persons Act, which sounds like we are opening things up to refugees, but was actually super restrictive, especially for Jewish Holocaust survivors.

• 7:43Hannah McCarthy?

  So much so that when Harry Truman signed it into law, he called it, quote, "wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice," unquote. Because, to your point, this act was specifically discriminatory against Jewish displaced persons, despite the United States having been a key allied force in World War II, key to the downfall of the Nazis and to the liberation of many of those displaced peoples from concentration camps. You can't go home, but you sure can't come here. So, Nick, what do you think the United States did when the United Nations introduced the 1951 Refugee Conventions, defining the term refugee and laying out refugee rights and standards for international protection?

• 8:28Nick Capodice?

  We said nope.

• 8:29Hannah McCarthy?

  We said nope. We did not sign it. We wanted to be in charge of our own policies, especially after World War II. Now, do you happen to know when we finally did sign on to an international refugee agreement?

• 8:43Nick Capodice?

  That I do not.

• 8:44Hannah McCarthy?

  1968, one year after the UN came up with a revised refugee protocol. The old one was pretty much about European refugees following World War II. The new one took those restrictions away.

• 8:57Nick Capodice?

  So this one was more broad and we agreed to it?

• 9:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, Nick, it was the Cold War. We had already begun to change our approach to admit refugees fleeing communist oppression in Europe and the Middle East, then Hungary, then Cuba. Now, to be clear, we still had restrictions, but we were projecting an image. We wanted the United States to be seen as the leader in the protection of democracy and human rights. By agreeing to the 1967 UN protocol, according to then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, we would be helping the whole world to accept and stick to those humane standards.

• 9:34Nick Capodice?

  And how does that all square with the Vietnam War?

• 9:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, yeah, this is, in fact, during the Vietnam War, but I would not so much try to square that. Despite the humane standards thing, the United States military committed atrocious human rights violations in Vietnam. We were both a cause of the refugee crisis that followed the Vietnam War, and we created a path for hundreds of thousands of those refugees to resettle in the United States. Contradictions abound here, Nick. Okay. Finally, in 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act. This is what gave us the law to abide by that international protocol and codified our refugee policy.

• 10:18Nick Capodice?

  So, smooth sailing after there, right?

• 10:22Hannah McCarthy?

  I'll get to that after the break.

• 10:34Nick Capodice?

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• 11:19Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code CIVICS at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 11:40Nick Capodice?

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• 12:24Nick Capodice?

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• 12:45Hannah McCarthy?

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• 13:30Hannah McCarthy?

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• 14:32Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking about refugees and asylees today. Before the break, we crash course-covered how we ended up with a refugee and asylum process here in the United States that is also tied to an international approach to refugees and asylum. And before we get into the processes, there are two things that you have to keep in mind. One... A lot of what we are about to discuss is currently, as of the publishing of this episode, suspended too, even if it weren't.

• 15:03Speaker 08

  It depends on where you bring your claim. It depends on the country you're coming from. It depends on what the current situation in the country is.

• 15:09Hannah McCarthy?

  Again, this is Georgie Pisano, a practicing immigration attorney and adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center.

• 15:16Speaker 08

  It depends on who's in charge of DHS. It depends on the attorney in the room with you. It depends on your client. So it would really depend.

• 15:24Nick Capodice?

  I'm just going to kind of tie all this together, Hannah, and hazard that this whole refugee and asylum thing depends on factors.

• 15:35Hannah McCarthy?

  Sure does. And I should say, right off the bat, I'm not going to be able to give you the precise process for any one individual to become a refugee or an asylee because so much goes into the United States' decision to grant someone refugee or asylum status. Or, I should say, in many cases, so much depended. But we will get into that in a bit. Before we can get to asylum, we first should go through the refugee process.

• 16:00Speaker 08

  So if you're seeking asylum, you need to show that you meet the legal definition of a refugee, which we see as someone who's fleeing their country because they have or will suffer harm rising to the level of persecution on account of a protected ground. And those protected grounds being race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group.

• 16:21Nick Capodice?

  All right, this we laid out before the break. Basically, you've got to be in some kind of specific, provable form of harm's way to be considered a refugee.

• 16:31Hannah McCarthy?

  That's right. And even so, I mean, even if it is definitely true that if you are sent back to your country of origin, you will be in some kind of danger, it is still really difficult to achieve refugee or asylum status in the United States. Remember how Georgie talked about the principle of non-refoulement? Please forgive me, French speakers. It is the big part of international refugee and asylum law, the thing that prohibits countries from forcibly returning someone to the place where they face danger or persecution. Well, people are refouled. This is a complex and difficult process. But there are processes.

• 17:14Hannah McCarthy?

  And Georgie talked about the two basic pathways.

• 17:17Speaker 08

  Outside of the US and inside the US.

• 17:22Hannah McCarthy?

  If you're outside the US and want to come here as a refugee, or at least this is how it used to go, you could submit an application to the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Before doing that, though, you generally need a referral.

• 17:35Nick Capodice?

  From whom?

• 17:36Hannah McCarthy?

  From the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or from a United States Embassy, or from some other non-governmental organization.

• 17:44Nick Capodice?

  So some higher power has to know about you and agree that you are, in fact, a refugee before the United States will decide whether they agree.

• 17:56Hannah McCarthy?

  That, and you almost always need to already have left your country of origin, unless the US President makes a special authorization.

• 18:03Nick Capodice?

  This already sounds both difficult and immensely complicated.

• 18:08Hannah McCarthy?

  None of what we're going to talk about today is easy. But what I am describing is probably the easiest of what we are going to talk about. So let's say you get the referral.

• 18:19Speaker 08

  You apply abroad, you go through a vetting process, and then you enter the US as a refugee already.

• 18:25Nick Capodice?

  I'm going to assume that the vetting process is fairly involved?

• 18:28Hannah McCarthy?

  There is a pre-interview, a pre-screening, biographic checks, biometric checks, another interview, a security check, medical exams, making sure you have an agency to sponsor you in the United States. And then, even after you have arrived in the United States, Customs and Border Protection makes the final call on letting you in as a refugee. But then, once you're in, you are a resettled refugee. You can legally work immediately. And you actually must apply for a permanent residency, aka green card, one year after arriving in the US as a refugee.

• 19:04Nick Capodice?

  Hang on, you don't have to apply for asylum if you go through that process?

• 19:08Hannah McCarthy?

  Nope.

• 19:09Nick Capodice?

  But I thought Georgie said you had to meet the legal definition of refugee in order to apply for asylum.

• 19:15Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, and you do, and that is another process entirely. So we just talked about applying for refugee status from outside of the US.

• 19:24Speaker 08

  Whereas if you are inside the United States or appearing at the border, you then apply for asylum. And you can apply to USCIS, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is considered an affirmative application. Or you can apply defensively because you've already been placed in court proceedings and you're defending against deportation by saying that you need asylum because you have a fear of returning to your home country. This is a defensive application.

• 19:50Nick Capodice?

  You can apply for asylum from inside the United States?

• 19:54Hannah McCarthy?

  Actually, you must be either inside the United States or at a port of entry, like an airport or a border crossing to do so.

• 20:02Nick Capodice?

  And let's say you're already in the country. Does it matter how you got there?

• 20:09Hannah McCarthy?

  There are so many "it depends" for that one. Like the kind of visa you have, or maybe you never had a visa, or your visa is expired, and on, and on. Very broadly speaking, if you are in removal proceedings, as in the government is trying to remove you from this country, you are going to apply for asylum defensively, like in defense of removal, in defense of deportation. If you are not in removal proceedings, you apply affirmatively. Generally, you have to do this within a year of arriving in the United States. That is something called a statutory bar.

• 20:51Nick Capodice?

  I think I got it.

• 20:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, you see, the thing about asylum and refugee law is that you might think you got it, but you could be wrong.

• 20:58Speaker 08

  Do you have to have a lawyer? No. Technically, the process is not built to require a lawyer, right? You should be able to request asylum at the country you're arriving in and not need to pay someone thousands of dollars to represent you in that process. However, is it easier with a lawyer? Absolutely.

• 21:15Hannah McCarthy?

  More so than any other episode, Nick, this one had me on a research tear. Because I just kept thinking, well, what about this situation? Or this one, or this one? There are so many factors. There are so many situations. If you go to USCIS.gov, it is a bevy of you may do this, you must do this, have this form, do this by this time. There are exceptions to this. This may not apply to you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, you know, a lawyer helps. But there's a part of that process that ostensibly should not require a lawyer.

• 21:49Speaker 08

  Which is the affirmative application, which if we want to think of something as being better or worse, or easier or harder, the affirmative application is going to be easier. It's not an adversarial process. You truly do not need an attorney there because there's no prosecutor, you know, grilling you. It's not an adversarial process. You're not being tested, so to speak. So you can apply, you file the form. The form requires some biographical information from you. It asks you certain questions about harm you've experienced in the past, other countries you've traveled through, if you've returned to the country you're claiming harm from, those types of things. You typically need to provide some evidence. However, your personal credible testimony can be sufficient to prove your claim.

• 22:33Speaker 08

  But it is always helpful to provide evidence, letters from people that witnessed the harm you experienced, identification, certainly documents if you're applying as a family to prove that you are a family that is related to each other, and then country conditions evidence.

• 22:47Hannah McCarthy?

  So that is the basic affirmative process. You're in the country, you apply at the right time, you go through the system, and you are either awarded asylum or you're not.

• 22:56Nick Capodice?

  And if you're not?

• 22:57Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, you're probably going to be referred to immigration court and go through a defensive asylum process, which is also where many asylum seekers end up when they arrive at the border of the US. So let's pivot to that. What does that defensive process look like? It's something like this. You show up at the border and you say you are afraid to return to your home, you fear persecution, you fear perhaps torture. An agent is going to interview you.

• 23:25Speaker 08

  So there are a couple of different interview stages. There's one that you have to pass to be placed into immigration proceedings. That usually is happening if you're arriving at the border, and that's the credible fear interview.

• 23:35Nick Capodice?

  Is credible fear different from proving that you're a refugee?

• 23:41Hannah McCarthy?

  It is. It actually has a lower bar. That agent is just going to decide whether there is a, quote, "significant possibility" that an asylum seeker might actually get asylum. From there, you might get to go to USCIS for a merits interview, which is a fairly new thing and an affirmative process. But you're probably going to end up in immigration court, which means, OK, maybe you could get asylum, but you are also now defending yourself from removal. Hence the term "defensive process."

• 24:13Speaker 08

  The similar sort of process at the courts is that you file your form. You definitely need an attorney. You don't have to have one, but I would highly recommend having one because there is a prosecutor. You're filing the same sort of evidence, but maybe a little bit more because you're anticipating the adversarial approach. You do not have an interview. Have a hearing where you provide testimony. And there's a direct examination. There's a cross-examination. The attorney from the Department of Homeland Security is asking you about any inconsistencies in your case. The immigration judge is asking you about any inconsistencies in your case or anything, really, they see fit to ask you about because asylum is discretionary. So those are the interviews. That's what you are required to do is provide this form,

• 24:57Speaker 08

  provide some evidence to support your claims, and then speak on those claims.

• 25:02Nick Capodice?

  If you're defending yourself from removal, does that mean you're being detained by the government at that point?

• 25:09Speaker 08

  Within the courts, we have two processes. One is non-detained. You're living at home. You go to your court proceedings. It proceeds. The other is detained. You're in a detention center. You go to court via video conference, and your proceedings move much faster because you're in a detained setting. Any number of other things also happen in the detained setting. Like I said, sometimes it takes place over video conference. Your ability to communicate over video conference varies. Your access to counsel is much harder to get a hold of somebody from a detention center, for someone to visit you in a detention center. Obviously, detention centers are in rural areas. They're in different states. It just really makes it very difficult. You can ask to be released on bond, which functions similar to a criminal bond. You prove to the court that you're not a danger and you're not a flight risk.

• 25:54Speaker 08

  The court releases you. You are now in the non-detained proceedings.

• 25:58Nick Capodice?

  There have been a lot of changes to this whole process, Hannah. And as you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, a lot of what you're talking about is currently moot for a whole lot of people.

• 26:10Speaker 08

  What we are currently seeing over the past year is a movement towards detaining every single person who is in court proceedings, rendering them ineligible for bond. Whether or not they are truly ineligible for bond is a legal issue that is being taken up in the federal district court.

• 26:28Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm going to get a little more into what is going on right now in just a bit. But I do just want to add that there are so many different things that can go or were going into this process. And so much of them have to do with whether you know about them, like finding a lawyer.

• 26:47Speaker 08

  If you're arriving at the border, you very rarely have an attorney. And there are a couple of different things that can happen. If you are placed in court proceedings, the judge should give you an opportunity to find an attorney. However, what we're seeing is more and more constraints on that initial entry point. And so individuals are not necessarily going to court proceedings. They don't necessarily understand their rights at any given point. And, you know, there are certainly individuals who are asylum seekers who speak English, who have a certain level of education. But there are also huge groups of individuals who do not have an education, do not speak English, do not speak a language that a border officer might speak, like an indigenous language from Guatemala comes up on the southern border quite a bit. Many indigenous languages, not just one.

• 27:32Speaker 08

  And so the idea that they then know what their rights are and know to contact an attorney is slim to none. They're mostly, you know, fleeing from something very serious and then anticipating that the country will provide a system for them to enter into.

• 27:48Hannah McCarthy?

  Just one point of note here. Speaking English is not a requirement to be granted refugee status.

• 27:55Hannah McCarthy?

  And as you may know, before March of 2025, the United States didn't even have English as an official language. But going back to the border, even crossing at the correct location, is more complicated than it may seem.

• 28:09Speaker 08

  It's very important in the United States that you arrive at a port of entry. So like an airport or also physically, there are bridges along the southern border and probably the northern border as well, although I have not worked at the northern border. And so it is very important to your case process, whether or not you entered with inspection or without inspection. And that means you saw a border patrol agent, which you saw at the port of entry. However, if you've lived in another country and you've ever crossed a border, did it look anything like the United States border? Was there any, you know, clear delineation? Was there a clear office that you had to go to? You know, a lot of people arrive and have no understanding that they've quote unquote, "entered without inspection", because they just know that they need to cross the border.

• 28:51Speaker 08

  And once they cross the border, they will be eligible to apply for asylum.

• 28:58Nick Capodice?

  These are things that I had not really considered, Hannah, that it's one thing to go through this complicated process. It's quite another to know anything at all about this process.

• 29:09Hannah McCarthy?

  And as Georgie told me again and again, it is so totally dependent on your individual case. But let's say you do actually get awarded asylum, an incredibly difficult thing to do.

• 29:23Speaker 08

  If you get asylum status, you are then an asylee. And an asylee can apply for their green card after one year. And then after you have your green card for five years, you can apply for citizenship. So you get this path. And asylees typically have access to some benefits. The government partners with nonprofits to provide sort of resettlement assistance in the country. However, we're seeing that really shrink because that has to do with a private-public partnership between the government and the nonprofits. So we're seeing a lot of The resettlement agencies shrink, and so then no one's there to provide the Asili benefits. However, they are technically entitled to them. And once you have Asili status, you can be eligible for other forms of social benefits. And certainly, once you get your green card, you're eligible for benefits.

• 30:07Hannah McCarthy?

  By benefits, I should just say, Georgie means things like healthcare, social security, childcare benefits, supplemental nutrition assistance. There's also work authorization, education benefits, travel flexibility, like making it easier to enter or exit the United States, and protection from deportation if you follow US law. I should also point out that green card holders from certain nations are now having their status reviewed, and we will get into that. But generally, why is all of this so much further out of reach for so many people? Let's dig in after the break.

• 30:56Nick Capodice?

  Have any of you out there ever Googled your own name? Like, actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers, whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over, so your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once, and they keep working in the background.

• 31:41Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 32:02Nick Capodice?

  Holiday season is coming and I don't think I have to tell you this might be a tough one because things are expensive in the fall of 2026. Everyone I know is looking for ways to make a little extra money prowling around the side hustle subreddits. But I will say, if you're looking to sell something to launch a store fast before the holiday rush, Shopify is the one stop shop platform for making a professional looking store without touching a line of code. You can sell anything and you can sell it anywhere that people shop online. You can have it done in minutes and you can launch before Black Friday, that time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy. So if you're ready to launch

• 32:47Nick Capodice?

  your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/civics to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/civics. Just go to Shopify.com/civics today to hear your first.

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• 33:41Nick Capodice?

  We are back here on Civics 101. We've been talking about refugee and asylum seekers vis a vis the United States. And Hannah, just before the break, you said you were going to finally bring us up to speed on what's going on today in terms of asylum seekers and refugees.

• 33:56Speaker 08

  I did. Here's Georgie Pizano again. This is certainly a shift away from protection on every front, right? Making it harder, people cannot apply from abroad, making it harder for people to apply at the border, making it harder for people to apply within the United States.

• 34:12Nick Capodice?

  So what is actually happening to people who are trying to flee their home country and become a resettled refugee or become an asylee in the United States?

• 34:22Hannah McCarthy?

  As far as those who apply abroad, the process we described as incredibly difficult and yet easier than other processes.

• 34:29Speaker 08

  One of the first presidential proclamations executive orders was to end the US Refugee Admissions Program, which was where you apply for asylum abroad and enter as a refugee. So it's not surprising that if the administration is closing the valve abroad, that they're trying to close the valve domestically as well.

• 34:47Nick Capodice?

  One of the first executive orders, meaning like a year ago?

• 34:51Hannah McCarthy?

  That's right. Trump first suspended refugee admissions, full stop. Then announced the administration would be prioritizing white South Africans for refugee admission, who Trump says face racial persecution in their homeland. South Africa, by the way, denies this. Trump also lowered the refugee ceiling in terms of how many people would be accepted every year from 125,000 to 7,500.

• 35:16Nick Capodice?

  Wow. So very few refugees comparatively and mostly white South Africans.

• 35:23Hannah McCarthy?

  Correct. This also meant that many, though not all, people who have spent years having their refugee applications processed have now been, at least for now, stranded without a process. The USCIS has also announced that it will re-review previously reviewed cases of refugees admitted to the United States between January 2021 and February 2025.

• 35:48Nick Capodice?

  As in people who already went through the whole process that you laid out earlier?

• 35:52Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, we're talking about the people who succeeded. People who are in the United States legally, who went through the very detailed and very in-depth refugee vetting process, which can take up to three years by some estimations. The memo announcing this new policy claimed that Biden-era vetting was insufficient and led to national security concerns. Five days after this memo was circulated, two National Guard soldiers were shot by an Afghan national who had come to the United States under a special Biden-era resettlement program. The shooting was then cited in the December policy memo that halted USCIS asylum applications and cited high-risk countries, including Afghanistan.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  For families who believed their future here was settled, certainty has now shifted to fear.

• 36:43Speaker 09

  I had a client just asked the other day for a case that we just filed. Like, does that mean that they're going to be out of status? Like, is that going to mean that it can be picked up? You know, there's all kinds of fears around that.

• 36:54Nick Capodice?

  Okay, what happened with the asylum-seeking process exactly?

• 36:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, AKA USCIS, what I keep talking about, has paused the decision-making process for all affirmative asylum applications, regardless of your country of origin. Trump has also issued a pause on all immigration applications, including asylum, from nearly 40 different countries.

• 37:18Speaker 08

  USCIS had said that they will not process any applications for asylum or any form of benefit from those countries. You can still apply. And the USCIS cannot, as far as I know, cannot reject your application. They have to accept it if it's properly filed. However, they just won't do anything with it. Like, you're not going to get an interview. There's not going to be a process. That's, yeah.

• 37:39Nick Capodice?

  And Hannah, you said affirmative applications have been paused. What about the defensive applications?

• 37:45Speaker 08

  Any applications before USCIS have been paused. However, what is going forward before the immigration courts has not been paused. So anybody applying for asylum before an immigration judge is still being processed.

• 37:56Hannah McCarthy?

  At the southern border, agents are also currently engaging in something that has been referred to as metering.

• 38:02Speaker 08

  Metering is just about controlling the access to territory. So like I said, you're only eligible to apply for asylum in the United States when you have entered the United States. From a cynical point of view, it's a way to prevent people from entering the United States and barring them from applying for asylum. From a less cynical point of view, it's a way to control the flow of people at the southern border. That is just too many. We don't have enough people to process them and to hear their asylum claims and put them into the proper process. And so we need to control how many people cross the border at a certain point. We saw it under Trump 1.0, where at certain stretches of the southern border, they were saying, turning people away. This is the turn-back policy, which is sort of hand-in-hand with the metering. Turn back from the border and saying you need to come back a different day.

• 38:47Speaker 08

  We've filled our quota. And then it was sort of haphazard. They maybe had handwritten lists of who could come back, who had an appointment later. There were multiple days that they didn't accept anyone who didn't have documents to cross into.

• 39:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Georgie explained that this is something that shifted a little bit during the Biden administration with the CPB One app, something that migrants could use to schedule an appointment. That was unsurprisingly short-lived.

• 39:13Speaker 08

  And now we're back to a little bit of metering. Well, I guess no metering at all because no one's being allowed to request asylum at the southern border under Trump 2.0.

• 39:20Nick Capodice?

  All right, Hannah, I also have to ask about arrests and detentions. There have been so many cases of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, AKA ICE, arresting people before or after their asylum hearings. What is that?

• 39:37Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. So this is something that has prompted a lot of public outcry and resulted in people showing up both inside and outside of federal immigration courthouses to show their support for non-citizens and to protest the presence of ICE agents. To be clear, ICE can arrest and detain asylum seekers. The targets of these arrests and detentions are ostensibly people who ICE suspects are subject to removal from the United States for various reasons. Now, some states like New York have laws that would generally require a warrant from a judge for an ICE agent to arrest an asylum seeker on their way to, at, or leaving court.

• 40:18Hannah McCarthy?

  ICE has also made, quote, "collateral arrests" of people suspected of violating immigration law, regardless of whether or not they are the initial target. ICE also has limited ability to arrest and detain U.S. citizens if they are determined to be interfering with an arrest, assaulting an ICE agent, or, despite citizenship, suspected of being in the United States illegally. This is ostensibly how ICE has arrested and detained U.S. citizens, green card holders, and other people in the country legally. ICE agents have dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot American citizens, recently killing one, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026.

• 41:00Hannah McCarthy?

  There have been hundreds of lawsuits filed against ICE for various reasons, including detention and deportation policies. Now, in terms of what is going on with asylum seekers and their cases today, I can tell you that detention is more likely if your court case has ended or been terminated.

• 41:17Speaker 08

  Certainly, we saw a couple of months ago that people were showing up to court and DHS was moving to terminate their cases.

• 41:24Nick Capodice?

  So the Department of Homeland Security was actually requesting that those cases be terminated?

• 41:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. You'd have a DHS attorney move to dismiss the case. And Georgie told me that, at least in the past, this could actually be a good thing, a way to turn around and send an affirmative asylum application to USCIS.

• 41:44Speaker 08

  Sometimes termination can seem like the best-case scenario because you want to go through the affirmative process. However, several months ago, when DHS was terminating these cases, it was to place people in expedited removal. And I don't know of any list. However, we did see that DHS had internal guidance that expedited removal would apply to anyone who had been in the US for less than two years. And so they were targeting cases that had just started or were in preliminary proceedings. I should say two years is preliminary, right? Immigration court takes a long time unless you're in a detained setting. So they were terminating the cases, which the noncitizen and maybe their attorney, if they had one, was like, well, great, like, then we can pursue some other opportunities. But it was to put them in this expedited removal and really

• 42:26Speaker 08

  limit their access to process, limit their access to an immigration judge.

• 42:33Nick Capodice?

  Expedited removal, meaning trying to get them out of the country as soon as possible?

• 42:38Hannah McCarthy?

  Right.

• 42:39Nick Capodice?

  Well, while we're on the subject, Hannah, I've heard of asylum seekers being sent to other countries, like, not the country they're fleeing from, but a third country. Is that real? Is that happening?

• 42:54Hannah McCarthy?

  It is. It is done through what is called an asylum cooperative agreement. US law does provide for these agreements, provided that an asylum seeker is safe in that third country and has access to a full and fair asylum process. Now, for a long time, Canada was the only country with which we had such an agreement. We now, according to reports, have those agreements with nations such as Uganda, Honduras, and Ecuador.

• 43:19Nick Capodice?

  Which are, to my understanding, countries from which some people flee to seek asylum in the United States.

• 43:27Hannah McCarthy?

  They are indeed. Now, in case you're wondering, there are plenty of lawsuits pertaining to so much of what we just talked about. There is so much that remains to be seen, and there is so much that we did not talk about today. So many other kinds of immigrations, of situations for refugees and asylees, so many new developments all the time.

• 43:49Hannah McCarthy?

  But for now, I think the big takeaway here is that the path is narrow, and getting narrower.

• 43:57Speaker 08

  Everything is shrinking. We see that, over the years since 1950, that the US moves towards protection or away from protection, right? And that's, you know, not necessarily political or partisan. It's just sort of the way that the law shifts in the immigration space in the United States. This is certainly a shift away from protection on every front.

• 44:32Hannah McCarthy?

  That does it for this episode. It was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy, with Nick Capodice. Our producer is Marina Hanke. Rebecca Lavoie is our executive producer. Music in this episode comes from Epidemic Sound. If you are seeking more information on asylum, refugee, or immigration services in the United States, you can find some basic information at USCIS.gov. But of course, many of those processes are suspended or halted at the moment. There are also many, many resources available on the websites of many, many law firms, and services available in states around the country. Just do a quick search online with the state that you're in and what exactly you need help understanding. Because there is a lot more than went into this episode.

• 45:15Hannah McCarthy?

  You can find a lot more Civics 101, including every episode we have ever made, at our website, civics101podcast.org. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 45:38Speaker 10

  What does it really take to start a startup? I'm David Rosenko, entrepreneur, investor, and the host of Leap Forward. In each episode, I go behind the scenes with successful founders and someone who knew them before they were famous: their college roommate, their first employee, or their mom. To hear the sometimes uncomfortable, but very real, inside stories of how companies actually get built. Companies like Reddit, Airbnb, or Twitch. Listen to the new season of Leap Forward for never-before-heard stories behind the world's most iconic companies.