Asylum seekers

Trump tells asylum seekers to apply for refuge elsewhere

The effort represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to curtail immigration and meet its ambitious annual deportation goal.

By Myah Ward and Eric Bazail-Eimil

The Trump administration has long seen asylum requests as “a huge loophole” in its effort to close the border. Over the last two months, it’s become apparent how it intends to close it.

The Department of Homeland Security is asking courts to summarily dismiss asylum claims without a hearing and send migrants to a third country where they can pursue relief, even if they have no connection to that place. The federal government is relying on so-called safe third country agreements Trump officials have reached with a number of nations, including Uganda, Honduras and Ecuador — countries that have a reputation for destabilizing gang violence or a history of human-rights abuses.

The effort represents the latest attempt by the Trump administration to curtail immigration to the United States and meet its ambitious annual deportation goal of 1 million people. And it comes as asylum claims have increased significantly: There were nearly 900,000 asylum claims before the Executive Office of Immigration Review in Fiscal Year 2024, up from roughly 200,000 per year during Trump’s first term.

“Asylum was not designed to provide people a backdoor way to get to a country of their choosing,” said a senior administration official, granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking about the strategy. “If the United States is confident that they can be successfully removed to another country where they will not be threatened, then there’s no reason or expectation that they should be allowed to remain here.”

The Trump administration’s strategy was bolstered in October when the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative body that oversees immigration courts, said judges should weigh third-country removal before an asylum case is considered in the U.S. The endorsement turbocharged the effort, and in November, DHS attorneys asked judges to dismiss nearly 5,000 cases, more than twice the amount in October and four times the amount in September, according to a recent analysis of immigration court data. It is not clear that all 5,000 were because DHS wanted to send someone to a third country.

In exchange for accepting migrants, these other countries have usually received less U.S. condemnation for alleged human rights abuses and greater security assistance.

Immigration attorneys and advocates, alarmed by the latest trend, argue that it’s a further erosion of the U.S. asylum system in the United States.

“The administration wants to demolish our humanitarian protection system,” said Rebekah Wolf, a staff attorney with the immigration justice campaign and policy department of the American Immigration Council. “They do not want to have people have the ability to apply for asylum in the United States.”

But the administration official countered that anyone who genuinely fears persecution should only be concerned about their safety.

“They shouldn’t care about what specific location,” the official said. “Many [immigration groups] somehow think that it’s bad to be doing this — that everyone should get a hearing, no matter anything else. But the reality from our perspective is, it is the law. And you may disagree with the law, but the way to address that is through Congress.”

DHS’s strategy provides another example of how President Donald Trump’s team learned from and built upon efforts of his first term. In 2019, DHS and the Justice Department issued an interim final rule allowing the U.S. to enter into third-country agreements with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — barring migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if the administration determined they could do so safely in one of the other nations. In a federal lawsuit filed that year — revived this September — asylum seekers and immigration groups argued the agreements were unlawful. Administration officials expect other lawsuits to be filed against their latest strategy.

This term, the White House has not only expanded efforts to strike these agreements with less stable nations, but has also cut other deals with countries willing to accept migrant deportees. For months, the administration has deported migrants to African nations, including South Sudan and Eswatini. The administration also sent more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they were detained in the country’s mega-prison for months.

And this month, Palau, an archipelago of roughly 350 small islands in the Pacific Ocean, inked a deal with the Trump administration to take up to 75 migrants in exchange for aid, another example of how the White House is looking to third-countries to accelerate deportations of people who cannot be returned to their home countries.

As for asylum protections, supporters of the administration argue that the system has long been abused, and they are simply course correcting to bring the program in line with its original intent.

“No one who has passed through other countries where they’re not being persecuted should get asylum [in the United States]. If you’ve passed through other countries, you’ve effectively ignored other opportunities to claim asylum,” said Mark Krikorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies think tank, which favors restrictions on immigration. “It’s a way to deter bogus asylum claims.”

A DHS spokesperson said the agency is working to remove all unauthorized immigrants from the United States, while “ensuring they receive all available legal process, including a hearing before an immigration judge.”

“Asylum Cooperative Agreements,” as DHS calls them, “are lawful bilateral arrangements that allow illegal aliens seeking asylum in the United States to pursue protection in a partner country that has agreed to fairly adjudicate their claims” the spokesperson said. “DHS is using every lawful tool available to address the backlog and abuse of the asylum system.”

DHS said last month that the Trump administration is on pace to shatter deportation records, projecting nearly 600,000 removals by the end of the president’s first year, surpassing the 400,000 deportations that marked the peak for the Obama administration.

Since Trump returned to office, the White House has aggressively targeted the asylum system and tried to accelerate deportations. That has included an aggressive effort to shrink the case backlog in the immigration courts, which EOIR says has now dropped to less than 3.75 million cases from 4.18 million in January.

“The Trump administration knows that the backlog at the immigration courts is a huge obstacle to their mass deportation campaign,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an immigration lawyer who works as an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “They’re trying to speed up and close out as many of those cases as they can.”