How the US shut the door on asylum-seekers |
Asylum-seekers gather outside a US customs office in Tijuana, Mexico, shortly after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025. | Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
When he first emerged on the political stage more than a decade ago, Donald Trump made closing America’s borders and remaking our immigration system a central plank of his agenda.
A year into his second administration — and as this week’s events in Minneapolis underscore — the issue has defined his presidency and changed America’s trajectory.
Perhaps one of the most consequential moves on that front has been his dismantling of our system of asylum: the process by which immigrants can legally enter the country if they fear violence or persecution. Trump has moved aggressively to curtail asylum-seekers’ entrance into the US, as well as to force ones already in the country to leave.
Today, Explained guest host Miles Bryan talked to ProPublica immigration reporter Mica Rosenberg about how the Trump administration has made life harder for asylum-seekers, how the system broke under Joe Biden, and what the changes in the US might spell for the rest of the world.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What was the Trump administration’s mindset about asylum coming into 2025?
Under US law, people are allowed to show up at our border and request asylum if they fear returning to their home countries. But that actually triggers a very long court process in the US that can take years to resolve.
Trump and his advisers really view this system as kind of like a giant loophole. They believe that most people who are coming into the country this way are not legitimate asylum-seekers, and they’re maybe coming for economic reasons. They’ve really come into office with a blitz of policies to try and shut that system down.
And that includes things that they’re doing at the border, which is quickly turning people back to Mexico — and, in some cases, sending them to third countries like Panama or Costa Rica or even farther, locations that they’ve never been to, and........