Maria is a fictional composite drawn from real cases involving unaccompanied children seeking asylum; she does not represent any individual applicant.

Maria

Maria was twelve years old and in sixth grade. She grew up knowing her mother primarily through telephone calls. Her father was not part of her life.

Maria’s mother was born in a country ravaged by extreme poverty, civil war, death squads, and foreign intervention. She left for the United States early in Maria’s childhood. Maria remained in Central America, raised by her grandmother—her mother sent what money she could, and her grandmother provided the daily care.

Maria’s elementary school was a little different.

Kids needed near-constant situational awareness just to survive the route to the building. By the sixth grade, many of the boys in her class were being initiated into MS-13. It wasn’t hard to tell. As part of proving themselves to the gang, they decided to hold a competition that targeted the girls in Maria’s class for sexual assault. Word spread through the school first as rumor.

Then it started happening.

First it was one of Maria’s classmates.

The girl they came for next was Maria’s best friend.

She did not survive.

When the boys came for Maria, she managed to get away.

She ran home to her grandmother.

Her grandmother called Maria’s uncle, and together they spoke with her mother in the United States. They moved quickly through the available options. All three were terrified. They decided that Maria’s best chance was to reach her mother in the United States.

Notice who they did not call: the police.

They knew too many versions of the same story.

Sometimes the police did nothing. Sometimes they dismissed the complaint. Sometimes officers collaborated with the gang, and reporting only gave the gang another reason to target the victim or her family.

For Maria’s family, relying on the government to control MS-13 and protect her from the violence inflicted on her friends was not a realistic option.

Maria’s family faced an impossible choice: leave a twelve-year-old girl to face the fate of her friends, or send her with strangers on a journey that could also kill her.

How the Violence Traveled

Maria’s impossible choice did not appear in a vacuum. Neither did the violence surrounding her.

During the 1980s, Central America was a Cold War battleground. The United States backed governments that were allies in its war against communism. In El Salvador and Guatemala, government forces carried out atrocities at scale: death-squad killings, torture, disappearances. Over 270,000 people were killed or disappeared in those two countries alone. Honduras had become a base for America’s Cold War policy throughout the region.

Thousands of families were displaced. Poverty deepened. Weak governments came and went. Corruption flourished. Maria’s mother and grandmother lived with the consequences of that history.

Some Salvadorans fleeing that violence ended up in Los Angeles.

That is where MS-13 began.

Then, during the 1990s, the United States deported some of its members to El Salvador—helping export MS-13 into a country still recovering from the carnage of the 1980s.

From 2001 through 2010, nearly 130,000 people were deported to Central America because of criminal convictions, primarily to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. It is impossible to say exactly how many were gang members.

Some were.

Amid extreme poverty, fragile governments and pervasive corruption, MS-13 and gangs like 18th Street spread across the region.

That is how a gang born in Los Angeles became a transnational force and came to infect Maria’s elementary school.

Extreme Violence Is Not Enough

Maria survived a journey of more than a thousand miles along one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world. After U.S. authorities determined that she was an unaccompanied child, she was eventually released from federal custody to her mother.

By the time Maria arrived, Congress had created special provisions allowing unaccompanied children to present their asylum claims first to an asylum officer in a nonadversarial interview—giving them a chance to obtain protection without having to sit across from an ICE attorney in immigration court. If USCIS did not grant the claim, the child could still pursue it there.

In giving USCIS initial jurisdiction over asylum applications filed by unaccompanied children, Congress also directed the Department of Health and Human Services, “to the greatest extent practicable,” to ensure that these children had counsel to represent them in legal proceedings and protect them from mistreatment, exploitation and trafficking. Over time, congressional appropriations supported a national network of organizations providing those legal services.

Unaccompanied-child asylum cases can be extraordinarily difficult to win. One of the most challenging legal elements to prove is nexus—the required connection between the feared harm and a protected ground.

That is the why: Why did MS-13 target Maria?

Exposure to generalized violence, regardless of its severity, does not by itself establish asylum eligibility. Proving the danger is only the first step. The feared harm must also be on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

For children like Maria who are fleeing gangs, the answer to that question can decide whether they are allowed to remain in the United States or ordered back to the country they fled.

She described the horrific gang violence she survived without proving that MS-13 would target her on account of a protected ground. The fact that the boys targeted girls does not, by itself, establish a legally cognizable particular social group or the nexus required.

On these facts, Maria would not be granted asylum. Her case would be referred to immigration court.

A Sixth Grader Can Be Barred for Terrorist Activity

The legal definition of terrorist activity reaches far beyond what most people ordinarily associate with terrorism. The terrorism-related inadmissibility grounds (TRIG) can still bar a child from asylum even if they prove every element of an asylum claim.

For years, gangs such as MS-13 were not formally designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). That all changed in February 2025 when the U.S. designated MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and several Mexican cartels as FTOs. The Haitian gangs Gran Grif and Viv Ansanm, along with Barrio 18, were later added to the list.

That may not seem like a stretch for organizations responsible for extraordinary violence, but the designations can have enormous consequences for an unaccompanied child’s asylum case. Now, because MS-13 is a designated terrorist organization, even an apparently innocuous interaction a child has with its members may also require an analysis under the extraordinarily broad terrorism provisions.

What could that look like for Maria?

Assume this happened after MS-13’s designation.

One day, Maria and her sixth-grade classmates are on the playground. The boys being initiated into MS-13 are playing soccer. Their ball rolls toward Maria’s foot.

She kicks it back. Like many kids would.

The boys continue playing. Nothing more.

Kicking a soccer ball may not constitute material support to a Tier I terrorist group. But under TRIG, that fact alone cannot resolve the issue.

More questions are required before reaching a conclusion.

Did Maria know the boys were MS-13 members?

Was this an isolated interaction?

Did they expect her to help them?

Had she ever carried a message, shared food, delivered money, or performed another task for them?

What would the boys have done to her if she had not kicked the ball back?

In one case, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that an act may constitute material support if it has a logical and reasonably foreseeable tendency to promote, sustain, or maintain a terrorist organization—even to a minimal degree.

Determining where an innocent interaction ends and material support begins requires facts, careful questioning, and legal analysis. Any available exemption is discretionary and requires a separate analysis.

For Maria, the inquiry may not end with the soccer ball. If one of her relatives or friends is suspected of involvement with MS-13 or another designated organization, that relationship may generate additional national-security scrutiny—even if Maria knew nothing about it.

Now give that case to a child without a lawyer—or to an inexperienced volunteer who receives the file three weeks before the interview.

The Statute Remains. Dismantle the System Around It

The provisions Congress enacted for unaccompanied children are still the law and that is not likely to change anytime soon. Rather than continue administering the law as it had for decades, the government has now effectively removed many of the safeguards in place for these kids.

In late July 2026, DHS adopted a rule allowing USCIS to refer certain asylum applications directly to immigration court without first conducting an interview. It expressly applies to unaccompanied children if an asylum officer determines from the written record that the child does not qualify for asylum.

Practitioners are also seeing long-pending asylum cases scheduled for interviews with only weeks to prepare, while the same children’s removal proceedings continue moving through immigration court.

USCIS still has initial jurisdiction, just as it says in the statute.

USCIS can refer cases to court based on the written record alone, without the interview that gives the words on the page context and meaning. If the written application does not contain the facts necessary to establish every element of the claim, or provides another reason not to grant asylum, USCIS can send the child directly to immigration court without first conducting an interview.

That child is now sitting across from ICE attorneys with an increasingly narrow path to asylum.

Since 2025, decisions by the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals have narrowed several legal theories on which many children’s claims depend, including claims involving family, gender, and resistance to gangs.

As cases are accelerated and interviews can be bypassed, the experienced legal infrastructure Congress funded to help children prepare their cases is being taken apart.

For years, the government funded legal services through a national network of nearly 100 providers serving roughly 20,000 unaccompanied children.

Then the government simply stopped paying them—even for work they had already performed. The providers estimated that they were owed more than $65 million. These were not high-end law firms. Most were public-interest organizations operating under challenging budgets even in ordinary times.

The furloughs began. Offices shuttered. Organizations stopped accepting new cases, and maintaining representation in existing cases became increasingly difficult.

Then, on July 31, the government allowed the contract supporting their work to expire. The providers had to go to court just to be paid for work they had already completed.

In August, the government announced its plan to award a single-source agreement worth up to $150 million to a small law firm with little immigration experience. The firm later declined to apply, and the announcement was withdrawn.

The government separately awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $244 million to an anti-trafficking organization with close ties to ICE. It had no publicly documented history of providing immigration legal services at this scale.

On the facts, Maria would have lost even under the system Congress designed. That is precisely the point: asylum law was already difficult enough.

Other children will have viable claims buried in facts they do not understand are legally important. Accelerate their cases, narrow the law, dismantle the legal network and bypass their interviews, and those claims may never emerge.

The statutory right remains.

That is how you deport unaccompanied children without repealing their right to seek asylum.

Afghanistan’s defense minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim, left—the commander Salaruddin Eqbal spent years protecting—enters the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in March 2003. Department of Defense photo by Helene C. Stikkel.

Judicial decisions sometimes result in miscarriages of justice.

Then there is the case of Salaruddin Eqbal.

By November 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks, American bombs were falling across Afghanistan. U.S. Special Forces had moved into the country. Northern Alliance fighters were advancing on Taliban positions. The Taliban abandoned Kabul as the government it had imposed on Afghanistan collapsed.

Eight years earlier, 19-year-old Salaruddin Eqbal, born in Panjshir Province, the heartland of Afghanistan’s resistance to the Taliban, had begun working as a bodyguard for Mohammad Qasim Fahim, one of the most powerful figures in the anti-Taliban resistance.

After his predecessor was assassinated by al-Qaeda just two days before September 11, Fahim emerged as one of the men at the center of America’s war against the Taliban. Within weeks of the American intervention, the U.S. military was building part of its campaign in northern Afghanistan around Fahim and the forces under his command.

Fahim was a “critical figure” whose actions were enormously important to American military objectives, according to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. American Special Forces teams worked closely with commanders and fighters under his leadership.

Eqbal had already been protecting this “critical figure” for eight years.

And he paid a price for it.

Around 1997 or 1998, the Taliban took Eqbal prisoner, holding him for a month, torturing him, and leaving him with a permanent back injury. He was freed only after Fahim arranged a prisoner exchange. When the Taliban government fell in 2001, Fahim became one of the most powerful officials in the new U.S.-backed Afghan government. Eqbal continued providing security for Fahim and later other senior officials, including President Hamid Karzai.

He continued that work until 2021.

Then America left.

Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the final American service member to leave Afghanistan, boards a C-17 at Kabul’s airport on August 30, 2021. U.S. Army photo by Master Sgt. Alexander Burnett.

What America Left Behind

Eqbal had been on the Taliban’s radar for decades. Once the last of American and allied forces left the country, the Taliban could now hunt him down with impunity. And not just him. The Taliban began detaining and killing some of Eqbal’s former colleagues. They issued documents calling for his arrest precisely because of his work with the American-backed government they had overthrown.

Eqbal and his family were forced to move repeatedly in order to stay alive. Taliban members went to his home to look for him and found only his mother, whom they interrogated and assaulted in an effort to learn her son’s whereabouts.

For two years, Eqbal and his family lived this way.

He finally found a way out in 2023. In what sounds like a scene from a movie, Taliban personnel stopped and questioned him at the airport as he tried to leave Afghanistan. He escaped only with the help of an airport employee who recognized him and helped convince the Taliban that Eqbal was traveling abroad for medical treatment and would return.

With his family left behind, he finally reached the United States in June 2024.

But there was a problem.

He had not arrived on one of the evacuation flights Americans watched leave Kabul in 2021. He had not come through a refugee program that could screen and adjudicate his claim overseas before he ever boarded a plane.

He just showed up.

Without a valid document authorizing his admission to the United States.

That did not make him ineligible for asylum. But DHS detained him and placed him in removal proceedings.

And that changed the system that would decide whether he lived or died.

Eqbal would not have his asylum claim decided by a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum officer operating in a non-adversarial proceeding. It would instead be decided in an adversarial removal proceeding, with the Department of Homeland Security on one side and Eqbal on the other.

His case would now be decided by an immigration judge.

But an immigration judge is not the kind of judge most Americans probably imagine.

Not That Kind of Judge

The federal judiciary is established under Article III of the U.S. Constitution and includes the district courts, courts of appeals, and the Supreme Court. Judges are nominated by a president, confirmed by the Senate, and serve for life. A president cannot simply fire one because he does not like a decision.

Immigration court is nowhere to be found in that Article III judiciary.

Immigration court falls within the executive branch, in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) at the Department of Justice. The judge sitting behind the bench works for the DOJ, not the federal judiciary.

The structure is adversarial.

On one side of the courtroom is the Department of Homeland Security, represented by government lawyers from ICE.

On the other side is the immigrant.

Often without a lawyer and sometimes detained.

If the immigration judge rules against the immigrant, the first appeal goes to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The BIA, though, is also part of the Department of Justice, so a direct appeal of an immigration judge’s decision is also decided within the executive branch. Its decisions remain subject to the Attorney General.

Only after the BIA dismisses an appeal can a case like Eqbal’s find its way to an Article III federal court of appeals.

That is how Eqbal’s case eventually landed on the docket of the Fifth Circuit.

Despite the lack of a check by a separate judicial branch at the trial and administrative-appeal stages, immigration judges have historically operated independently when deciding the individual cases before them.

Now, if an immigration judge rules against the government in a particular case, they may not have a job the next day. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since January 2025. Two in particular were terminated shortly after ruling against the government in high-profile deportation cases involving pro-Palestinian students. In replacing the scores of judges who resigned or were pushed out, the administration set a record for hiring new judges in a short span of time, advertising the positions as “deportation judges.”

For the immigration judges who remained, the message could not have been clearer.

EOIR leadership told them to take “all appropriate action” to immediately dispose of cases, including denying asylum applications they deemed legally insufficient without holding a hearing on the merits.

By June 2025, a memorandum accused some immigration judges of displaying bias against DHS. Judges who preferred to act as “policy advocates,” it warned, should “consider transitioning to alternate career paths.” The memorandum threatened “corrective or disciplinary action” against judges the agency deemed biased.

By September 2025, immigration courts were being forced toward an assembly-line model through performance targets nearly impossible to reconcile with any kind of meaningful review. Ninety-five percent of detained removal cases were to be completed within 60 days. Ninety-five percent of merits hearings were to be completed on the first date scheduled.

And Then Came the Rocket Dockets

After the sitting American president called Somali immigrants “garbage,” said they “contribute nothing,” and declared, “We don’t want them in our country,” asylum cases involving Somalis that had been sitting for months or years were suddenly accelerated.

The assembly line of justice had found its target population.

More than 2,200 Somali cases—about two-thirds of all open Somali immigration cases nationwide—were reassigned on short notice, many to judges appearing remotely from other states. One asylum seeker went from his initial master calendar hearing to the final hearing deciding whether he could remain in the United States in four weeks.

What normally takes about a year was compressed into weeks.

This same government warns its own citizens not to travel to Somalia for any reason. But if they do, Americans should prepare a will and leave DNA samples in case their families need to identify their bodies.

Immigration lawyers gave it a name:

The “Somali rocket docket.”

The machinery now reaches far beyond Somalis.

In June alone, immigration courts nationwide held more than 1,300 “mega master” hearings—nearly three times as many as a year earlier—with dozens or even hundreds of cases placed before one judge in a day.

Meanwhile, newly hired immigration judges were reportedly being told during training that asylum should be granted only in rare cases. By February 2026, Syracuse University data placed the nationwide asylum grant rate at approximately 5 percent.

Two years earlier, it had been nearly ten times that.

Of course, the administration continued to insist that immigration judges retained independent judgment.

The reality was far different:

Decide the cases faster.

Deny claims without a full hearing.

Watch colleagues who rule against the government lose their jobs.

Watch their replacements arrive after being recruited as “deportation judges.”

Be told during training that asylum should be granted only in rare cases.

Then go out there and exercise your independent judgment.

And it didn’t stop with the judges.

Early in the administration, nine members of the BIA were removed. The administration has also tried to dramatically accelerate the appeals process and create new grounds for summary dismissal.

Immigrants have always walked into court where the opposing team, the referee, and the first level of review of the call all ultimately work for the same owner. That arrangement depended on the owner not dictating the calls.

Now a new owner comes in, and referees watch their colleagues get fired after making calls against him. The people responsible for interpreting the rules and reviewing those calls are removed too.

If this were the NFL, fans would be screaming that the game was rigged.

Like so many others, Eqbal faced the immigration judge alone.

The government had ICE lawyers.

Eqbal had none.

The Year Was 1372

After Eqbal was detained by DHS, he told them he was afraid to return to Afghanistan.

By law, that triggered a credible fear interview with a USCIS asylum officer.

A credible fear interview is a threshold screening designed to determine whether someone facing expedited removal has enough of an asylum or torture claim to be allowed to make the full case in an immigration court.

The stakes are enormous.

A positive determination gets the applicant their day in court. A negative one likely leads to removal from the U.S. very quickly.

But enough information still has to be elicited for the officer to understand what the claim is and whether it could ultimately succeed.

That means asking many questions.

Names. Places. Jobs. Arrests.

And dates.

Like many places in the world, Afghanistan uses a different calendar than the one we do. Using an Afghan calendar meant that the date had to be converted into the Gregorian calendar for the officer to understand his claim.

One of those dates was 1372.

On the Afghan calendar, 1372 corresponds to 1993. The same year Eqbal consistently maintained that he began working for Fahim.

Converting the dates requires a basic calendar search. But the notes from his credible fear interview said he began in 1972, even though he was not born until 1974 and the Taliban did not exist until decades later. Whatever happened with the date during the interview, the asylum officer ultimately found that Eqbal had established a credible fear.

The immigration judge used that date discrepancy as one of their main reasons to find him not credible.

The 19-Year-Old “Middle Schooler”

Then there were Eqbal’s “middle school” years.

His asylum application appeared to say that he had attended “middle school” from 1984 to 1999—a 15-year period that included the year he began working as Fahim’s bodyguard.

The education section of a blank Form I-589 application for asylum. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The immigration judge reasoned that a middle school student could not also provide security for one of Afghanistan’s senior commanders.

Perhaps the judge skipped over Eqbal’s date of birth, listed a little higher on the same form. It showed that Eqbal was approximately 19 years old in 1993.

Eqbal had tried to fit three different schools, attended over a 15-year period, into the education section of an American government form whose categories did not neatly accommodate his education.

He then had to explain to the judge how his life had been compressed into its boxes.

The judge treated the label on the box as though it were damning testimony.

When the man and the box disagreed, the judge believed the box.

And that became more evidence that Eqbal was lying.

When “Worked For” Became “Was”

According to the judge, Eqbal testified that he himself had been the head of national security between 1993 and 2001.

That is quite a side hustle for a middle school kid already working as a bodyguard for one of Afghanistan’s most powerful commanders.

Except Eqbal never said that.

At all.

Referring to Fahim, Eqbal said that he worked for the head of national security.

The hearing transcript reflected some confusion among Eqbal, the interpreter, and the judge. But it contained no clear statement that Eqbal ever claimed to have held the position himself.

The judge’s interpretation was that Eqbal ran the country’s national security apparatus.

The judge then treated that misunderstanding as further evidence that Eqbal could not be believed.

The judge also found a contradiction between Eqbal saying that his work began in 1993 and saying elsewhere that it began in 2001.

Eqbal began working as Fahim’s bodyguard in 1993. After the United States helped establish a new Afghan government in 2001, Eqbal began serving in government security positions.

Those were two distinct roles, with two starting dates, at two very different points in Afghan history.

Not an inconsistency.

To the judge, it was just more evidence that Eqbal was lying.

The Imprisonment Already Disclosed

Then there was Eqbal’s detention and torture by the Taliban. The one that ended in a prisoner exchange arranged by Fahim, the head of Afghanistan’s national security service.

The immigration judge reasoned that Eqbal’s failure to disclose that imprisonment during his credible fear interview was more evidence of his propensity to dissemble.

There was a slight flaw in the judge’s reasoning.

Eqbal had disclosed it.

The credible fear record itself described the Taliban imprisoning and torturing him for a month.

Even the date carried the same calendar error. The interview notes reflected that his detention took place in 1977, when the Taliban did not exist and Eqbal was about three years old.

This judge questioned him on a false premise. And of course, his response to that premise became more evidence that he could not be believed.

The Fifth Circuit later called the judge’s assertion “unsupported by the record.”

And Then There Was the Evidence

The judge’s credibility findings are not even the most disturbing part of this case.

Worse is what happened to the evidence that supported Eqbal’s story.

He had photographs of himself with some of the most senior officials in the Afghan government, including Fahim and Hamid Karzai.

He had Afghan government employment cards bearing his name, photograph, and job title.

He had documents issued by the Taliban calling for his arrest because of his work for the former government.

The esteemed immigration judge just ignored the photographs. The employment cards were never explicitly considered either.

In affirming the denial, the BIA later claimed that the photographs lacked dates, translations, and information identifying Eqbal.

Except they contained all three.

The Taliban arrest documents were dismissed because the judge believed the original was missing and saw a problem with the dates on the translations.

Except the record appeared to contain the original. The date problem also suddenly disappeared once the dates were read in the correct day-month-year format.

Nothing Eqbal did to help the American mission in Afghanistan mattered.

The Fifth Circuit said the agency had made “short shrift” of the evidence after deciding Eqbal was not credible.

A Bridge Too Far

The John Minor Wisdom U.S. Court of Appeals Building in New Orleans, home of the Fifth Circuit. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

When Eqbal’s case finally made its way to an Article III court, it landed before a court that is no refuge for asylum seekers—the Fifth Circuit.

The unanimous panel included two judges appointed by Donald Trump.

Even that court found that the agency’s erroneous credibility determination had “infected the entirety” of the decision.

“No reasonable factfinder could have rejected Eqbal’s explanation of the date discrepancy,” the court concluded.

It found no material inconsistency in Eqbal’s employment history or prior imprisonment. It also found that the agency had failed to meaningfully consider his photographs, employment cards, and the Taliban documents calling for his arrest.

The court granted Eqbal’s petition, vacated the BIA’s decision, and sent the case back to the agency to do it all over again.

It did not grant Eqbal asylum.

He remains confined in ICE detention while the agency reconsiders whether to believe the box or the man.

The betrayal of America’s Afghan allies did not end with the evacuation or at the gates of Kabul airport. For Eqbal, it followed him all the way into an American courtroom.

Five years after Kabul fell, the betrayal had reached the courthouse.

For now, the Fifth Circuit, of all places, has stopped America from sending him back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

A note of thanks to Sam Nelson of Immigration Law Explained for sending me the Eqbal decision that inspired this piece.

Afghan evacuees board a U.S. Air Force C-17 at Hamid Karzai International Airport, August 21, 2021. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Taylor Crul.

“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

The narrative that has come to define America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is often told through the images of its final days.

The desperation of the crowds outside Hamid Karzai International Airport. Afghans clinging to the landing gear and fuselage of a U.S. Air Force C-17 as it taxied and lifted off, some falling to their deaths. The tragic bombing at Abbey Gate that killed thirteen U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghan civilians during the final days of the evacuation.

These became the defining images of America’s longest war coming to an end.

What’s often forgotten is that these scenes unfolded during the largest noncombatant evacuation airlift in American history. Over the course of just seventeen days in August 2021, the United States and its partners evacuated approximately 124,000 people from Afghanistan.

Even before the planes took off from Kabul, another massive undertaking was already taking shape. The United States had to figure out how to screen, process, and receive tens of thousands of Afghans all at once, even though the immigration pathways in place had not been designed to operate at that speed and scale—particularly with a caseload that presented unusually complex national-security issues.

After undergoing extensive screening and vetting overseas, followed by inspection upon arrival in the United States, tens of thousands of Afghans were paroled into the country. At one point, approximately 53,000 Afghan evacuees were temporarily housed across eight U.S. military installations, where additional processing took place before they were resettled in communities throughout the country.

In the years that followed, thousands of other Afghans were processed across the globe through the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program (USRAP). USCIS deployed hundreds of refugee officers on extended details to conduct interviews, while cases moved through multiple layers of vetting and review at military installations, transit facilities, and processing centers around the world.

It was one of the most ambitious humanitarian and national-security operations ever undertaken in the American immigration system.

New Jersey Air National Guard officers walk with an Afghan girl at Liberty Village, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, November 8, 2021. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Matt Hecht.

In late January 2025, I walked into one of the secure facilities where I had spent much of the previous eighteen months.

Before entering, I locked away my phone and electronics, passed through a secured door, and stepped into a windowless room known as a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

This was the first assignment in my government career that required a Top Secret clearance.

Refugee officers ordinarily worked with Secret-level clearances, allowing us to review enough of the national-security information needed to adjudicate most protection claims, as well as evaluate terrorism-related inadmissibility grounds and other security concerns.

But many Afghan cases generated intelligence reporting classified above the Secret level. That presented a real problem for a government trying to honor the country’s obligation to Afghans who had placed themselves and their families at grave risk by supporting the American mission. With the Taliban once again in full control of the country, many now faced persecution or death for precisely that reason.

The United States therefore needed to solve two problems at once: compress a refugee process that ordinarily took years, and create a way to adjudicate Afghan cases using the full range of classified and unclassified information available to the government.

America had an obligation to protect the people who had stood with us, but it also had to identify anyone who posed a genuine threat. Getting it wrong could endanger lives, be seized upon to discredit the entire program, and close the door on thousands of other Afghans waiting for protection.

Afghan cases were not the only refugee cases in which intelligence reporting at this level surfaced. But in Afghanistan, the frequency and complexity of those concerns reflected something distinctive: more than four decades of war, shifting governments, armed factions, and twenty years of direct American involvement.

The History Inside the Files

For decades, Afghanistan has been defined by war: the 1979 Soviet invasion, mujahideen fighters, years of civil war, armed factions, Taliban rule, September 11, and the twenty-year American intervention that followed.

That history is woven throughout people’s files with direct consequences for whether they would ever set foot on American soil: the district where someone grew up, an armed group that controlled their neighborhood, a father who served in the Afghan army, an uncle who fought the Soviets, years spent displaced in Pakistan or Iran, or even a job taken after the United States arrived.

Before those decades of conflict, Afghanistan was a very different place.

Students in a biology class at Kabul University, photographed in the 1950s or early 1960s. Photographer unknown. Public domain.

Kabul in the 1960s and 1970s was cosmopolitan. Women attended universities, entered professions, and participated in civic and public life. It was not a utopia, and life beyond the capital was very different. There was space in Afghan society for education, culture, political debate, and for women to claim a public role in the country’s future.

Then the Soviets came.

Moscow’s military tactics looked similar to those it would later unleash in Ukraine: targeting civilians and infrastructure, destroying villages, and committing massive human-rights abuses across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians were killed during the war. Millions more were displaced within the country or driven across its borders.

The armed resistance, broadly known as the mujahideen, fought both the Soviet occupation and its Kremlin-backed government. For one family, that could mean a father or uncle who fought with the mujahideen. For another, it might mean a relative who served in the Soviet-backed government or military. For another, it could mean years spent across the border in Pakistan. When Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, Moscow continued supporting the Afghan government it had backed. That government collapsed after the Soviet Union disintegrated and its support disappeared.

The Taliban emerged from the chaos of years of civil war among numerous armed factions and seized Kabul in 1996.

Then 9/11.

When America invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, its stated objectives were to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government that had provided shelter to its leadership and a safe haven for its operations.

Within weeks, American forces and coalition allies severely disrupted al-Qaeda’s operations and drove the Taliban from Kabul. A new interim Afghan government soon took shape. What came next was twenty years of nation-building—a government, military, police force, schools, courts, aid programs, girls’ education, and civil-society institutions. Many Afghans became interpreters, soldiers, government officials, contractors, teachers, journalists, judges, activists, and leaders.

That work placed them—and their families—at grave risk in their own country.

Before Kabul fell, many had been able to live in relative safety in the city under the protection of the Afghan government and the international presence. When the Taliban seized the capital in August 2021, many of them found there was no longer any part of the country beyond the reach of a Taliban government now hunting them.

The danger they faced, however, was only one part of the adjudication.

Every layer of that history could show up in a file—an uncle who fought the Soviets, years spent displaced in Pakistan, life under the first Taliban government, service under the Islamic Republic, an associate who worked with an armed group, work connected to the United States, and threats after Kabul fell.

The same facts that supported their claims for refugee protection could also raise questions about whether they were admissible to the United States.

By the time those cases reached us, more than four decades of Afghanistan’s history had been compressed into individual case files.

Back Inside the SCIF

Inside the SCIF, those decades of history appeared in the files—both classified and unclassified. The cases that reached us had otherwise met the legal requirements for refugee protection. What remained was determining whether the national-security concern reflected a genuine threat or could be overcome after reviewing the full record.

Some applicants were approved. Others were not.

USCIS approached these decisions with extreme caution, requiring multiple layers of vetting and review before anyone could be approved for resettlement in the United States.

For eighteen months, it was an honor to be among the small group of officers entrusted with helping America keep its promise to Afghans who had risked everything to stand with us.

Then the work stopped.

There was no email. No meeting. No announcement. Not even a formal word passed down the chain of command.

We knew the new administration had suspended the refugee program. But no one bothered to explain what that meant for the cases in our queue.

We began hearing informally that cases sent forward for senior-level review were not being touched. At the same time, we kept showing up to work, many of us wondering if we would still have a job the next day.

Nothing changed about the cases. Afghanistan had not become any safer for them. They also did not pose any more of a danger than they did the day before.

After days of wondering what we were still doing there, we were simply reassigned to other work.

Cases that had taken years to reach that stage were frozen in place. The applicants remained scattered across the world, most in countries where they had no permanent status and no guarantee they would be allowed to remain.

We were on the front lines of America’s promise. Now we were watching its betrayal in real time.

Who Abandoned Afghanistan?

Every president who served during America’s longest war faced difficult choices.

Whether to send more troops or bring them home. Whether to withdraw or continue fighting. How long America would remain. What would be left behind.

There were failures across administrations. Failed strategies. Broken promises. Astronomical waste, fraud, and abuse. Decisions that cost Afghan and American lives.

But in 2020, the Doha agreement all but erased whatever chance the Afghan government still had of surviving without American forces.

When the United States negotiated the terms of its departure directly with the Taliban in the Qatari capital, the Afghan government America had spent nearly twenty years helping to build was not even invited to the table to negotiate the future of its own country.

The framework of the deal that emerged was essentially this: American and coalition forces would leave within fourteen months. A permanent ceasefire and political settlement were left for later.

It was also telling what the Doha deal omitted. There was nothing in the agreement about America protecting its Afghan partners and allies.

The Taliban surely noticed.

U.S. representative Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban representative Abdul Ghani Baradar sign the Doha agreement in Qatar on February 29, 2020. The Afghan government was not a party to the agreement. State Department photo by Ron Przysucha.

After Doha, America started packing as journalists, judges, activists, government officials, human-rights defenders, and women in public life were assassinated across the country. These were the very people who represented a different vision for Afghanistan and who could stand in the Taliban’s way. Many had worked directly with Americans or represented the institutions America had spent twenty years helping to build.

Afghanistan was being dismantled person by person before it fell province by province.

The American withdrawal under the next administration ended in catastrophe. Nothing can erase the images from Kabul, the deaths at Abbey Gate, or the thousands of people left behind.

But for America’s Afghan allies, Kabul was not the end of the story.

In the years that followed, that administration tried to uphold the promise America had made to them. It was the same promise America had kept after the fall of Saigon, when the United States resettled tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam. And the same principle behind the pathways created for Iraqis who had supported the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Leaving a war did not erase our obligations to the people who had stood with us.

The evacuation, the military installations, the refugee processing around the world, and the work inside the SCIF were all part of an extraordinary effort to salvage something honorable from a twenty-year debacle: protecting as many Afghan allies as American law and national security would allow.

The current administration went the other way.

Trust. Credibility. Moral obligation. None of it mattered.

Within days of taking office, the administration suspended the refugee program and stopped decisions on pending cases. Months later, it imposed sweeping restrictions on Afghans still trying to reach the United States.

Now, Afghans who waited for years and endured the most rigorous screening and vetting process in the American immigration system have simply been shut out.

In Pakistan, many with pending cases face deportation back to the country they fled—and a grim fate under the Taliban. In Qatar, about 1,100 Afghans—including their family members—remain at a former American military facility. The United States has explored relocating them to the Democratic Republic of Congo rather than completing the process that was supposed to bring them here—with return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan hanging over those left behind.

For the Afghans whose cases were sitting in our queue, this administration has offered no credible path forward—regardless of what the government’s own national-security review found.

At the same time, Afghan allies already in the United States remain in legal limbo, waiting for decisions in a system that once promised them protection and now leaves them facing the same threat of detention and removal confronting immigrant communities across America.

People once described as allies are now being treated as threats.

The vetting my colleagues and I conducted inside that SCIF is treated as though it never happened—as though these people had simply walked through the door.

Even the Soviet Union, after waging a brutal war in Afghanistan, continued supporting the Afghan government it had backed after withdrawing its troops in 1989. That support ended only after the Soviet Union itself collapsed and could no longer provide it.

Here, there has been no collapse rendering the United States unable to help.

This is a choice.

None of us had any illusions about the current administration’s plans for immigrants and refugees when it came to power in January 2025. But some of us thought that if any refugees still had a chance, surely it would be the Afghans who had risked their lives for the United States.

But here we are.

We had the officers. We had the clearances. We had the cases. We had built the machinery to finish the work.

Inside the SCIF, I spent eighteen months helping decide whether the people in those files could be trusted.

When the work stopped, America proved it would not keep its word.

That answered the question of who really abandoned Afghanistan.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Afghanistan: Administrative Divisions (2008).

As the senior DHS statistics official who resigned this week put it, there is a “war on immigrants” underway in this country.

This week, DHS stripped away one of the most important safeguards in the affirmative asylum process: the non-adversarial interview. A new rule provides USCIS with discretion to move certain asylum applicants directly into removal proceedings without ever giving them an opportunity to sit across from an asylum officer and explain their case.

I cannot overstate how devastating this will be for people seeking protection. That does not eliminate their right to seek asylum. What it does do is make that right extremely difficult to exercise. People waiting for years to make their case before an asylum officer may now be sent into adversarial removal proceedings, where they also run the risk of being detained by ICE while they await their day in an immigration court system deliberately being designed to facilitate deportations.

For affirmative asylum applicants, rigorous case preparation has never been more important. The written filing may now have to carry the case before the applicant ever gets an opportunity to speak. For many applicants, whether USCIS gives them an interview or sends them directly to immigration court may now rise or fall on the four corners of the written filing. Applications must therefore be as thorough, accurate, and carefully developed as possible from the outset.

Practitioners must understand not only the protection claim, but every part of the applicant’s history that could raise a credibility issue, statutory bar, national-security concern, filing-deadline question, or other basis for referral.

Afghan protection cases present uniquely complex versions of these issues. Drawing on years of adjudicating and reviewing cases, training asylum officers, and nearly two years adjudicating and reviewing some of the most complex Operation Allies Welcome cases, I created this guide to help practitioners build the factual record carefully, identify difficult issues before the government does, and give Afghan applicants a meaningful chance in this “war on immigrants.”

Build the life story first. Let the legal theories follow.

Download the free practitioner guide.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign insisting Project 2025 had nothing to do with him. The Heritage Foundation — the organization behind it — boasts that the Trump administration has now implemented 53 percent of the blueprint in barely eighteen months.

And it reads like a countdown to the end of the constitutional republic.

Volume I traced the blueprint, the people now carrying it out, and how it is reshaping the federal workforce, refugee program, asylum system, and immigration policy.

Volume II followed one piece of that blueprint from first-term asylum policy to a deportation plane that landed in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Volume III turned to Ukraine: the country where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the country whose survival Project 2025 reduces to presidential discretion.

Volume IV turned to Article III of the Constitution: the Court.

Volume V turned to the Constitution itself.

The sixth and final installment turns to the hostile takeover of the American government.

VOL VI: The Hostile Takeover

On July 4, DOGE’s formal mandate ended.

The chainsaw is going back in the shed.

Just as the agencies it tore to shreds begin hiring again.

They were so committed to eliminating waste that one of the first items on the agenda was spending billions of taxpayer dollars to pay tens of thousands of experienced civil servants not to work.

Those agencies are now scrambling to fill the vacancies.

The State Department. The IRS. Health and Human Services. Social Security. The Department of Education. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The National Endowment for the Humanities. Agency after agency, scrambling to replace the very people it paid billions of taxpayer dollars to push out.

The jobs did not disappear.

The civil servants did.

The “E” in DOGE stood for EFFICIENCY, after all. Turns out chainsaws can be remarkably efficient—at destruction.

So now they’re calling it “reshaping.”

In the first five months of this year, the federal government posted more than 104,000 job openings—far more than during the same period last year. The “Fork in the Road” program alone reportedly cost taxpayers an estimated $11 billion to pay federal employees not to work.

It started with an email.

The subject line read:

Fork in the Road

It came from an unfamiliar email address.

Most of us assumed it was a phishing attempt.

Many followed their training and reported it as such. Others warned coworkers not to click the links.

Then another message arrived. This one came through an official government email. Same message.

It was presented as a voluntary resignation offer.

The messages that followed made clear what it actually was.

Go take a paid vacation, they said. Find something better to do with your time than serve the public. Get a real job in the private sector was the clear message.

Russell Vought, one of Project 2025’s chief architects and now director of the Office of Management and Budget, had promised that bureaucrats would be “traumatically affected.”

This was how it began.

Not metaphorically.

Institutionally.

The End of an Independent Civil Service

In Volume I, my old job was on the list.

The list is now in force.

And last week, the administration confirmed it is looking for more names to add.

The first roughly 8,000 positions were concentrated near the top of the career workforce. Now the administration is considering reaching further down, potentially into thousands more positions.

“This is probably not like a single thing,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said.

He was right about that.

Schedule Policy/Career is not merely another personnel category. It moves career employees outside the ordinary civil service removal system and into at-will positions with sharply reduced protections against dismissal. The administration describes those positions as sufficiently connected to policy that they should remain under White House control.

My position less than a year ago—Supervisory Refugee Officer—was never a political appointment, never a policymaking job, and never one that changed with administrations. It applied U.S. immigration law to refugee cases.

The administration’s Schedule Policy/Career appendix identifying Supervisory Refugee Officer positions for conversion to at-will status.

Yet it was on the list.

The independent civil service is grounded in the principle that federal employees swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution—not to any President. It was designed so that professional judgment, legal obligation, evidence, and expertise would not yield to presidential whims.

Its protections were never a promise of lifetime employment.

They were a promise that government service would not become political patronage.

Merit instead of loyalty.

Law instead of personal obedience.

A professional civil service instead of the spoils system the country spent more than a century trying to leave behind. A system that treated public office as political currency—jobs for loyalists, favors for allies, and government power in service of the people who controlled it.

Project 2025 supplied the constitutional theory and the personnel machinery.

Musk brought the chainsaw.

And DOGE took it further than even its architects may have imagined.

That Private-Sector Efficiency I Always Heard About

The most radical transformation of the American government in generations. Literally named after a joke.

Some facts are worth stating plainly, because they sound invented.

DOGE stood for the Department of Government Efficiency.

It was named after a cryptocurrency.

Which was named after a meme.

Which was a picture of a dog.

The most aggressive restructuring of the federal workforce in a century took its name from a Shiba Inu meme whose captions said things like “much wow” in broken English.

Musk had spent years pumping the coin.

Now he had the government to match.

DOGE said it was saving a billion dollars a day.

The number kept changing. The receipts kept not arriving. Every time a reporter checked the math, the savings shrank.

But the billion-a-day headline had already done its work.

The method wasn’t new either. He’d run it before.

When he bought Twitter, he opened with mass layoffs and an email telling employees to commit to “extremely hardcore” work or take the door. The subject line was “A Fork in the Road.” Most took the door. More than a thousand who stayed were fired anyway—some the night before Thanksgiving.

The lawyer who sued him over it watched the federal version land and pointed out that he hadn’t even bothered to write a new subject line.

He did drop the “A.”

Those same four words hit two million federal employees. Fork in the Road.

Then came the sequel: reply with five bullet points on what you did last week, or be counted as resigned. He’d done that one at Twitter too—made engineers print their code and defend it to his face.

He was recycling one hostile takeover for another. We were the reboot.

Then came the people sent to do it.

Nineteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. No government experience. Handed the keys to federal systems most career employees spend years earning their way toward.

The most famous was nineteen. He went by “Big Balls.”

Not a leak. Not something an enemy dug up. He had put it on his own LinkedIn. As a joke.

Not sure how my background investigation would’ve gone under an alias like that.

They gave him access to the National Finance Center—the payroll and personnel system for the Justice Department, DHS, and the FBI. From there he collected roles at the State Department, DHS, FEMA, USAID, and Social Security.

A former FBI agent said he wouldn’t have recommended the kid for government work at all. Records later showed that a company he operated had provided technical support to a cybercrime network.

They gave him the keys to the vault anyway.

The “E” Is for EFFICIENCY

At USCIS headquarters, the signs of the new order were hard to miss. Cybertrucks began appearing in the best spaces in the parking garage. I would pass them on the way upward, circling toward whatever space remained, while employees inside wondered whether that would be the day the next email arrived—or the day their jobs disappeared.

The symbolism was almost too perfect.

Career civil servants who had spent years mastering complex government systems—along with senior officials responsible for running agencies and divisions—were waiting to learn whether they would still have jobs. At the same time, Musk-aligned operatives were being ushered into agencies and sensitive systems in the name of finding waste.

And yet we knew almost nothing about what they were doing. They had access to extraordinary amounts of information about us.

Classification and access controls are not bureaucratic theater.

They exist because the government holds information that can expose intelligence sources, military operations, diplomatic communications, law-enforcement investigations, proprietary business information, and the most sensitive details of people’s lives. In immigration systems, that can include asylum narratives, biometric records, medical histories, family relationships, security-check results, and information that could place applicants or their relatives in danger if improperly disclosed.

I know because I went through the process myself. Even after years in federal service with an active security clearance, an upgrade to a higher level still took roughly six months, another background investigation, interviews, and formal adjudication before additional access was granted.

That is how seriously the government was supposed to treat sensitive information.

Then DOGE arrived.

They were inside the databases before most civil servants got their drug test results back.

The rules became optional.

Then again, the president who put them in charge had already stored classified records in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and had shown a classified military attack plan to unauthorized people.

Musk spent $288 million to help put him back in office.

Apparently, that is the price tag.

Lobbyists pay for access to government officials.

Musk was given access to the government itself.

DOGE was the opening phase of a hostile takeover: drive out the people who understood the institutions, strip away the protections that allowed them to resist, seize the systems and data they guarded, and redirect public power toward private and political interests.

Musk did not merely gain influence over the government. He gained access to the actual systems used by agencies that contracted with his companies, regulated them, investigated them, and enforced the laws governing them.

His businesses had received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits. SpaceX alone held roughly $22 billion, primarily through government contracts. Yet DOGE sought or obtained access inside agencies overseeing Musk’s contracts, bids, regulations, and investigations.

Who needs lawyers and lobbyists when the president lets you inside the computer?

Projection as Confession

Contrary to some people’s apparent belief, shouting the word fraud does not make it true.

It requires a bit more to have any legal meaning.

At its core, fraud involves a material lie or concealment, knowledge or reckless disregard of its falsity, an effort to induce reliance, and resulting harm. The exact elements depend on the claim or statute, but accusation alone has never been one of them.

DOGE couldn’t be bothered with any such formalities.

It replaced any semblance of a legitimate fact-finding mission with the sound of a chainsaw.

An unused credit-card account became evidence of theft.

I cannot speak for every corner of the federal government. But I spent eleven years in USCIS divisions that deployed and trained thousands of officers across the United States and around the world.

I carried a government travel card for years. Official travel had to be authorized in advance. Per diem rates were set. Every charge had to be accounted for. Every receipt had to be submitted. You could not upgrade yourself to business or first class. Delinquencies, down to the dollar, were visible up the supervisory chain. Cards could be suspended or canceled.

Employees could face serious consequences.

An unused account proved nothing.

A grant Musk disliked became corruption. A contract’s maximum value became money supposedly saved. A payment nobody bothered to understand became proof of a criminal scheme.

The verdict came first.

The evidence was promised later.

Meanwhile, “Big Balls” was inside secure government systems containing some of your most sensitive data.

Millions of children around the world were losing access to lifesaving medicine, treatment, and nutrition services.

“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” Musk declared as he held it above his head at CPAC.

It made for a great photograph—for a WWE event.

Trump spent the campaign insisting he knew nothing about Project 2025.

Then he handed Musk the chainsaw and made him the face of the destruction.

Musk delivered something of a fantasy for the project’s architects: the federal government dismantled at lightning speed, their blueprint accelerated with impunity, and, by Heritage’s own accounting, more than half of Project 2025 implemented in barely eighteen months.

If anyone ever performs an autopsy on DOGE, its method may reveal the precise anatomy of the fraud it claimed to be hunting: sweeping material claims, reckless indifference to whether they were true, a public asked to rely on those claims, and immense harm once it did.

Perhaps someone just needs to shout it loudly enough. Maybe a larger power tool.

The operation that demanded receipts from everyone else is shutting down without producing any of its own.

Asked whether the administration would account for all that efficiency and what DOGE had done—the dollars, the jobs, the cost—the man who now runs the federal budget had an answer.

“No plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”

That man is Russell Vought. He runs OMB—the nerve center of the president’s budget and management agenda, and the office that would have to produce the receipts.

Oversight is not on the agenda.

The architect of the blueprint, auditing the demolition he designed, has decided there is nothing to report.

We’ll probably never know what DOGE actually cost the American taxpayer.

But we know what it did.

It paid tens of thousands of experienced civil servants not to work.

It drove career experts out of government and then began recruiting people to fill many of the same jobs.

It dismantled the world’s largest government foreign-assistance system and interrupted programs delivering food, medicine, disease surveillance, and protection to millions of people.

Then it kept going.

It entered systems holding the private information of nearly every American. It moved Social Security data through an unauthorized server—the most sensitive records the government keeps, routed outside the controls built to protect them.

It eliminated offices, abandoned projects, erased institutional memory, and scattered expertise accumulated over decades.

It crushed unions, appeal rights, whistleblower protections, and institutions designed to keep professional public service independent of immediate political control.

It redirected public machinery toward political priorities and private interests.

It invented an affirmative-action program for white South Africans and repurposed the crown jewel of America’s humanitarian protection system to carry it out, while tens of thousands of refugees from around the world remain shut out.

It stood up an Office of Remigration to run deportations through the same system that offered refuge to millions over decades—cutting deals with some of the most dangerous countries on earth to take the people we are now sending back.

Volume II followed one deportation plane to one of those countries.

Remigration is that plane, now a fleet.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have already lost their protections, even as their country is still pulling bodies from the rubble of catastrophic twin earthquakes. And after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the administration to terminate TPS for Haiti and Syria, hundreds of thousands more now stand one step closer to a removal order and a plane ride back into grave danger.

While the carnival barkers shout about Haitians eating cats and dogs, the Project he swore he’d never heard of is rewriting who counts as an American, who the government works for, and who gets put on a plane.

To places where you are told to leave a DNA sample behind so your family can identify the body.

And when the cutting stopped, agencies discovered that the work had not disappeared.

Across the government, agencies are hiring again for the same jobs they paid experienced civil servants billions of taxpayer dollars not to do only months earlier.

Some have returned as contractor roles. Many of the people who already knew how to perform the work have not been brought back.

We can count some of the employees fired.

We can count some of the jobs now being filled again.

We can count some of the programs abandoned and some of the expertise driven out.

But the full cost of dismantling institutions built over generations, across nearly every function of the federal government, may never be measured.

The cost to America—incalculable.

The Court Completes the Takeover

Volume IV traced how the Court had been built to clear the path.

As its term ended, it delivered.

The administration’s reclassification of thousands of protected civil-service positions—including my former job—into at-will policy roles ripples downward through the federal workforce.

The Supreme Court’s recent removal decisions reach upward into the leadership of independent agencies across the federal government.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court held that statutory protection preventing the President from removing an FTC commissioner except for cause violated the separation of powers. The majority’s theory was direct: officials exercising executive power must remain subject to presidential supervision and removal.

Make career employees much easier to fire.

Bring independent agencies under tighter presidential control.

Crush the unions and outside appeal rights.

Gut independent oversight.

Traumatize the bureaucracy.

Subject career officials who raised legal or ethical objections to forced reassignment, threats of termination, and hours-long polygraph examinations.

Place hiring and firing under tighter White House control.

In Trump v. Cook, the Court preserved the practical force of the Federal Reserve governors’ for-cause removal protection, rejecting an interpretation that would have reduced it to at-will employment. The Court emphasized the Fed’s distinctive history and the importance of protecting central banking from political interference.

The markets still require institutional independence—for now.

That “for now” is the whole story.

On the civil service, on presidential removal, on the machinery of executive power, the Court gave them almost everything Project 2025 assumed it would.

And what little the Court won’t hand over, they assume they can work around. Volume V was about exactly that—constitutional red lines treated not as walls but as inconveniences to be routed past. Birthright citizenship could not be ended by executive order, so they signed one anyway and assumed the Court would give them that too. The Fed could not be seized without burning down the economy, so the pressure shifts instead—to rates, to appointments, to the next vacancy.

Citizenship. The merit-based civil service. Two nineteenth-century protections, now provisional.

Apparently, we finally have an answer to when America was “great.”

The nineteenth century is making a comeback.

What Was Never on the Ballot

For six volumes, I have traced what this looked like from inside the systems being taken apart.

Fifty-three percent, by Heritage’s own count, in eighteen months.

It only accelerates from here.

Every major lever has been captured and is pulling in the same direction. The workforce, purged and made at-will. The courts, pre-positioned to clear the path. Congress, taking its marching orders from the White House. The watchdogs, defunded. The data—on citizens, on immigrants, on nearly every American—inside systems the executive now controls end to end.

One branch reaching into all the others. One office deciding who counts as a citizen, who the government serves, who gets investigated, who gets deported, who gets paid.

Almost none of it was on a ballot. After all, the president spent the campaign insisting he had nothing to do with Project 2025.

No one voted to hand "Big Balls" access to the payroll systems serving the FBI, DHS, and the Justice Department.

No one voted to run deportations to the Central African Republic, one of the most dangerous countries on earth, through the system built to offer refuge.

No one voted to send hundreds of thousands of caregivers, business owners, workers, and neighbors—people who were here lawfully and did everything the system asked of them—back into grave danger.

No one voted to fast-track white South Africans while vetted and approved refugees get locked out.

No one voted to end the independent civil service.

Volume V argued that the guardrails can only hold if the people in power operate in good faith.

This administration has learned that no one can make them.

Separation of powers is treated as an inconvenience.

The Constitution, as something to work around.

Security clearances, as paperwork for lesser people.

Power, as something to seize by any available means.

People this committed to holding power do not give it back. Not when they’ve built the machine to keep it. Not when every check has been captured or hollowed out. Not when they’ve dismantled the machinery meant to hold them accountable.

The chainsaw is going back in the shed.

The machine it built is just getting started.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign insisting Project 2025 had nothing to do with him. Less than two years later, its authors, contributors, allies, and ideas have reshaped the American government in ways that just a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable.

The Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 — says the Trump administration has now implemented 53 percent of the blueprint’s policy proposals.

And it reads like a countdown.

Volume I traced the blueprint, the people now carrying it out, and how it is reshaping the federal workforce, refugee program, asylum system, and immigration law.

Volume II followed one piece of that blueprint from first-term asylum policy to a deportation plane that landed in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.

Volume III turned to Ukraine: the country where I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the country whose survival Project 2025 reduces to presidential discretion.

Volume IV turned to Article III of the Constitution: the Court.

Volume V turns to the Constitution itself.

VOL V: To Support, Defend, & Work Around

The U.S. Constitution on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

The United States Constitution was never meant to be a museum piece.

Every president, member of Congress, Supreme Court justice, member of the armed forces, and federal employee swears an oath to support and defend it.

I took that oath. It was a privilege to do so.

But so did the people whose project has always been to find a way around it.

That oath is what separates public service from the private sector. You are not just working for an employer. You are not just carrying out a particular administration’s agenda. You are serving a constitutional system: separated powers, individual rights, due process, and equal protection under the law.

That system gives government officials enormous power.

It also protects the rest of us from that same power.

In other words, the American system only works if the people who swear to uphold it do so in good faith.

Otherwise, it is just words on an old piece of paper.

Project 2025 and its allies treat the Constitution as just that.

Not an oath to uphold.

Not a command to follow.

Not something to preserve, protect, and defend with your hand in the air.

A piece of paper to lawyer around.

A set of words to manipulate through manufactured ivory-tower theories.

An obstacle to overcome.

Something to work around when it does not allow the desired outcome.

When the only goal is power at all costs.

They Were Originalists Until the Actual Words Got in the Way

Last week, the Fourteenth Amendment survived the administration’s most brazen attack yet on the plain language of its Citizenship Clause.

It is astonishing that we have reached a place where this was even close.

The executive order tried to deny citizenship to children born in the United States if their mother was unlawfully present or temporarily present, unless the father was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

In other words, the administration tried to make American citizenship at birth depend on the immigration status of a child’s parents.

The Court rejected that theory.

But it got closer than it ever should have.

A majority held that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The birthright citizenship case should have been a layup for the conservative legal movement, or whatever it calls itself these days.

If textualism and originalism meant what they say they mean, this was the easy case.

These are the people who spent decades calling themselves textualists and originalists. They told the country that judges should not be activists, invent rights, rewrite statutes, update constitutional meaning, or impose policy from the bench.

They said courts should follow the text.

They said history matters.

They said judges are not legislators.

They said the Constitution means what it says.

But birthright citizenship is written into the Constitution.

It is in the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, written after the Civil War to destroy caste citizenship and prevent governments from deciding, generation by generation, which children born here are Americans:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States …

No caveats.

No qualifying language.

No exemptions.

The words the administration needed are not in the Citizenship Clause.

Not mother.

Not father.

Not lawful.

Not temporary.

Not immigration status.

The majority said as much. The words appearing throughout the executive order — mother, father, lawful, temporary — are absent from the Clause for a simple reason: they did not matter.

The history the administration needed was not there either. The majority called the government’s domicile-based theory “dramatically revisionist” and said there was “scant evidence” for it.

So the government did what this movement does when the law points the wrong way.

It invented a workaround wrapped in bogus legal doctrine.

Domicile. Primary allegiance. Exclusive jurisdiction. Temporary presence. Foreign power.

A lot of ivory-tower language deployed for one purpose: to make the Constitution stop saying what any literate person can plainly read.

That is not originalism.

That is not textualism.

That is the Project 2025 method applied to the Constitution itself: manufacture a legal theory, route around the text, and call the workaround law.

The Constitution becomes the obstacle. Doctrine becomes the route around it. And the citizenship of children born here becomes the thing to erase.

Constitution be damned.

Then Precedent Got in the Way Too

It is not only the text.

The Supreme Court already answered this question more than a century ago.

Generations of law students have read United States v. Wong Kim Ark in first-year constitutional law because it explains the basic framework of citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Wong Kim Ark, the government tried to deny citizenship to a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who lived in the United States but were barred by federal law from becoming citizens.

They were barred because Congress had built an exclusion regime around Chinese immigrants: a legal architecture of racism created by politicians and special interests who turned rhetoric about labor, disease, vice, invasion, and permanent foreignness into federal law.

Different century.

Same move.

“The Only One Barred Out” (1882). Library of Congress.

Chinese immigrants were cast as dirty, diseased, dangerous, unassimilable, and alien to American citizenship itself.

Now, Haitians are accused of eating cats and dogs. Somalis are held up as proof that immigration is destroying Minnesota. Syrians are cast as ISIS terrorists and Trojan horses. Central American mothers are reduced to “anchor babies” and fraud. Pregnant women from abroad become “birth tourists.” Migrants are called invaders, criminals, disease carriers, people with “bad genes,” people “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Take real people building your country, raising families, opening businesses, staffing hospitals, caring for children and elders, filling jobs, paying taxes, and contributing to the country, and turn them into a threat.

Then use that manufactured threat to argue that their children should not count.

Birth tourism exists. Fraud exists. National-security concerns exist. That is why governments have investigators, fraud-detection units, law-enforcement agencies, visa rules, criminal statutes, and removal proceedings.

Their answer to fraud is constitutional arson.

Individual misconduct is not a license to erase citizenship for a whole class of children born here.

Wong left the United States, returned once as a citizen, traveled again, and then the government treated him as a foreigner with no right to enter the country where he was born.

It claimed he was not an American citizen despite being born on U.S. soil.

The Supreme Court rejected that argument in 1898.

It held that the Fourteenth Amendment adopted the common-law rule of birthright citizenship: children born in the United States, subject to U.S. jurisdiction, are citizens at birth. The exceptions were narrow — children of foreign ministers and, at the time, children born into tribal nations treated as separate sovereigns.

That has been the law of the land for more than a century.

Stare decisis.

A Latin phrase for a simple idea: courts are supposed to follow what courts have already decided, especially when the Supreme Court has already answered the constitutional question.

And still, the administration tried to circumvent it.

The dissents tried to minimize Wong Kim Ark as much as possible. Because Wong’s parents were domiciled here, they argued the case did not protect children born to people here temporarily or unlawfully.

That is the workaround.

The Constitution has never made citizenship turn on the immigration status of someone’s parents.

They argued it regardless.

They built a theory around the obstacle.

And there is another irony here.

The dissents shrink the Fourteenth Amendment back toward the immediate facts of Reconstruction. Yes, the Citizenship Clause was written to repudiate Dred Scott. Yes, it was written in the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War. Yes, it was designed to make formerly enslaved people citizens of the United States.

But constitutional rights do not expire once the first group of people is protected.

That is the point of putting them in the Constitution.

And that is what Wong Kim Ark made clear: the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise applied to a Chinese American man born in San Francisco to parents who were barred from naturalizing because federal law excluded Chinese immigrants.

He was born here.

He was subject to U.S. jurisdiction — a citizen.

The Fourteenth Amendment was born from Black freedom, and Wong Kim Ark applied its promise to a Chinese American child of immigrants.

That is not a contradiction.

That is the correct reading of an amendment written in plain text for anyone literate enough to read.

As I wrote in Volume IV, Project 2025 assumed a Court.

The dissents came from the Court this movement spent decades building — a Court shaped through the same Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society network of judges, clerks, scholars, and legal theories that Project 2025 depends on.

The dissents are now the legal roadmap for the next workaround.

They read Wong Kim Ark the same way Project 2025 reads the Constitution: not as a command to follow, but as an obstacle to route around in order to reach the desired result.

When the text got in the way, they manufactured a theory.

When precedent got in the way, they hollowed it out.

And when the Court was assumed, the whole thing became a dangerously close call.

When the Workaround Fails

As the Court’s 2026 term ended last week, Project 2025 had received almost everything it needed from the Court on immigration.

TPS termination — mass de-legalization.

Third-country removals to some of the world’s most dangerous places.

Lawful permanent residents made easier to exclude.

The right to asylum on life support.

The front door. The back door. The work permit. The protection. The machinery of removal.

All of it.

The Court this project assumed had delivered.

And then the administration almost pulled it off: erasing birthright citizenship by executive order.

Almost.

When the Court cleared the path for TPS termination, third-country removals, and blocking asylum seekers before they could reach the place where the law begins, the administration and its allies celebrated executive power.

Stephen Miller took a victory lap when this Court cleared the way for the administration to turn hundreds of thousands of people from legally present into removable, despite the protection Congress created when it enacted TPS.

They told us:

“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY.”

But when the Court refused to let the administration reimagine the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and hollow out 128 years of precedent, the same movement suddenly discovered the danger of judges rewriting the Constitution.

Now the answer became barring pregnant foreign travelers, birth-tourism crackdowns, and whatever administrative machinery might make the constitutional right impossible to exercise in practice.

When the Court gives them the outcome they want, it respects the rule of law.

When the Court stops them from erasing birthright citizenship by executive order, the response is:

“If your ruling requires you to suicide your civilization, your reading of the Constitution is wrong.”

When the text protects them, it is sacred.

When the text protects immigrant children, the text becomes an obstacle to route around.

That is not originalism.

That is power at any cost.

The Workaround Was the Point

The birthright citizenship ruling was a setback for the project — but only a setback.

The administration tried to do by executive order what can only be done by constitutional amendment. It got closer than it ever should have. And now it will look for other routes.

Justice Thomas wrote a sprawling dissent that treated Wong Kim Ark as though it had never settled the very question his opinion sought to reopen: whether the Citizenship Clause protects children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents. In doing so, he recast a constitutional guarantee born from Reconstruction and carried forward in Wong Kim Ark into one that no longer reaches the children of many immigrants.

Justice Jackson answered his logic in her concurrence. Thomas has insisted for decades that the Constitution is colorblind — until colorblind was the reading that protected these children’s citizenship. Then, suddenly, the Citizenship Clause became a narrow race-conscious remedy for the freedmen and no one else.

Justice Kavanaugh agreed the order was unlawful — but on statutory, not constitutional, grounds, and in doing so he held the next door open. He would have resolved the case under the Immigration and Nationality Act, not the Constitution.

Then he wrote:

“Congress could—consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment—amend §1401(a) or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country.”

And House Speaker Mike Johnson understood the invitation. After praising Thomas’s dissent as a “must read,” he said Republicans were already looking for a “legislative fix.”

Thomas supplied the maximal theory. Kavanaugh preserved the statutory route. Johnson translated it into politics. Miller showed how the administrative state could be used to make the constitutional right impossible to exercise in practice.

That is the next workaround.

That is the method.

Shift the theory.

Reverse-engineer the reasoning.

Wrap the desired result in Yale legalese, Federalist Society doctrine, and MAGA grievance.

Then call the workaround law.

Project 2025 is usually described as an executive-branch blueprint. That is true but incomplete.

It is also a workaround manual.

A plan for using legal theories, loyal personnel, administrative machinery, and a Court built for this moment to circumvent the Constitution whenever the Constitution stands in the way.

But a constitutional system cannot survive if the people who swear to uphold it consistently work around its plain text, hollow out its precedent, and use every branch of government to reach a result the Constitution does not allow.

The separation of powers becomes theater.

Rights become paperwork.

Citizenship becomes conditional.

The oath becomes a prop.

The Constitution becomes a museum piece.

And the workaround becomes America.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign insisting Project 2025 had nothing to do with him. Less than two years later, its authors, contributors, allies, and ideas have reshaped America in ways that just a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable.

This week, Bloomberg Law reported that the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 — says the Trump administration has already implemented 53 percent of the blueprint’s policy proposals.

The Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact tracker found that 283 of 532 identified domestic administrative actions had been initiated or completed within the first year of the administration.

Denying the connection has become irrelevant. The people who wrote the blueprint are embedded across the most powerful positions in the Trump administration.

Their progress is now being celebrated in public.

And it reads like a countdown.

Volume I of The Project 2025 Chronicles traced the blueprint, the people now carrying it out, and how it is reshaping the federal workforce, refugee program, asylum system, and immigration law.

Volume II followed one piece of that blueprint from first-term asylum policy to a deportation plane that landed in Bangui.

Volume III turned to Ukraine: the country where I served for twenty-seven months as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the country whose survival Project 2025 reduces to presidential discretion.

Volume IV turns to Article III of the Constitution: the Court.

VOL IV: The Court Clears the Path

The U.S. Supreme Court. Credit: USDA / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Last week, the Supreme Court cracked open the foundation under hundreds of thousands of people who had done exactly what the U.S. government asked them to do.

Now their lives are at risk.

In Mullin v. Doe, the Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians living in the United States — people whose lives had already been upended by the violence, collapse, war, and humanitarian disasters that led the United States to protect them in the first place.

They came forward. They registered with the government. They renewed their status. They passed background checks. They worked legally, paid taxes, raised children, cared for elders, staffed hospitals, built businesses, joined churches, paid rent and mortgages, and organized their lives around being protected from return until their countries were safe enough to go back to.

Many people forced back will be targeted precisely because they lived in the United States — perceived as wealthy, Westernized, disloyal, or marked by the very fact of having escaped. People will know when a removal flight lands in Port-au-Prince or Damascus — that knowledge alone will put many at risk as soon as the plane touches down.

Now panic and chaos are spreading through families and communities as people try to figure out whether they have any path left, whether they will be forced to leave their U.S.-citizen children behind, or whether they will have to bring them to countries our own government tells Americans it is too dangerous to enter for any reason.

Legal yesterday.

Removable tomorrow.

Taking a victory lap, Stephen Miller knew exactly what the Court had given him.

“This is a victory 10 years in the making,” Miller said on Fox News.

Temporary Does Not Mean Disposable

DHS decided to explain the ruling this way: it says it right there in the name:

“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY.”

Secretary Mullin is right about that much. That is indeed what the T is for.

The legal argument sounds simple enough: the T is for temporary. DHS has discretion. Courts should not second-guess termination decisions.

But the word “temporary” is being used not to describe a humanitarian status, but to erase the people who organized their lives around it.

The question at the heart of any TPS renewal is what the government is supposed to do when the conditions that justified protection in the first place remain dangerous.

TPS is built around country conditions. The government designates a country when armed conflict, disaster, or extraordinary conditions make return unsafe. Then it reviews those conditions before the designation expires to determine whether protection should be extended or terminated.

If safe return becomes possible, the government can terminate it.

That is the rule.

And if anyone wants to know where to check country conditions, you do not have to dig through a stack of human rights reports.

You can start with the State Department’s own website.

State Department Haiti Travel Advisory: Level 4 — Do Not Travel due to crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care. Source: U.S. Department of State.

For Haiti, the State Department tells Americans: Do Not Travel — for any reason.

For Syria, the State Department tells Americans: Do Not Travel — for any reason.

The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic carry the same warning — countries to which the administration is now deporting people, including people protected by court orders. The Central African Republic advisory tells Americans who go anyway to draft a will before they leave and leave DNA samples with loved ones in case they need to be identified.

That is what fancy lawyers might call prima facie evidence that a country is not safe.

A humane government would at a minimum heed those warnings and renew protection — not design its immigration policy around deporting people into countries its own officials warn Americans not to enter for any reason.

This administration looked at those warnings and celebrated a “victory 10 years in the making.”

The Emergency They Chose to See

The administration did not forget how to recognize an emergency.

It found one exactly where it wanted to find one — protecting a particular group of people.

Not in Haiti, where gangs have overrun large parts of the capital and the State Department tells Americans not to travel for any reason. Not in Syria, after more than a decade of war, torture, detention, displacement, and state collapse.

Senior State Department and DHS officials greet newly arrived Afrikaner refugees at Dulles International Airport. Source: U.S. Department of State.

It found one for white South Africans.

For Afrikaners — members of one of the wealthiest and most politically powerful communities in South Africa, descended from the architects and beneficiaries of apartheid — the administration discovered urgency.

A pathway was created seemingly overnight. Senior officials met the first wave of arrivals at Dulles. Welcome materials were prepared. The Times of London reported that future arrivals are to receive Android tablets, American flags, books about anti-white racism, copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and literature curated to tell them what kind of country they were entering.

And there is nothing temporary about that pathway.

Refugee resettlement is designed to lead to permanence: lawful permanent residence, citizenship, and a future in the United States. That door is now being opened for white South Africans while tens of thousands of refugees from around the world — many already vetted and approved for resettlement — have been shut out.

The contrast is even starker because TPS holders are not waiting abroad.

They are already here.

The pattern is not subtle.

Haitians are accused of eating cats and dogs. Somalis are held up as proof that immigration is destroying Minnesota. Syrians are cast as ISIS terrorists and Trojan horses. Migrants are called invaders, criminals, disease carriers, people with “bad genes,” people “poisoning the blood” of the country.

This is racism in full view — broadcast by the executive branch of the United States government.

And it is aimed at communities that, in the real world, are working, raising families, building businesses, staffing hospitals, caring for children and elders, filling jobs, paying taxes, and contributing to the growth of places like Springfield, Ohio, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

They are not voting. TPS does not give anyone the right to vote in our elections. They are not replacing anyone at the ballot box. They are being targeted for mass deportation because of who they are and where they come from.

Asked whether Haiti was safe, Stephen Miller reportedly answered: “Haitians live in Haiti.”

The same government that warns Americans not to travel to Haiti because of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care is sending Haitians there because: “Haitians live in Haiti.”

And apparently white Afrikaners belong in America.

One emergency had to be invented.

The other is published on the State Department’s website.

For Haitians and Syrians, temporary means disposable.

For white South Africans, emergency means a red carpet.

What TPS Is — and What It Is Not

Temporary Protected Status is not amnesty. It is not open borders. It is not a loophole for people who committed crimes. If a TPS holder commits a crime, the system already has tools. Criminal convictions can make someone ineligible. Immigration enforcement can act.

Nothing about TPS requires the government to ignore public safety.

TPS is a legal status Congress created because reality sometimes makes deportation irrational, dangerous, or impossible. War. Natural disaster. State collapse. Extraordinary conditions. When a country is too dangerous for return, the United States can designate that country for TPS.

Only eligible nationals already in the United States can apply, and if approved, they are protected from removal and authorized to work while the designation holds.

It is not permanent and it is not automatic. A designation can last 6, 12, or 18 months at a time. Before it expires, the government must review country conditions and decide whether protection should be extended or terminated.

If conditions have materially improved and safe return is possible, TPS can end. If the danger remains, the protection is supposed to continue.

Haitians and Syrians did not overstay anything. They registered. They renewed on schedule. They paid fees. They passed background checks. And DHS kept agreeing they qualified, extension after extension, for more than a decade.

Haiti was first designated in 2010, after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed more than two hundred thousand people and destroyed much of the capital. It stayed designated through everything that followed — a cholera epidemic, a presidential assassination, and gangs that now control much of Port-au-Prince.

Syria was designated in 2012, after the Assad regime answered protest with torture, siege, and chemical weapons, and the country collapsed into civil war.

As of March 2025, about 1.3 million people with TPS were living in the United States. Since then, the Trump administration has terminated or announced plans to terminate protections for more than one million of them, including about 350,000 Haitians and more than 600,000 Venezuelans.

That is not a narrow immigration enforcement decision.

It is an attempt to convert lawful presence into deportability at scale.

Now, the Court has cleared the way.

Collapsed and damaged buildings in Los Palos Grandes, Venezuela, after the June 2026 earthquakes. Source: Venezolana de Televisión / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.

Last week, twin earthquakes — magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 — devastated coastal Venezuela. The death toll has climbed past 1,700, with tens of thousands still missing or unaccounted for. Buildings collapsed. Families are still searching through rubble. Search-and-rescue teams, including teams from the United States, rushed in to help.

That is exactly the kind of disaster TPS was built for.

And yet the same government sending help to pull Venezuelans from the rubble has already moved to strip TPS from more than 600,000 Venezuelans living here lawfully.

Reuters reported that a deportation flight carrying more than 140 Venezuelans landed in Venezuela just hours before the earthquakes. The deportees were taken to a government-run hotel that later collapsed; relatives told Reuters that only about a dozen escaped unaided, and one family had seen a list of 32 survivors.

The disaster has now arrived — and the administration has signaled it has no plans to restore the protection, even as the country it would send them back to is still digging its children out of the rubble.

Venezuelans live in Venezuela, after all.

Haiti Does Not Become Safe by Press Release

The State Department warns Americans not to travel to Haiti for any reason. The country is experiencing gang violence, kidnapping, civil unrest, mass displacement, food insecurity, and the collapse of basic security.

In parts of the country, armed groups function as the government. Roads, neighborhoods, airports, hospitals, and ordinary movement can turn on who controls the street that day.

But Haitians who have lived lawfully in the United States for years are told they can be sent back because “the T in TPS stands for temporary.”

A Haitian TPS holder can have a work permit, a Social Security number, U.S.-citizen children, a job, a lease, church membership, taxes paid, background checks passed, and an ICE check-in scheduled — all under the understanding that TPS protects them from deportation while Haiti remains unsafe.

Then the legal floor drops.

Yesterday: protected.

Today: removable.

Haiti does not become safe because the administration wants Haitians gone. Syria does not become returnable because the word “temporary” fits neatly in a press release. Ukraine or Yemen will not become safe because a future DHS secretary arbitrarily decides protection has lasted long enough.

That is the point of non-refoulement — the bedrock principle, recognized in international and U.S. law, that countries do not send people back into harm’s way.

But this administration treats that principle as irrelevant.

The “T” is for temporary.

Not disposable.

Al Otro Lado and the Door That Disappears

The TPS ruling should be read beside the Court’s asylum decision issued the same day in Al Otro Lado.

One ruling says protection can disappear after you have lived here lawfully.

The other says the right to seek asylum can be blocked before you can even ask.

Al Otro Lado grew out of metering: the practice of limiting how many people CBP would inspect each day at ports of entry and turning others back before they could step onto U.S. soil. It was not Remain in Mexico. It came before that. But it belongs to the same architecture: policies designed to make asylum unreachable.

Metering kept asylum seekers from reaching the door. Remain in Mexico forced them back across the border to wait in danger. Title 42 used public health as the pretense to summarily expel people before their asylum claims could be heard.

Different tools. Same architecture.

The government’s theory in Al Otro Lado is absurdly simple: you have a statutory right to ask for asylum once you arrive, and the government can defeat that right by stopping you a few feet short of the line — even while staring you in the face.

Imagine a political dissident fleeing persecution. She reaches the port of entry. She can see the officer. The officer can see her. She says: if I go back to my country, I will be killed. But because the government stops her from reaching the square of concrete that triggers the statute, the Court says she has not legally arrived.

The Court says that is enough.

Not enough to trigger the statute.

Enough to make the right disappear.

Justice Sotomayor understood the consequence. In dissent, she warned that the Court’s rule allows immigration officers to stand at the border and physically block asylum seekers from setting foot on U.S. soil — even if the person is certain to be persecuted or killed if turned away.

“More people will die.”

This is what “10 years in the making” looks like in legal form.

Not one policy. A sequence.

Keep them from reaching the door. Push them back after they ask. Expel them before they can be heard. End protection for those already here.

Deport hundreds of thousands of lawful people to grave danger.

Then ask the courts to call each step discretion.

The Court the Blueprint Was Waiting For

Project 2025 is usually described as an executive-branch blueprint. That is true but incomplete.

The blueprint assumes a Court.

And for good reason.

It assumes a conservative legal movement that spent decades cultivating judges, clerks, law students, donors, doctrines, and institutions. Scalia was its hero. Roberts gave it institutional cover. Thomas and Alito became its anchors. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett came through the list process that gave the movement the Court it wanted.

Project 2025 did not create this Court.

The blueprint was written precisely for it.

It assumes justices who will read humanitarian protection narrowly, executive immigration power broadly, and lower-court resistance as obstruction. It assumes judges trained to know which words matter and which people do not.

That is what “10 years in the making” means.

Not one ruling.

A sequence.

One decision says lawful protection can disappear after years of compliance, leaving hundreds of thousands of people to wonder when the removal flight lands in Port-au-Prince or Damascus.

Another says the right to seek asylum can disappear before the request is even heard.

They wrote the blueprint.

Now it is being built.

Heritage says it is already 53 percent complete.

The countdown is public now.

And it is counting down to the end of humanitarian protection in the United States.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign insisting Project 2025 had nothing to do with him. Less than two years later, its authors, contributors, allies, and ideas have reshaped the federal government in ways that just a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable.

Volume I of The Project 2025 Chronicles traced the blueprint, the people now carrying it out, and how it is reshaping the federal workforce, refugee program, and immigration system. Volume II followed one piece of that blueprint from first-term asylum policy to a plane that has now landed in Bangui.

Volume III turns to Ukraine: the country where I served for twenty-seven months as a Peace Corps volunteer, and the country whose survival Project 2025 reduces to presidential discretion.

To understand what Project 2025 makes optional, you have to understand what Ukraine has already survived.

VOL III: The Country I Taught Rule of Law In — Ukraine

Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 did not create Ukraine’s struggle for self-determination.

It fully militarized it.

Ukraine has exposed the lie at the center of Moscow’s imperial myth: that Russia was inevitable.

Long before Russian tanks crossed the border, Ukraine was already fighting over memory, identity, law, corruption, language, Europe, Moscow, and whether the country would belong to its people or to the power next door trying to claim it.

When Peace Corps volunteers were serving across Ukraine, that struggle was visible in ways that were not always easy to understand at first.

Victory Day, 2012: crowds gathered for parades commemorating the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany. Old men wore decorated uniforms and medals. Soviet songs played. Stalin’s image did not merely linger in memory; it appeared openly — on placards, signs, posters, and portraits praising his leadership.

Victory Day parade in Kyiv, 2010. Wikimedia Commons.

In markets, you could still buy old Soviet trinkets, Lenin pins, Red Army medals, and portraits of men whose images had become, for some, historical kitsch rather than living terror. Soviet memory was not just politics. It was atmosphere. It was in parades, flea markets, songs, family stories, apartment blocks, monuments, and the habits of people who had survived one system and were still learning how to name what it had done to them.

Much has been made, rightly, of the Soviet sacrifice in World War II. The usual estimate is staggering: roughly twenty-four to twenty-seven million Soviet dead. What is easier to forget is how many of those dead were Ukrainian.

Ukraine became one of the central killing grounds of the twentieth century. Estimates vary, but roughly eight million Ukrainians died in the war — civilians, soldiers, Jews murdered in the Holocaust, prisoners, partisans, and others caught as the Eastern Front tore through the country twice.

And yet the man still appearing on placards at Victory Day celebrations was also the man who had turned mass starvation into public policy in Ukraine.

In 1932 and 1933, Stalin had a problem: Ukraine.

Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, the agricultural heartland of the Soviet project, and a country with its own language, memory, peasantry, and older traditions of Cossack self-rule.

Moscow needed grain. Stalin needed control.

That was the logic of collectivization. The state takes your land, your harvest, your livestock, your livelihood, and your food — and calls protest sabotage.

Ukrainian farmers resisted. Stalin answered with one of his most diabolical acts of state violence, even by his standards.

Officials imposed impossible quotas. Brigades searched homes for hidden grain and food. Villages were blacklisted. Starving people were blocked from leaving in search of bread. Railway stations and roads became points of control.

Ukraine’s harvest was extracted while Ukrainians were trapped inside the famine.

Millions died.

Holodomor Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the millions of victims of Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine. Photo by Andrew J. Kurbiko / Wikimedia Commons.

It was rule by starvation: a deliberate campaign to break Ukrainian resistance, feed and finance the Soviet state, and crush the idea that Ukraine could exist as anything more than a subordinate province of Moscow.

A Ukrainian law professor I worked with spoke about the Holodomor not as history. He talked about it as family. His relatives had died because of it, and the wound had not fully closed.

For decades, the Holodomor itself was buried under Soviet denial. The truth emerged slowly — through survivors, émigré memory, demographic research, the suppressed 1937 Soviet census, and later access to archives after the Soviet Union began to open and then collapse.

Even by 2012, it did not feel like a settled national memory everywhere in Ukraine. Some people knew it intimately. Others knew it incompletely, or as something still being recovered from beneath official silence.

That view of Ukraine did not disappear with Stalin. It is the same imperial logic that runs through Putin’s war now: Ukraine as possession, Ukrainian identity as threat, Ukrainian independence as an insult to be corrected by force.

Western Ukraine carried a different historical memory.

Before the Soviet Union, much of western Ukraine had not shared the same long history of Russian imperial rule. Centuries under Polish and Austro-Hungarian rule had produced a more European-facing culture, and a deeper resistance to the idea that Ukraine’s future should be dictated from Moscow.

Then came the twentieth century.

Soviet occupation under Stalin. Nazi occupation. Stalin again.

In Lviv, the former prison on Łąckiego Street stands as a museum and memorial to that cycle of terror. Under Soviet rule, it became NKVD Prison No. 1. During the German occupation, it was used by the Gestapo. After the war, Soviet security services took it back.

The former prison on Łąckiego Street in Lviv, now the National Museum-Memorial of Victims of the Occupation Regimes. Photo by Бучач-Львів / Wikimedia Commons.

The political ideologies differed. The ideology of absolute power through fear did not. The same cells. The same interrogations. The same logic: torture, confession, disappearance, execution.

When German forces advanced and Soviet authorities retreated from Lviv in 1941, the NKVD murdered more than 1,600 people held in the prison rather than release them. Then the Nazis arrived. After the Nazis were driven out by the Red Army, the Soviet security services returned.

The signs changed again. So did the uniforms. For the people of Lviv, the machinery of terror remained.

Even decades later, after Ukraine became independent, the fight over memory was not over. In 2010, the museum’s director was detained after researching the history of political repression.

Memory itself remained dangerous.

Then came Chornobyl.

A Ukrainian colleague once showed the scar on her neck from thyroid surgery. She traced it back to visits with relatives in areas affected by the disaster. After the reactor exploded in 1986, Soviet authorities concealed the scale of the catastrophe. People were told conditions were safe when they were not. May Day parades went forward while radioactive fallout was still spreading. Only after radiation alarms sounded in Sweden did the Soviet Union begin to admit what had happened.

For many Ukrainians, Chornobyl was not only an environmental catastrophe. It was another lesson in what secrecy, corruption, and unaccountable power could cost ordinary people.

Families carried those consequences in bodies, medical records, childhood cancers, thyroid scars, and stories passed down across kitchen tables. Anyone who has visited the Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv knows that the disaster was never only about a reactor. It was about truth — who controlled it, who buried it, and who paid the price.

Inside the Ukrainian National Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv. Signs mark towns abandoned after the disaster. Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, Russia’s war reached even that memory. During a major attack on Kyiv, the National Chornobyl Museum reportedly suffered severe damage to its collection — nearly forty years after the Soviet state tried to hide the truth the museum was built to preserve.

That was the Ukraine I encountered before Maidan: a country carrying more suffering than any people should have to, while a younger generation began asking different questions about sovereignty, truth, law, and where Ukraine belonged.

The Peace Corps Firewall

After this administration took power, I found myself thinking about the Peace Corps.

Why not?

USAID has been gutted. Refugees have been shut out. Asylum has been eviscerated. Immigrants with court orders protecting them have been deported to some of the most dangerous places on earth. International organizations have been defunded or denounced. The federal workforce has been put through the “Fork in the Road” machine.

An administration that views public service as suspect, humanitarian work as ideological, and foreign assistance as waste seemed unlikely to have much patience for an agency built on the belief that Americans should live humbly inside other countries and learn from them.

Project 2025 does not appear to single out the Peace Corps for abolition. The threat was not in a specific Peace Corps provision. It was in the worldview: public service as suspect, foreign assistance as waste, and independent institutions as obstacles to presidential control.

Peace Corps is one of the best foreign-policy tools the United States has ever built. Not because it projects power, but because it does the opposite. It sends Americans into local communities most Americans will never visit, including places where even diplomats and development professionals may rarely spend much time outside capital cities. It asks them to live there, learn the language, teach there, be humbled there, and come home with a deeper understanding of the world than they had when they left.

At its best, Peace Corps carries the strongest American ideals in the least imperial form: not a base, not a contract, not an intelligence platform, not a sermon, not a demand. A person. A classroom. A counterpart. A host family. A bus ride. A winter morning in Cherkasy. A class of Ukrainian second graders singing “The Wheels on the Bus.”

All of it costs almost nothing by federal standards. For a rounding error in the federal budget, the United States sends thousands of Americans into the world to build relationships no embassy cable or weapons system could ever create.

Every volunteer knew the agency’s three goals. I still have them in my wallet for some reason: help interested countries meet their need for trained people; promote a better understanding of Americans by the people served; and promote a better understanding of other peoples by Americans.

That is not sentimentality.

It is strategy.

And it only works if people believe volunteers are not spies, not missionaries, not political operatives, not dealmakers, and not bargaining chips.

Ukraine Welcomed What Russia Rejected

Russia understood the threat of that distinction well enough to reject it.

Russia ended Peace Corps operations in 2002. Ukraine made a different choice. Peace Corps goes only where it is invited — the host government asks for volunteers, selects the projects, and decides what role they will play. Russia closed the door. Ukraine opened it.

By the time I served there, volunteers were placed across the country — from Crimea to Donetsk and Luhansk, from Lviv to the center of the country, where I lived in Cherkasy.

There is a conspiracy theory, common in Moscow and among some of its American sympathizers, that Ukraine’s democratic movements were engineered by the United States. From my vantage point, the charge misunderstands what was happening.

If the accusation is that America helped expose Ukrainians to the outside world, then guilty.

The work was mostly teaching English, riding the marshrutka, helping with community projects, talking with law students about courts and constitutional systems, and singing “The Wheels on the Bus” with second graders.

If that was empire, it was a strange one.

What I saw was not an American project.

It was a Ukrainian one.

Cherkasy

From 2011 to 2013, I lived in Cherkasy, a small city on the bank of the Dnipro River, in an old Soviet high-rise on the outskirts of town, and took the marshrutka to work every morning.

Hill of Glory memorial in Cherkasy at sunset, July 24, 2015. Photo by Dniprovych / Wikimedia Commons.

From the bus stop to the classroom, I was greeted by a chorus of hellos from students who seemed delighted that an American had somehow appeared in their city and stayed for two years.

The secondary school became my first window into a country beginning to look outward. I taught from second grade through eleventh grade, across different levels and different kinds of lessons. The teachers welcomed me into the community.

There was nothing casual about the first day of school. It was a ceremony. Families and communities came out. Administrators spoke. Students stood in formation. The anthem played. The bell rang.

What also struck me was the seriousness of the academic culture. Students were encountering algebra, geometry, physics, chemistry, and biology earlier and more formally than many American students do. The expectations were high. The system could be rigorous, even demanding.

At the same time, there was a different relationship to questioning, argument, and critical thinking — habits a democratic society depends on, but that Soviet and post-Soviet schooling had never really been designed to teach.

Later, at two law schools, the conversations moved from language and culture to justice, constitutional systems, American legal institutions, and comparative law. The students were curious in a way that felt deeper than politeness. They wanted to know how things worked elsewhere. They wanted to understand courts, rights, accountability, power, corruption, and the difference between rule of law and rule by law — between law as a restraint on power and law as a tool for the powerful.

This was a generation looking outward after having been closed off for too long. People showed up to hear an American lawyer talk about courts and rights and accountability in a way that would have been hard to imagine back home. Students stayed after class. They asked questions. They wanted photographs. They wanted to keep talking.

They were not trying to stop being Ukrainian.

They were looking for hope. Connection. A future that did not feel already decided.

Corruption as Atmosphere

At one point, while teaching comparative American and Ukrainian judicial systems, I suggested a field trip to observe court proceedings.

In the United States, that would have been an ordinary civics lesson. Courts are public. Students can sit in the gallery, watch the process, and see the difference between a legal system on paper and a legal system in motion.

The idea was shut down almost immediately. I was told Ukrainian courts were not really open to the public in that way. Whether that was formally true, practically true, or simply understood by everyone to be true, the message was clear enough: this was not something that was going to happen.

I started a law and justice working group to discuss these questions more broadly, but even there the limits were clear. Peace Corps is mandated to be nonpolitical. For good reason. Volunteers are not sent abroad to interfere in domestic politics. We were guests. Teachers. Counterparts. Neighbors. Community members. Not activists.

Still, the boundary taught me something.

I once suggested that students could collect local stories about corruption — not as formal accusations, not as journalism, but as a kind of civic chronicle. The working title in my head was something like Tales of Corruption.

These were the stories everyone seemed to know: the envelope passed to the doctor, the official who had to be paid, the connected son who escaped accountability, the ordinary person crushed by a system everyone understood and almost no one could name out loud. One story I heard involved an intoxicated police officer who killed a pedestrian with his car and then somehow won damages from the victim’s family for the repairs. Whether every detail was true or not, the point was clear: power did not merely escape accountability. It could make the victim pay.

When I raised the idea with Peace Corps Ukraine staff, I was told plainly that pursuing something like that could jeopardize Peace Corps Ukraine itself.

That was when it became clear: corruption was not merely a topic.

It was the atmosphere everyone had to breathe.

The Warning Flares Before Maidan

People told stories to explain corruption. One was almost certainly apocryphal, but everyone understood the point.

A young man is badly injured in a motorcycle crash and taken to a hospital. The doctor expects cash before treating him. Other patients are seen first. By the time the doctor reaches the motorcycle victim, the young man is dead.

Only then does the doctor realize the dead boy is his own son.

That was the story people told because that was what corruption felt like. Not a few bad officials taking envelopes. A whole moral universe in which every gate had a price, every office had a patron, and every emergency became a transaction.

Then there was the case of Oksana Makar.

In 2012, an eighteen-year-old woman in Mykolaiv was raped, strangled, set on fire, and left for dead; she survived nearly three weeks before dying of her injuries. The case became a national scandal after suspects reportedly connected to former officials were initially released.

People protested.

That mattered.

In a country where people had learned not to expect accountability from the powerful, the protests were a warning flare.

Maidan did not come from nowhere.

Euromaidan in Kyiv, November 27, 2013. Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Kyiv’s Independence Square — became the center of Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity after Viktor Yanukovych turned away from a European path and back toward Moscow. Photo by Evgeny Feldman / Wikimedia Commons.

The State’s Answer

In November 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych abruptly backed away from signing an association agreement with the European Union and turned Ukraine back toward Moscow. A journalist, Mustafa Nayyem, posted on Facebook urging people to gather in Kyiv’s Independence Square — Maidan Nezalezhnosti — if they believed Ukraine’s future belonged with Europe.

People came.

I saw it myself.

Students came. Parents came. Workers came. A group of grandmothers came and sang the Ukrainian national anthem. They waved Ukrainian and European flags. They stood in the cold and insisted, peacefully, that their country belonged to them.

Authoritarian violence always tries to rewrite what came before it. Maidan was not born as chaos. It became a revolution because the state answered peaceful civic dignity with a massacre.

Anti-riot police and Berkut forces during clashes in Kyiv, January 22, 2014. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov / Wikimedia Commons.

By the time I completed my Peace Corps service and returned home, Yanukovych’s security forces had turned on the people in the square. More than 100 protesters were killed during the Revolution of Dignity, many of them in February 2014. Ukrainians remember them as the Heavenly Hundred.

The square where people had sung the anthem became the place where they were gunned down.

A Post-Soviet Neverland Ranch

When Yanukovych fled Kyiv, Ukrainians entered Mezhyhirya, his palatial estate outside the capital.

Mezhyhirya, Viktor Yanukovych’s former private residence outside Kyiv, March 2014. Photo by DenysZ / Wikimedia Commons.

It became a public monument to obscene corruption: fountains, a private car collection, an ostrich farm, a petting zoo, and a level of vulgar excess that looked less like a president’s residence than a post-Soviet Neverland Ranch built from the stolen materials of a country’s future — the roads, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, salaries, and ordinary dignity his people were denied.

In a country where the average full-time worker earned less than $5,000 a year, Mezhyhirya was not wealth. It was theft made visible.

The man whose palace became Ukraine’s Museum of Corruption did not stay to answer to the people he had governed. He fled to Russia, where he has remained while Russia invaded, occupied, and brutalized the country he once claimed to lead.

Of all the people Donald Trump could have brought in to professionalize his 2016 campaign, he chose Paul Manafort — the American consultant who spent years packaging Viktor Yanukovych, worked for Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions, and was embedded in the political world Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity was trying to escape.

It was easy to look at the palace at Mezhyhirya and see a uniquely Ukrainian scandal. It was harder, and more necessary, to recognize a style of power Americans would soon come to know all too well: corruption hidden in spectacle, power sold as grievance, and public office treated as personal entitlement.

Return to Ukraine as a Refugee Officer

Years later, I returned to Ukraine for a different American mission.

By then, I was no longer a Peace Corps volunteer. I was a refugee officer with USCIS, working within the same refugee and asylum directorate that Project 2025 would later seek to restrict and overhaul.

Around 2018, I traveled to Kyiv on circuit rides to adjudicate Lautenberg refugee cases, part of a program created to resettle certain religious minorities from the former Soviet Union and later expanded to other groups.

The war was already raging in the east. Crimea had been seized. Donetsk and Luhansk — places where Peace Corps volunteers had once served — were no longer places Americans could simply go. Kyiv, meanwhile, felt calm on the surface. Peace Corps was still operating in Ukraine, just not everywhere it once had.

When I served from 2011 to 2013, Ukraine had one of the largest Peace Corps programs in the world. Volunteers were scattered across the country — west, east, south, center. And Crimea. Back then, Crimea was where Ukrainians went for summer vacation: Yalta, Sevastopol, the Black Sea beaches, the cliffs.

Then Russia took it.

After Maidan, after Crimea, after the war in the east began, the old map had been violently changed.

The Soviet trinkets, Lenin pins, Red Army medals, and portraits of Stalin that were easy to find in markets in 2012 had not exactly disappeared. But near Maidan in 2018, vendors were selling rolls of toilet paper printed with Vladimir Putin’s face.

Putin toilet paper sold among souvenirs in Kyiv, 2017. The rolls reference the Ukrainian chant “Putin khuylo” — roughly, “Putin is a dickhead.” Photo by Maksym Kozlenko / Wikimedia Commons.

A Russian dictator reduced to something disposable and humiliating. It struck me as about as American a value as I could imagine.

The culture had shifted.

Putin was not being absorbed into kitsch. He was being mocked as the man who had taken Crimea, fueled the war in the east, and tried again to make Ukraine a puppet state.

What the Emperor Cannot Hide

By 2026, the shift was nearly complete. Moscow had sold itself as inevitable. Ukraine exposed the lie.

The empire had no clothes.

Not since Napoleon stood in the Kremlin and watched the city burn had the myth of Russian inevitability looked so exposed.

The Fire of Moscow, 1812. Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain.

Ukraine’s survival is no longer only a moral test for the West. It is a demonstration of what free societies can build when the threat becomes existential. Ukrainian drone innovation has changed the nature of the battlefield, struck the systems that fund and supply Russia’s war, and exposed the illusion Moscow works hardest to maintain: that the war is distant, controlled, victorious, and cost-free.

That illusion is central to the system. Russian citizens are told not to see the bodies, not to count the sons, not to ask about atrocities committed in their name, not to ask why the refineries burn, not to say aloud that men are fed into the front by the hundreds of thousands for the ambitions of one man — whether he is called tsar, Soviet premier, or Vladimir Putin.

The state controls the narrative, punishes dissent, and calls obedience patriotism.

For Ukrainians, the emperor is now printed on rolls of toilet paper.

The Permission Structure

That is why Project 2025’s treatment of Ukraine is so revealing.

It recognizes the moral stakes, then builds the permission structure for retreat.

Project 2025 acknowledges that Russia’s invasion was unjust and that Ukrainians have a right to defend their homeland. Then it turns Ukraine’s survival into an internal conservative policy debate for the president to resolve.

That is not restraint. It is abdication.

This is a document willing to prescribe, in extraordinary detail, how the next administration should remake the federal government. But on the subject of Ukraine — a country fighting for survival against Russia’s invasion — it retreats into options.

One camp sees Russia’s invasion as a major threat to U.S. interests and the post-Cold War security order. Another says Ukraine is not a NATO ally, is corrupt, and should not receive further American involvement. A third proposes an “America First” compromise: military aid only if limited, paid for, and tied to a larger U.S. strategy that avoids direct American involvement.

Then it turns the country’s survival over to the president.

And that president is Donald Trump.

In February 2025, Trump brought Ukraine’s leader into the Oval Office, berated him before the cameras, and within days his administration paused military aid and halted intelligence sharing — not to pressure Russia, but to force Ukraine to the table. Three years earlier, on the eve of the full-scale invasion, he had called Putin’s move “genius” and “very savvy.”

Once a country’s survival becomes merely an internal movement debate, the result is predictable:

Humanity disappears. Families living under missile fire don’t matter. Classrooms and students don’t matter. Targeting power grids before winter doesn’t matter. War crimes don’t matter.

Twenty thousand kidnapped children don’t matter.

All that remains is leverage.

That is what the blueprint does.

It turns survival into discretion.

It makes optional what should not be optional.

Not an issue.

A country.

The Foundation

Project 2025 treats Ukraine as a policy option.

I knew it as a country before it became a bargaining chip — before Maidan, when a generation was looking outward; after Crimea, when the map I had known had been violently changed.

And now a movement that built its identity around opposing tyranny treats Ukraine’s survival as conditional, transactional, and revocable.

That is moral retreat dressed up as strategy.

Yanukovych’s palace at Mezhyhirya was never really about the gold fixtures or the ostriches. It was about the system that stood behind them: officials who answered up to a patron and never down to a public; courts where the verdict tracked status and not the facts of the case; a country whose policy turned on the appetite of one man.

That was the system.

For most of the twentieth century, the American right claimed to oppose it. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, became the brain trust of Reagan’s Cold War — and its 1981 Mandate for Leadership armed an administration that treated standing up to Moscow as a matter of moral clarity.

Project 2025 is the latest edition of that same Mandate for Leadership. The title and adversary have not changed. What has changed is that the blueprint now treats Ukraine’s survival, against Moscow’s latest war of conquest, as a question of presidential discretion.

Ukrainians spent a revolution, and now a war, trying to get out from under that system.

The same style of power they rejected abroad is being translated into the administrative state here: a civil service remade to serve the president instead of the law; people loaded onto planes and sent where courts said they could not be sent; public institutions bent toward one man.

Ukraine is still fighting to escape the system exposed by Yanukovych’s palace.

Here, the foundation is being poured.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Donald Trump spent the 2024 campaign insisting Project 2025 had nothing to do with him. Less than two years later, its authors, contributors, allies, and ideas have reshaped the immigration system in ways that just a few years ago would have seemed unimaginable.

Volume I of The Project 2025 Chronicles traced the blueprint and the people now carrying it out. Volume II follows one piece of that blueprint from first-term asylum policy to a plane that has now landed in Bangui.

VOL II — Warning: Do Not Travel

The State Department issues a Level 4 advisory for the Central African Republic:

Do Not Travel — for any reason.

Not “reconsider travel.” Not “exercise increased caution.”

Americans are warned of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, terrorism, and health risks. The advisory says the U.S. government has limited ability to help its own citizens there. Its own employees need special authorization to leave Bangui, travel in armored vehicles inside the capital, and live under curfew. Their family members cannot join them.

The Central African Republic is under a Level 4: Do Not Travel advisory.

For Americans who go anyway, the government’s advice reads less like travel guidance than preparing its citizens to go missing: draft a will, designate power of attorney, leave DNA samples for identification, and establish a proof-of-life protocol with loved ones in case hostage-takers need to be questioned.

Last Friday, the United States deported people to that country.

Not the “worst of the worst,” if that’s what you were told. About twenty people who fled Afghanistan, Iran, and other countries came here seeking protection — and, in some cases, won it. They were granted protection by a United States immigration judge.

A grant of protection is not a courtesy. It is a legal finding by a judge that returning a person to persecution or torture would be illegal.

This flight set that judge’s order on fire.

More precisely, it exploited the gap between a court order barring removal to one country and a system now willing to send people to some of the most dangerous places on earth. It circumvents the foundation of refugee law — the principle of non-refoulement, which bars sending people to any country where they would likely face persecution or torture.

Rather than honor a court order protecting someone from that fate, the administration finds another country willing to take them instead.

The architecture was built in the first Trump term under Stephen Miller, then a White House adviser: Remain in Mexico, which forced asylum seekers to wait out their cases across the border in areas controlled by cartels and gangs; and the Asylum Cooperative Agreements with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, which allowed the United States to send asylum seekers to countries already struggling with violence, displacement, and asylum systems that were either incapable of meaningful protection or barely functioning in practice.

We challenged that architecture at the time. As a union steward, I wrote publicly in 2020 about how those policies were forcing the refugee and asylum system to abandon the very protection principles it was built to uphold.

Even those policies carried the pretense of process. Under Remain in Mexico, the government relied on arcane “contiguous territory” language and built a fear-screening mechanism around it. Under the asylum agreements, there was at least the formal claim that another country would hear the case.

That pretense is gone.

The new model is simpler: put people on a plane.

We saw it with CECOT, when the United States sent Venezuelans — most with no criminal record — to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison built for gangs. We saw it with South Sudan, when men from other countries were flown toward a country facing famine and on the brink of civil war. We saw it with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the United States sent people with no connection to one of the largest refugee-producing countries on earth.

Now it is the Central African Republic (CAR).

Project 2025 did not invent the architecture. In its DHS chapter, under “Asylum Cooperative Agreements,” it took the first-term prototype Miller helped build and tried to lock it into place. It urged Congress to mandate that the executive branch “work faithfully to negotiate and execute ACAs” and ensure that an unwilling future executive could not “renege on an existing agreement or abandon the effort.”

Third-country removal would no longer be a temporary deterrence measure. It would become a durable feature of American immigration policy.

Between administrations, Miller’s organization was tied to the Project 2025 network. Now he is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff. The third countries are no longer Guatemala and Honduras. They are El Salvador’s CECOT, South Sudan, the DRC, and now the Central African Republic.

This is the blueprint becoming government.

It is a plane that has landed in Bangui.

But the runway was built long before this flight. The old model still had a legal theory, however strained, and a process, however hollow. This one is the prototype on steroids: more countries, more money, more secrecy, and almost no rule of law in sight.

Start with the office.

The Office

In 2025, the State Department reorganized. Folded into a hundred-page plan sent to Congress was a new unit: the Office of Remigration.

The word is not bureaucratic boilerplate. “Remigration” is a term from the European far right — Germany’s AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party — for the forced removal of immigrants. The administration chose it deliberately. In an emailed statement to WIRED, the State Department put it this way:

“Remigration puts these words into action.”

Here is the part to sit with. The office was placed inside the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration — PRM — the State Department bureau Congress made central to the U.S. refugee resettlement system.

Since 1980, that system has resettled more than three million refugees from around the world. PRM is the nerve center of that work: coordinating with international organizations, resettlement agencies, and foreign governments; building the overseas pipeline; and making sure the cases and infrastructure are in place before USCIS refugee officers arrive to interview applicants and decide who qualifies for protection.

That is the bureau where the administration built an office for remigration.

The same reorganization eliminated the division that resettled Afghans who had worked alongside American forces.

And now, from inside the same bureau, the government is facilitating deals to send Afghans, Iranians, and others to countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic — places where they have no status, no connection, and where our own government tells Americans to draft a will before entering.

Inside the bureau built to move refugees toward safety, the administration built an office to move protected people into grave danger.

The Destinations

The Central African Republic is not the first stop. Since early 2025, the United States has signed third-country deportation agreements with more than thirty nations — including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, and now CAR. More than $44 million in taxpayer money has gone to receiving governments, tracked by Human Rights First and Refugees International.

As the first deportees arrived in Kinshasa, I wrote about the moral and legal inversion of sending people with no connection to the DRC into one of the largest refugee-producing countries in the world. On that flight was Adriana Zapata, a Colombian woman a judge had found, in February 2025, more likely than not to be tortured if returned.

The United States sent her to the DRC anyway.

Less than two years ago, I spent over a month in Tanzania supervising refugee processing of applicants from the DRC — villages burned, families killed, systematic sexual violence. These were the kinds of claims the refugee system was built to assess: people fleeing exactly the type of violence and persecution the law is supposed to recognize.

Now the United States is sending people who won protection in court to countries that put them at grave risk.

And the danger is not theoretical. People sent to Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon — countries with serious human rights concerns of their own — have been detained on arrival and sent onward, back to the countries they fled.

Refoulement with a layover.

What the governments on the receiving end were promised, we do not fully know. The agreements are secret. Congress has asked for them and been refused.

What is on the record: the Central African Republic agreed to accept third-country deportees under a secret arrangement; the United States awarded $85 million to IOM for operations in that same country; CAR is rich in minerals — especially in diamonds and gold, resources long entangled with conflict, corruption, and armed groups.

In the DRC, the deportation agreement sits beside a signed deal granting American companies preferential access to critical minerals.

Three facts, on the record, side by side.

The Law

On paper, at least, the law is not ambiguous.

Many of the people on these flights have withholding of removal. It is a judge’s order carrying a specific finding: that returning the person to their home country would more likely than not result in persecution or torture. It does not grant permanent status; it bars removal to that country.

The government’s workaround is that the order bars only that one country — so it ships them to a third country instead, even one that may be dangerous for them, or that may turn around and send them back to the place they fled.

Consider the case that set this litigation in motion. A gay man from Guatemala, granted withholding of removal because a judge found he would likely be tortured there, was put on a bus to Mexico two days later, with no notice. Mexico sent him back to Guatemala, where he went into hiding.

He had a court order protecting him from exactly that outcome.

The government found a way around it.

In D.V.D. v. DHS, a federal judge in Massachusetts barred the government from deporting people to third countries without notice and a meaningful chance to say they would be harmed there. The government tried to deport a group toward South Sudan in violation of the order; the men ended up held in a converted shipping container at a U.S. naval base in Djibouti.

In June, the Supreme Court stayed that injunction without explanation. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, dissented.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.”

She wrote that the Court was granting emergency relief from an order the government had “repeatedly defied.”

Through every stage of it, the flights kept leaving.

That is the pattern. The law exists on paper. The process moves faster than review. The plane leaves before the court can catch it.

The pillar beneath the entire refugee system is supposed to be simple, and it does not depend on having won a court order: the United States does not send people to persecution or torture. It is the core premise of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Refugee Act of 1980.

Not directly.

Not by laundering the removal through another country.

Not by handing someone to a government that may detain them indefinitely, abandon them without status, or send them onward to the place they fled.

This is the logic pushed to its endpoint: not turning people away before they can apply, but expelling people to some of the most dangerous places in the world after they made it through, were vetted, received hearings, and, in some cases, won.

The vetting happened. The hearings happened. The protection was granted.

That is not enforcement.

That is the protection system running in reverse.

And it is sending people to countries where our own government warns Americans to draft a will and leave DNA samples for identification before entering.

They wrote the blueprint. He said he’d never heard of it. Many now hold the most powerful positions in the U.S. government.

Volume I: The Refugee Officer Was on the List

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump insisted Project 2025 had nothing to do with him.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” he wrote in July. At the September debate, he repeated the denial: “I have nothing to do with Project 2025. I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it purposely.”

But he apparently knew enough about it to call parts of it “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” the product of the “radical right,” and “seriously extreme.”

On that last point, I’d have to agree.

Project 2025 was not a typical think-tank policy paper. It was a governing blueprint designed precisely for a second Trump administration: a detailed plan to restructure the federal government, concentrate power in the executive branch, bring the career civil service to heel, crush federal unions, and place the machinery of government under direct political control.1

And its architects are not still roaming the halls of Heritage, the Federalist Society, or America First Legal, writing their next policy paper.

Some wrote chapters. Some edited the volume. Some built the personnel machinery. Some supplied the immigration agenda.

Now many of its authors, contributors, allies, and implementers are operating from inside the executive branch.

Russell Vought, a principal architect of Project 2025, authored its chapter on presidential power and now runs the Office of Management and Budget — the office at the center of the federal budget, personnel, and agency control. Stephen Miller’s America First Legal was part of Project 2025’s advisory network, and Miller has been at the center of White House immigration policy across both Trump administrations. Joseph Edlow contributed to Project 2025 and now runs USCIS. Tom Homan, a former acting ICE director, Heritage Foundation fellow, and Project 2025 contributor, is helping drive the administration’s deportation agenda from inside the White House.

Others built the blueprint itself. Paul Dans directed Project 2025. Kevin Roberts led Heritage and wrote its foreword.

It is difficult to argue otherwise: Project 2025 became exactly that — the governing blueprint for this administration.

The result has been the most significant transformation of the federal government in generations.

It reached the agencies that deliver foreign aid, administer federal law enforcement, protect public health, regulate markets, enforce labor laws, manage public lands, process benefits, and carry out the daily work most Americans only notice when it stops working.

Large portions of the federal workforce have been reclassified. Collective bargaining rights have been gutted. Agencies have been reorganized. Thousands of subject-matter experts have been fired, pushed out, or walked out the door. The immigration system has been rewritten.

DOGE served as the accelerant: a team of Elon Musk-aligned tech operatives embedded across agencies in the name of efficiency, with free rein to cut staff, access sensitive data systems, dismantle offices, and force changes at a speed impossible under ordinary legal, regulatory, and civil-service constraints.

The goal was not subtle. Vought once explained the objective this way: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.” Not an especially reassuring message from the man about to become the de facto head of human resources for the entire federal workforce.

For me, and for hundreds of thousands of civil servants, it started with an email.

In late January 2025, federal employees across the government received a message with the subject line: “Fork in the Road.”

Many employees ignored it at first. It came from an unfamiliar email address and looked enough like a phishing attempt that people spent the day asking whether it was real.

It was.

The message was presented as a voluntary resignation offer. But even the first email carried the threat underneath it: take the deal now, or remain inside a government openly warning that your job, your agency, and the protections around both were in peril.

The messages that followed only made the point clearer. This was not normal HR communication. It was a repudiation of public service itself: a message to hundreds of thousands of career civil servants saying they were no longer wanted, no longer needed, no longer trusted, and should consider getting out before the machinery moved against them.

That was the beginning of the trauma Vought had described.

Not metaphorically. Institutionally.

One of the positions identified for reclassification under Project 2025’s workforce vision was Supervisory Refugee Officer.

That was my job.

This series examines how a policy blueprint becomes government: the document, the people, the implementation, and the impact.

It focuses on the parts of Project 2025 now dismantling the systems where I spent eleven years in public service: immigration, refugees, asylum, USCIS, and the federal workforce that carries those systems out.

The changes have come at a blinding pace: civil service, federal unions, refugee admissions, asylum adjudications, immigration benefits, agency staffing, and enforcement priorities. One executive order after another. One memo after another. One court challenge after another.

Viewed individually, they can seem disconnected.

Viewed together, they reveal a governing strategy clearly outlined in Project 2025.

Each installment will track three areas where that strategy is now visible: the federal workforce, the refugee program, and the immigration and asylum systems.

The List

Last week, the administration finalized what was once known as Schedule F, creating a new employment category called Schedule Policy/Career and identifying roughly 8,000 federal positions for conversion.

For most Americans, that sentence means very little.

In practice, it means thousands of career civil servants who were previously protected from political dismissal can now be removed far more easily by the administration they serve.

For more than a century, the federal government has generally operated on a distinction between political appointees and career civil servants.

Political appointees are expected to advance the president’s agenda. Career civil servants are expected to carry out lawful policy regardless of which party occupies the White House.

That distinction exists for a reason.

Without it, every change in administration risks becoming a spoils system in which loyalty to political leaders matters more than expertise, institutional knowledge, professional judgment, or the Constitution itself.

That may sound strange to people in the private sector, where at-will employment is often treated as normal. But civil-service protections are not a perk. They are a guardrail. Career employees have never sworn an oath to a president. They swear an oath to the Constitution. Those protections exist so they can apply law, report misconduct, resist unlawful pressure, and serve the public rather than whoever happens to hold political power.

The administration argues these changes are necessary to improve accountability and ensure that federal employees faithfully carry out presidential priorities. The premise beneath that argument is familiar: career civil servants are not neutral professionals but an entrenched bureaucracy, a “deep state,” or a politically biased obstacle to the elected president.

In eleven years in the USCIS Refugee and Asylum divisions under four administrations, I never saw a career employee refuse to carry out a lawful policy directive because of personal political views.

I worked alongside conservatives, liberals, and everything in between. Most people kept their politics to themselves. Federal employees are subject to Hatch Act restrictions, and managers are trained to take those obligations seriously.

As a supervisor and union representative, I dealt with employee misconduct issues, performance issues, workplace disputes, and disciplinary matters. I represented colleagues whose politics I knew or could guess. It never mattered. The question was whether management had followed the law, the contract, and the evidence.

Political beliefs were rarely the issue. Federal employees swear an oath to the Constitution, are restricted in partisan political activity, and can face serious discipline if they cross those lines — which is one reason, in my experience, most civil servants kept their politics out of the work.

The rule finalized last week did not appear out of nowhere. Trump tried to create a version of this system at the end of his first term, but it never fully took effect before he left office. In February, the administration finalized the framework again: up to 50,000 career employees could be moved into a new category of at-will employment, with reduced appeal rights and whistleblower complaints handled inside agencies rather than through the independent Office of Special Counsel. Last week’s list showed the first roughly 8,000 positions selected for conversion.

Then I opened the list.

Buried among thousands of positions was one entry that caught my attention:

Supervisory Refugee Officer.

It was the position I held when I left federal service less than a year ago.

Appendix to the administration’s Schedule Policy/Career conversion list identifying “Supervisory Refugee Officer” positions for reclassification.

The reclassification list was not the only move aimed at the federal workforce. The administration had already moved to treat broad categories of federal employees as tied to national security, stripping collective bargaining rights from workers whose jobs had never meaningfully changed. As a result, thousands of civil servants were stripped of those rights, while some unions were left with few — or no — employees remaining in the bargaining units they were supposed to represent.

The logic was the same: strip the protections that make career public service possible and pull more of the federal workforce under presidential control.

Project 2025 laid it all out — reclassify policy-adjacent employees so they can be removed more easily, break federal unions, and lean on the unitary executive theory to concentrate the civil service under the president. That theory holds that the president should command the entire executive branch directly: every official wielding executive power answers to him, and the independent agencies, career protections, and internal checks built up over a century are unconstitutional limits on his authority. Pushed to its limit, it is a theory of nearly unchecked executive power.

But what exactly is a Supervisory Refugee Officer?

And why would it be on this list?

I spent eleven years in USCIS’s Refugee and Asylum divisions. For part of that time, I served as a Supervisory Refugee Officer — managing officers responsible for interviewing and vetting refugee applicants, applying U.S. immigration law, and signing off on decisions about who would be admitted to the United States.

It is not a political position. It’s not even a policy one.

No president appoints it. No Senate confirms it. No administration arrives and fills it with loyalists.

It is a career civil-service position built around expertise, training, and the application of law and policy regardless of which party occupies the White House.

Which raises an obvious question.

Why was it on the list?

The Refugee Program

This week also brought two reminders of what has happened in less than eighteen months to U.S.R.A.P. — a crown jewel of humanitarian protection systems. Of the roughly four million refugees resettled worldwide since 1980, approximately three million came to the United States. For decades, the United States resettled more refugees than the rest of the world combined.

In fiscal year 2024, the United States admitted roughly 100,000 refugees from around the world. In January 2025, the new administration suspended refugee admissions, dismantled much of the resettlement infrastructure, and put Stephen Miller’s immigration agenda back at the center of the White House.

For the sixth consecutive month, the United States has admitted only white South African refugees. The administration cited an “emergency” to resettle 10,000 more white Afrikaners while already-vetted Afghan allies, Sudanese, Burmese, and nearly every other refugee population are shut out.

Afrikaner refugees arrive at Dulles International Airport on May 12, 2025, where they were greeted by senior State Department and DHS officials.

The overlap was not subtle: the same administration that empowered Elon Musk’s DOGE operation also redirected the refugee architecture toward a cause Musk had loudly championed. The system once used to interview, vet, and resettle vulnerable people from around the world is now being concentrated on one politically and racially favored population — while everyone else is told they require more vetting, more scrutiny, or no access at all.

Readers of this Substack may recognize the pattern. I wrote about this in The Emergency America Chose and What Happened to “Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor”?: the refugee program has become “racial and political preference with refugee paperwork on top” while the rest of the world’s refugees are locked out.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reported this week that the Afrikaner refugees prioritized by the administration are struggling with the consequences of the system being gutted for everyone else: reduced refugee assistance, weakened resettlement infrastructure, restrictive state licensing rules, and extremely limited support after arrival.

Project 2025 called for the refugee program to be radically restricted — and it was, for everyone but one group. It treated refugee resettlement as a threat vector, not a humanitarian protection system: insufficiently vetted, too expansive, too vulnerable to abuse, and too disconnected from the administration’s preferred conception of national interest.

Then came the exception.

White Afrikaners.

Asylum & Immigration

Last week, a federal judge struck down the administration’s freeze on asylum decisions and other immigration benefit adjudications for people from 39 countries, including many Afghan allies.

What happens next remains uncertain. The administration may comply. It may appeal. It may narrow the ruling through new guidance. It may find another mechanism to achieve a similar result under a different name.

But the ruling fits a pattern I wrote about recently in Vetting as Pretense.

The claim is familiar by now: the system cannot be trusted. The vetting did not happen. Entire categories of people must be paused, re-reviewed, re-vetted, or treated as suspect before their individual cases are even adjudicated.

The immediate trigger was the shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan national who had worked with the CIA during the war. He had been evacuated along with thousands of Afghan allies to the United States in 2021 and was reportedly granted asylum in April 2025, under this administration.

Yet the response was not limited to the facts of that case. The administration paused immigration benefits for people from 39 countries — a freeze a federal judge blocked last week. Thousands of people with no connection to that crime suddenly found themselves trapped in a system-wide freeze.

One case became an indictment of the entire immigration system and provided the justification for treating entire populations as suspect.

The pattern is familiar.

It is the same logic Stephen Miller helped operationalize through Title 42. During the pandemic, a public-health emergency became the pretext for effectively shutting down access to asylum at the border. The statute survived. The right to seek asylum remained on paper. But for three years, access to it at the border was largely blocked.

The pressure did not disappear. It accumulated.

Many of the same voices demanding that schools, businesses, restaurants, stadiums, and virtually every other part of American life reopen showed remarkably little urgency when it came to reopening access to asylum.

For years, people were told they could not apply, could not wait, and could not access the process Congress had created. When the border eventually reopened, the resulting bottleneck was cited as proof that the asylum system itself had failed.

In reality, many of the policies restricting access had helped create the crisis they were now pointing to as justification for restricting it further.

Now that same logic — claim there was no vetting, treat entire populations as suspect, restrict access, grow the dysfunction, then cite the dysfunction as proof that the system cannot be trusted — has reached nearly every corner of the American immigration system.

Asylum decisions. Work permits. Green cards. Citizenship. Denaturalization referrals.

The vetting existed. I know because I did it across four administrations. I trained and supervised officers conducting those interviews and running those security checks. The system was not perfect. No system is. But it was real, extensive, and became more demanding over time.

Joseph Edlow, a Project 2025 contributor now leading USCIS, has spent years advancing the opposite narrative. The agency is now re-vetting green cards, refugee approvals, and other benefits granted under the previous administration, he says, “when there was no vetting.”

But the “no vetting” argument is not a description of the past.

It is a license for what is being built now.

Freeze adjudications. Re-review approvals. Strip protections from the workforce. Grow the backlog. Then point to the backlog as evidence that the system cannot function.

Inside an immigration court.

At the same time, the immigration courts are being pushed in the opposite direction.

More than 100 of roughly 700 immigration judges were fired or pushed out in 2025. The remaining judges face pressure to clear cases faster — even as the administration accuses the courts of pro-immigrant bias.

The immigration courts have become a deportation rocket docket.

One judge reportedly handled 143 cases in a single day.

Delay when the goal is exclusion.

Speed when the goal is removal.

Project 2025 did not invent that logic, but it gave it a governing framework: treat humanitarian protections with suspicion, expand executive discretion, and make immigration enforcement the organizing principle of the system.

That is not vetting.

That is paralysis dressed up as security.

I-589 (Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal)

Years ago, I interviewed a Yemeni woman seeking asylum.

She had never lived there. Raised in a third country that did not recognize her as a citizen, she had come to the United States lawfully, as a student, with no asylum claim to make. She was in status. She was not fleeing anything. She was here to study.

Until her status lapsed. If she couldn’t remain in the United States, she would be removed to Yemen — a place she had never set foot in, now consumed by war, and among the most dangerous places on earth to be an educated woman.

Before we could talk about any of that — before I could ask a single question about what she feared — there was a threshold problem in front of us.

She had filed for asylum more than a year after she arrived.

The one-year filing deadline.

Most Americans have no reason to know the machinery of America’s asylum system. They do not know that a person generally has only one year after arrival to apply for asylum, or that missing that deadline can prevent the government from ever reaching the question at the heart of an asylum case: whether the person actually fears persecution.

This week, CBS News reported that the Trump administration is developing a regulation that would let asylum officers reject certain late-filed applications without an interview, sending those applicants straight into removal proceedings before an immigration judge. The administration frames it as a way to clear a backlog of more than a million cases — to stop, in the words of a USCIS spokesperson, “wasting time” on applications it would refer to court anyway.

On its face, that sounds reasonable. The backlog is real. Some people do file years after arriving, with nothing that would excuse the delay. Congress imposed the deadline for reasons that were not imaginary.

But to understand what this proposal actually does, you have to understand how the asylum system was built — and what the interview was for.

Two Doors Into the System

There are two ways to pursue asylum in the United States, and they are very different experiences.

The affirmative system is for people who are already in the United States — most often because they entered lawfully on a visa or some other status — and file an asylum application directly with USCIS, the benefits agency. It grew out of the asylum corps created in the early 1990s, and it was designed to be non-adversarial: an applicant sits down with an asylum officer, explains their case, and the officer — acting as both fact-finder and decision-maker — determines whether they qualify. No opposing counsel. No courtroom. If the officer grants the case, it is over. If not, USCIS issues a notice to appear in immigration court, informing them they are now in removal proceedings.

Defensive asylum is different. That is asylum claimed by someone who is already in removal proceedings. It can also include people placed into removal proceedings after crossing the border or arriving at a port of entry and expressing a fear of return. The case is before an immigration judge. There is an ICE attorney whose job is to oppose you. There is a judge with a staggering docket. It is litigation, with appeals, conducted while you are fighting to remain in the country.

The proposed rule takes a category of applicants who would normally begin in that non-adversarial process and moves them directly toward removal proceedings — without the interview that has traditionally determined whether they meet one of the exceptions to the one-year deadline.

How the Deadline Works

The one-year deadline entered the law in 1996, as part of IIRIRA — the sweeping enforcement act often called the last major immigration reform Congress actually passed. Every comprehensive attempt since has collapsed. So this rule, and the bargain inside it, has stood for nearly thirty years.

The concerns behind it were real ones. Congress worried about delay, about fraud, about people filing years after arrival with no genuine claim, about an affirmative backlog that never emptied.

Those were legitimate worries.

But Congress also understood the obvious problem with a hard deadline: real asylum seekers do not always know they have an asylum claim within a year of arrival. Some are here lawfully. Some are still hoping conditions will change back home. Some are too traumatized or medically vulnerable to come forward right away. Some develop a claim only after something happens abroad or in their own lives. So Congress did not create a strict liability bar. It created a deadline with narrow exceptions — and then made applicants prove those exceptions by clear and convincing evidence.

The rule is simple to state. To be eligible for asylum, you generally must apply within one year of your last arrival. File late, and you are barred — unless you can establish one of two exceptions: changed circumstances that materially affect your eligibility, or extraordinary circumstances that explain the delay.

And once you have filed late, the burden is on you, and the standard is demanding. You must show by clear and convincing evidence that an exception applies and that you filed within a reasonable time once it did. Not knowing about the deadline is not enough. Struggling to find a lawyer is not enough. Your home country deteriorating, in general terms, is often not enough. You have to fit inside one of two narrow statutory exceptions and prove it to a high standard.

The Bar to Be Heard is Higher Than the Bar to Win

To win asylum on the merits, you must show a well-founded fear of persecution — a standard courts have read as a reasonable possibility, something well short of certainty. But to get past the one-year filing deadline, you must present clear and convincing evidence, a markedly higher bar.

So the threshold to be heard is higher than the threshold to prevail. A person can hold a strong asylum claim — real persecution, solid country conditions — and never have it examined at all, because the deadline is a gate, not a factor weighed in the balance. If you filed late and cannot establish an exception, the merits become irrelevant.

Many applicants fail to meet those exceptions. Some claims are weak. Some are frivolous. Some are exactly the sort of delayed filings Congress worried about when it created the deadline. The rule was designed to screen those cases out.

But others are different. They may genuinely fear return. They may ultimately qualify for asylum. Yet if they cannot prove that one of the statutory exceptions applies, the government never reaches the question of persecution in the first place. The case turns not on whether the fear is well-founded, but on whether the applicant can clear the threshold required to have that fear even considered.

What the Interview Was For

The asylum application already asks late filers to explain why they missed the deadline. In practice, that space on the form was the beginning of the inquiry, not the end of it.

I interviewed applicants whose claims had not existed when they arrived in the United States. One had come lawfully, with no reason to seek asylum. Years later, after a serious medical event, he faced return to a country where life-saving treatment was limited and the diagnosis itself carried severe stigma. The legal question came down to when the diagnosis arose, whether that change materially affected his eligibility, and whether he filed within a reasonable time afterward.

That is what changed circumstances can mean. Not a loophole. A claim that comes into being after the deadline has already run.

The interview was where the real determination happened. It was where an officer developed the facts: when, exactly, the circumstances changed. Why the person waited. Whether the change actually affected their eligibility. Whether the delay, given everything, was reasonable. These are questions that require more than a box on a form, especially when the law itself demands clear and convincing evidence.

Take a case like the Yemeni woman from the opening.

On paper, her explanation might fit in a few lines. I came as a student. My status lapsed. I cannot return to a country I have never lived in, now at war, where women like me face serious danger. But the facts underneath those lines — the country of nationality she had never actually lived in, the country where she had spent her life but had no right to remain, the lapse in her lawful U.S. status, the timing of when return became dangerous, whether she had moved within a reasonable period once it did — none of that fits in a box. It had to be developed. That is what the interview was for.

What the Rule Changes

According to the CBS reporting, the regulation would let officers issue quick rejections “where the paper record suggests the applicants did not meet the 1-year deadline.” Officers could still schedule an interview, the documents say, in cases where an exception appears to apply.

Read that carefully, because it contains the whole problem.

How does an officer determine, from the paper record alone, whether a demanding statutory exception has been met — using a process that deliberately removes the interview that exists to make that determination? The exception turns on facts that only emerge when you ask. A paper record can tell you that someone filed late. It cannot tell you, in most real cases, why — not to the clear and convincing standard the law requires. The rule asks officers to spot the exception without the tool built to find it.

The Honest Version of the Other Side

I am not going to pretend the system is fine. The backlog is real and crushing. Some late-filed applications plainly do not qualify, and never will. Some people do file years after arrival with no legally sufficient reason, and an interview in those cases confirms what the file already shows. There is surely room to make parts of this process more efficient.

The question is where you draw the line — and whether a checked box and a few lines on a form are an adequate substitute for the one step that, for decades, actually determined whether the exceptions applied.

Congress knew, when it wrote the deadline, that legitimate refugees would sometimes miss it. That is precisely why it built the exceptions in. The bar was the concession to enforcement; the exceptions were the concession to reality. The two were a package, and the package was the deal.

This proposal does not repeal the exceptions. It can’t — that would take Congress, and Congress has not passed major immigration legislation in thirty years.

The exceptions remain in the statute, exactly where they have always been — while the principal mechanism for establishing them disappears.

For the woman who sat across from me that day, the difference was not abstract. Before anyone could decide whether she had a well-founded fear of persecution in Yemen, someone first had to decide whether she could pursue her asylum claim at all.

Under the new rule, that decision could be made before she ever has the chance to explain it.

There is still a box on the form for that.

Examples in this essay are drawn from the author’s experience; identifying details have been changed.

A region already carrying the last crisis now absorbs the next one.

Years ago, I interviewed an Iranian atheist in Papua New Guinea — one of the far-flung places where the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program once quietly operated. His story began with something ordinary: a workplace dispute. Then someone reported him to the religious police as a nonbeliever.

In Iran, that can be a death sentence.

Within days, he fled Iran and eventually ended up in Australia’s offshore detention system, with almost no chance of entering Australia or anywhere else. Even then, when offered the chance to return home, he refused. That is what a well-founded fear looks like. He was not a headline. He was the kind of person the refugee system was designed to protect.

I wrote in early March that a wider war with Iran would produce a new wave of displacement, and that the American system built to protect people like him had been gutted before the crisis arrived.

Less than three months later, the conditional tense has collapsed into the present.

The war started. On February 28, U.S. and Israeli strikes hit Iran, and the displacement began almost immediately. Between 600,000 and a million households — as many as 3.2 million people — fled their homes, mostly out of Tehran and the cities toward the north. In the first weeks, the UN counted more than 880,000 forced to flee in just over a week.

Most stayed inside Iran. Those who crossed borders pushed north into Turkey, where thousands have arrived even as the government builds holding zones and tightens the border behind them.

That is a displacement crisis all by itself. But Iran was never standing outside the region’s fragile displacement architecture — it was already one of its load-bearing walls.

For four decades Iran has hosted one of the largest displaced populations on earth — several million Afghans, most of them living not in camps but in cities like Tehran and Mashhad, working construction and domestic labor, a precarious urban underclass with few rights and no political voice.

These were people already displaced once, and in many cases more than once. When the bombing started, many were forced back across the border into Afghanistan. The strikes accelerated an expulsion already in motion. Iran and Pakistan had pushed nearly six million Afghans home in recent years, and the war drove the numbers higher still. The UN now projects millions more could be forced back by year’s end, into a country where the Taliban remains in full control and women have been erased from public life. The UN’s representative in Afghanistan, Arafat Jamal, called it what it is: a “massive demographic shock” pushing the country “to the brink.”

The pattern is spreading across the region. As the fighting spread into Lebanon, more than a million people — a fifth of the entire country — were driven from their homes in the span of a month, the largest exodus in Lebanese history, hundreds of thousands of them children.

And then came the reversal that should be impossible to believe: more than two hundred thousand crossed the border into Syria — among them tens of thousands of Lebanese fleeing the bombardment, and well over a hundred thousand Syrians who had once fled to Lebanon for safety and were now streaming back into the country they had fled years earlier.

People were choosing between war-torn countries on the basis of which one might be less lethal that week.

To the south, in Gaza, nearly the entire population of more than two million remains displaced, most of them still in tents and ruins, facing severe food shortages months into a fragile and repeatedly violated ceasefire.

Behind the immediate displacement are the people displaced long before it: millions of migrant laborers across the region, many from South and Southeast Asia, with little durable status and no floor beneath them.

And the places that have done the absorbing are full. Jordan and Turkey still host millions from Syria alone. Lebanon has carried a refugee population equal to a staggering share of its own citizens, and its state has been buckling for years. In Kenya, Dadaab and Kakuma have become city-sized fixtures of permanent impermanence — camps built for emergency shelter that now hold generations of Somalis, South Sudanese, Congolese, Burundians, and others.

These were never permanent answers. They were holding patterns that the wider world accepted in place of real solutions.

Sudan is the largest displacement crisis in the world — roughly one in three people forced from their homes, fourteen million uprooted, famine emerging across Darfur and Kordofan.

Somalia is sliding back toward catastrophe: more than six million people — nearly a third of the country — facing crisis-level hunger. And there the war’s impact reaches the Horn of Africa — with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, the cost of the fuel and food Somalia imports to survive has spiked, aid deliveries have been delayed, and a country that cannot grow enough to feed itself is pushed closer to famine.

Americans felt the same war as a spike at the gas pump. Somalis are feeling it as famine.

For most of the postwar era there was a release valve at the far end of this pipeline.

The countries of the global north — and above all the United States, which for decades resettled more refugees permanently than the rest of the world combined — took in a small, vetted fraction of the most vulnerable.

The modern refugee officer corps was created in 2005, in part to streamline and scale refugee processing as Iraqis fled a war the United States had started, including people who had worked with or alongside American forces. Years later, the Obama administration surged Syrian refugee admissions after years of civil war and regional displacement.

Those efforts reflected an older premise: when mass displacement overwhelmed a region, the United States leaned in — working with UNHCR, resettlement agencies, and foreign governments to relieve pressure where it could, protect people who could not go home, and keep faith with those who had risked their lives alongside us.

This is what happens when crisis piles onto crisis after the institutions built to absorb them have been weakened. USAID has been gutted, resettlement agencies have been starved of work and funding, and processing pipelines have been frozen.

The burden falls back on the same people and countries already carrying the last disaster.

That valve is closing everywhere now.

Britain has announced the largest overhaul of its asylum system in modern memory, making refugee status temporary and stretching the wait for permanent settlement to twenty years. The European Union’s new migration pact, taking effect this summer, lets member states declare countries “safe” and ship asylum seekers to places they merely passed through.

The doors are shutting in unison, and there is no other country waiting to fill the void.

None is willing.

Into this world — a world the UN projects will hold 136 million forcibly displaced or stateless people by year’s end, a number surpassing the aftermath of the Second World War — the United States has not merely closed its doors. It has made a political and racial choice. It has taken USRAP, the crown jewel of refugee protection, and turned it into a near-exclusive resettlement channel for white South Africans — Afrikaners — while effectively shutting out nearly every other population on earth.

The numbers are not in dispute. Of roughly six thousand refugees admitted this fiscal year, all but three were white South Africans. And in the third week of May, as Congress was being consulted on the year’s ceiling, the administration moved to raise it from 7,500 to 17,500 — reserving the additional ten thousand places, again, for Afrikaners.

It was packaged as an emergency: a response to “unforeseen developments,” recent statements by South African officials, and a raid on a processing site. The State Department issued an emergency notice. Roughly a hundred million dollars was found. Capacity was surged. An emergency was declared — exactly one — not for people facing mass displacement, forced return, famine, urgent medical vulnerability, or years of completed vetting; not even for those who risked their lives helping America — but for the population this administration chose to receive at Dulles with a red carpet and cameras waiting.

I know this system from the inside. Refugee processing does not normally move quickly. Cases can sit for months or years because of security holds, interagency reviews, biometric checks, and other layers of vetting before anyone receives a final decision. I have sat across from people who waited years just for the chance to answer questions from someone like me.

What the South Africa determination shows is this: every reason the administration has given for why it cannot help the others — no capacity, no vetting, too risky, too slow — was disproven by its own emergency paperwork. The same vetting architecture that existed before January 2025 is now processing white Afrikaners for rapid resettlement — the very system this administration claims did not exist.

It was a question of executive priority, and that priority has been made crystal clear.

The people left outside that door are not abstractions. Consider the Iranians. When the American-backed Shah fell and the current Islamic regime took power, the United States took in hundreds of thousands of Iranians fleeing it — a quarter of them as refugees or asylees — because the country understood, then, exactly what persecution under that regime looked like. Nearly a half-century later, war with that same regime has displaced millions, and more than fifteen thousand Iranians fleeing religious persecution have already been vetted and approved for resettlement.

They are now barred from entering the United States.

The institutional memory of who Iran’s refugees are did not disappear. It was set aside.

They are not alone behind that door.

More than a thousand Afghans who assisted the U.S. war effort, along with their families, remain in a transit camp in Qatar. About 900 are already approved for U.S. admission. Around 150 are immediate family members of active-duty U.S. service members. More than 400 are children. The administration has even explored sending them to the Democratic Republic of Congo — itself one of the world’s largest refugee-producing countries.

Our Afghan allies did everything asked of them. They completed every step of the process. Their lives would be at grave risk if returned, precisely because of the work they did alongside America.

Now they are banned from entering the United States.

And they are among the few who even reach the press. More than a hundred and twenty thousand people, from over ninety countries, were vetted, approved, and then abandoned in place — children traveling alone, families with urgent medical needs, all of them already cleared by the country that locked its gate.

The Congolese woman in the camp in Tanzania is banned. The Sudanese family is banned. The Afghan widow — banned. The door that opened in a matter of weeks for ten thousand Afrikaners stays locked for every one of them.

In March I wrote that the United States might discover, when the next crisis came, that the system it once built to answer it was no longer there.

The crisis came. Many crises came, all at once, into a world more displaced than at any point since the Second World War.

But the system had not disappeared.

The money was found. The ceiling was raised. The processing capacity was surged. The emergency authority was used.

Not for the millions displaced by the war. Not for Iranians already approved for resettlement. Not for Afghans left in transit camps. Not for Sudanese families, Rohingya families, or children with urgent medical needs.

For Afrikaners.

That was the emergency America chose.

Embarkation of the Pilgrims, Robert W. Weir, 1857. U.S. Capitol Rotunda. (Architect of the Capitol).

Most people think of refugees as people fleeing war, violence, or disaster.

That is not quite how the law works.

The distinction matters now, as new displacement crises are emerging while the U.S. refugee system has been restricted, politicized, and repurposed.

Under U.S. law, a refugee is someone who cannot return home because they have been persecuted — or have a well-founded fear they will be persecuted — on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.

The government must either be the persecutor or be unwilling or unable to control the persecutor. You must not be able to reasonably relocate to another part of your country. And you can’t be firmly resettled in a third country.

In other words, it’s very specific.

It’s not enough to come from a dangerous place. It’s not enough that there is violence all around you — or even that your family member was killed.

You have to explain who harmed you. Why they did it. What they said when they did it. Why they would do it again.

You have to show that you were persecuted — or would be persecuted — because of who you are: your identity, your beliefs, your affiliations. Because you helped a foreign army — and that army is no longer there to protect you.

Every part of that has to be proven.

Imagine what that means in practice.

You don’t leave all at once. Most people don’t.

First, something shifts.

The laws are still on the books. The courts are still open. Someone disappeared, but they lived three neighborhoods over. Nothing’s happened to you yet, you think. Reports of violence on the news. Armed men begin to move through nearby areas.

You try to move money. The bank won’t let you withdraw more than a small amount. Or there is no bank — you live in a rural area and whatever you have is what you have.

You look at your children. You check on your elderly parents. You think: can we just go? This is my country. Where my parents lived. Where my grandparents are buried. How much can we carry? What about food? Water? Enough clothing?

Sleep becomes impossible.

Then something hits too close.

A neighbor is killed. The village is raided. Men with weapons move through and no one stops them — not the police, not anyone. Or it’s the police themselves who come. They question you too long. They take you in and leave a few bruises. They let you go, but not before making clear they could have done otherwise.

And then you know.

The cost-benefit analysis you’ve been running in your head — the one that kept saying not yet, wait, it hasn’t come to that — is over. The calculation has changed. If you stay, you and your family face detention, violence, torture, imprisonment. Or worse.

So what do you do?

You call someone you trust. Maybe it’s a relative in a Hawala network — the informal money transfer system that moves funds across borders when banks won’t. Maybe it’s the businessman who works downtown who gives you a number. Or you just start walking, because your home and your neighborhood have already been destroyed. You may have your identity documents. You probably don’t.

The route itself is dangerous. Smugglers who promise safe passage sometimes rob you. Sometimes worse. Women and children are particular targets. The people moving alongside you are not always safe either. And the terrain — desert, jungle, open water — doesn’t negotiate.

The first step isn’t choosing a country.

It’s reaching a place where you can register.

Usually that means finding your way across a border — through checkpoints, across terrain that doesn’t care whether you make it — to a neighboring country where you can locate an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

You put your name down. You tell your story.

And then you wait.

There are screenings. Background checks. Medical exams. Interviews that can take hours — sometimes more than once. Each step is designed to answer a single question: whether you qualify for protection, and whether you can be safely admitted somewhere else.

Most people never move beyond this point.

While you’re waiting — in a sprawling refugee camp in western Tanzania, or a small city in eastern Turkey — the news from home keeps coming. Loved ones still there. Villages still burning. And around you, something else spreads through the camp: stories.

Not just your own. Everyone’s.

There’s a rumor mill in every camp. People talk about what the officers ask. What they’re looking for. What you’re supposed to say. The stories you’re supposed to tell.

But consistency is not optional. A detail given years earlier could come back across the desk. A date, a route, a family member’s name, the reason armed men came to the house — every answer has to hold up against the record and against your prior statements.

And you have to decide — when you sit down across from that stranger and take that oath — whether you listen to the camp stories, or whether you just tell the truth. There’s no lawyer to advise you.

But the fact that you even have to think about it tells you something about what this process costs.

You don’t choose where you go.

Most countries are closed, or offer only temporary protection. A small number accept refugees for permanent resettlement. Fewer still take more than a fraction of those in need.

If your case is referred, you begin the process again.

More background checks. More medical screenings. More paperwork. You reconstruct your life in documents — names, dates, places, family relationships. Your information is run through multiple security agencies across multiple countries.

And then you wait again.

Eventually, a small team of officers arrives.

They rotate through these locations on what are called circuit rides — temporary deployments to nearly every corner of the globe. Dadaab. Kakuma. Kuala Lumpur. Istanbul. Amman. They conduct interviews that will determine who is allowed to move forward and who is not.

The stakes are difficult to overstate.

You sit across a small desk from a stranger with a laptop, typing every word as you speak. You’ve heard about Americans, but you’ve never met one before. The law you read about — if you ever read about it at all — becomes a series of questions about the worst trauma and fears you have ever experienced.

What happened to you?

Was there harm — does it rise to the level of persecution?

Who did this? A government? A group the government cannot or will not control?

Why were you targeted?

Was it because of your race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group?

What did they say when it happened?

Is there evidence of motive — of nexus?

Why did they do that to your family member?

Same question. Same legal requirement. Asked again.

What do you think will happen if you return?

Is your fear well-founded?

The questions are detailed. Sometimes repetitive. They have to be.

Each one maps onto a legal requirement. Each answer has to be consistent with everything else you’ve said — and everything that can be independently verified.

You are asked to reconstruct the worst moments of your life in a way that can be tested.

Under oath.

Across a desk from someone you’ve never met.

While that person holds your future in their hands.

But the interview isn’t over when the persecution questions end.

Then come the admissibility questions.

Have you ever provided material support to an armed group — even under duress?

Have you ever been a member of an organization the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization?

A young girl who poured tea to armed men visiting her father may have provided material support to a designated terrorist group. A boy who opened a door for a militia at gunpoint to protect his family may be barred. The law does not always distinguish between the coerced and the willing — and while exemptions exist, they are narrow, discretionary, and never guaranteed.

Were you ever a member of a political party?

Any party — even one that no longer exists?

Did you ever hold a government position?

Did you ever serve in the military — guard prisoners, undergo any specialized training?

These are the questions that can end an otherwise approvable case.

And you answer them across the same small desk, in front of the same stranger, while the same clock runs.

I sat in those rooms for many years. I heard thousands of these stories. I know what persecution sounds like when it meets the legal standard. I know what it costs a person to walk through it again — out loud, under oath, in front of a stranger with a keyboard.

For decades, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement, and this system — quietly, imperfectly — did exactly what it was designed to do.

It identified people who could not return home. It moved them out of danger. It helped them begin again somewhere else. It was not fast. It was not simple. But it saved lives — and gave millions of people the chance to become Americans, shaping generations of families now woven into the fabric of this country.

But it depends on one thing.

That it remains a system of protection when people need it most.

Today, the part of the pipeline that identified refugees abroad has functionally gone quiet. The circuit rides that once sent officers around the world to conduct refugee interviews have narrowed dramatically. South Africa has become the center of the resettlement machinery that remains — now being used to resettle a politically preferred group while excluding nearly everyone else.

And the moment when protection is supposed to begin is now the moment it is failing.

Persecution is not a modern invention. The Pilgrims fled it. Every generation has produced people who had no choice but to leave — targeted for who they were, what they believed, which side they were on when the tide turned.

For decades, the United States resettled people fleeing both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships — Jews escaping the Soviet Union, Cubans fleeing Castro, Vietnamese families after the fall of Saigon, refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, and beyond. The program did not ask whether persecution came from communism or fascism. It asked whether the applicant met the statutory definition.

The names and places change. The pattern does not.

Great powers throughout history have moved people by force — through conquest, expulsion, or collapse. The United States, for all its flaws and contradictions, built something unusual: a system that could use its power to absorb the persecuted rather than close its gates to them. That inversion is part of what made America different.

The people who built this system understood something else: that the distance between stability and flight is shorter than most people think. That the circumstances that produce refugees are not unique to any one place or time. That the system existed not just for the people who needed it then — but for whoever might need it next.

The question is not only who qualifies as a refugee. It is whether the United States still intends to maintain a system capable of recognizing one.

You don’t think about systems like this until you need one.

Most people never will.

By the time you do need one — you are entirely dependent on whether it still exists.

Aerial view of Nauru. Courtesy: U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program.

In August 2020, I wrote in The Washington Post that, in ordinary times, my colleagues and I sat at our desks in places like Malaysia, Turkey and Nauru. Across from us, three feet away, sat an applicant for refugee status. It was a privilege, I wrote, to safeguard our country’s legacy as a haven for the persecuted.

I was an asylum training officer then. I was a shop steward for Local 1924, representing USCIS employees in the DC region — including the asylum office where the Migrant Protection Protocols and other deterrence pilots were rolled out, and the Refugee Affairs Division. I closed by warning that even if a different administration tried to course-correct, the damage would take years to undo.

I was right about the years. I was wrong about which damage would prove hardest to undo.

Last week I wrote about vetting as pretense — how the claim that “there was no vetting” became the license for unwinding decisions that had already been made. This piece is about the prototype for that move. Before pretense was used to reopen individual cases, it was used to close the border.

The right to seek asylum on U.S. soil is not a policy preference. It is codified law. Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act says any person physically present in the United States, irrespective of status, may apply. The asylum officer corps I trained into and helped train others into exists because a federal court found, in 1991, that the government had been denying that right unlawfully. The corps was the remedy.

Title 42 was the prototype for extinguishing the right without repealing it.

In March 2020, a CDC public health order shut the southern border to asylum seekers under a pandemic rationale. Inside USCIS offices, the rest of the work adapted — plexiglass, masks, video interviews, applicants in separate rooms. Affirmative asylum continued. Credible fear screenings at the border collapsed.

The statute was untouched.

The right was simply unreachable.

Public health experts said at the time the order served no legitimate public health purpose. The pandemic was real. The pretext was not. The same voices demanding the country reopen for everything else stayed silent about reopening it for asylum.

Title 42 ran for more than three years and demonstrated what its architects had been working toward: a codified right could be procedurally suspended indefinitely if the pretext was plausible enough.

It also reshaped the politics of the border. For years, people were told they could not apply, could not wait, and could not access the process Congress had created. The pressure did not disappear. It accumulated. When the border eventually reopened, many of the same officials and commentators who had helped sever access to asylum pointed to the predictable human bottleneck as proof that the system itself had failed. Title 42 did not solve the border. It staged the next crisis. It turned asylum law into a political weapon: close the door, let desperation build outside it, then blame the reopening on the people forced to wait.

In February 2024, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma — a conservative Republican whose proposal many immigration advocates opposed for being too restrictive — negotiated a bipartisan border bill giving the executive standing authority to summarily expel migrants once daily encounters crossed a threshold. It would have functioned, analysts noted, very much like Title 42, but as statute. Democrats supported it. Donald Trump killed it. Lankford said on the Senate floor that a popular commentator had told him the bill would be destroyed before anyone read it. The opposition was not to the policy. It was to making it law.

Statute creates a floor. Executive authority creates a ceiling the next administration can raise again at will. The same project that engineered Title 42 understood, by 2024, that it didn’t need Congress.

In March 2025, an executive order reclassified USCIS and dozens of other agencies as having national security as a primary function, invoking a rarely used carve-out to strip collective bargaining rights from career employees. By August, the agency had cancelled its agreements with the unions representing asylum and refugee officers. A spokesman said union management diverted time and energy from the mission. A current asylum training officer still has First Amendment rights to publish what I published in 2020. What they no longer have is the structure that made speaking a manageable risk rather than a calculated one.

The procedural override that produced Title 42 is no longer confined to the border. The same logic — bypass the constraints that survive even within executive discretion — is now being applied across the lawful immigration system. After the November 2025 attack in Washington, D.C., USCIS Director Joseph Edlow paused all asylum decisions and ordered a full-scale re-review of already-approved benefits. Internal guidance now directs field offices to refer between 100 and 200 denaturalization cases a month.

The historical average was eleven a year.

The system is no longer just restricting entry. It is reaching backward.

This is how you work around the rule of law in the one area where the executive is at the apex of its power. Immigration is the field of greatest presidential discretion under the Constitution. Even there, statutes constrain. Courts constrain. Due process constrains. The career workforce, when it can speak, constrains.

Title 42 demonstrated that all of those could be bypassed by procedural override if the pretext was plausible enough. The same bypass is now being applied across the entire lawful immigration system — asylum seekers, refugees already admitted, green card holders, naturalized citizens.

The discretion was never the point. The point was to escape the constraints that survive even within it.

In 2020 I wrote that reversal would take many years. I underestimated.

What began at the border is now being applied across the immigration system.

The statute survives.

Almost everything around it does not.

I.

On November 17, 2015, two Syrian families — two men, two women, and four children — presented themselves at the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge in Laredo, Texas seeking asylum. The women and children were transferred to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley. The men were held at a separate facility in Pearsall.

I was on detail at Dilley that week, one of dozens of asylum officers from around the country rotating through the facility to conduct credible fear adjudications—initial screenings to determine whether families could pursue asylum in the United States or be returned. I had been interviewing mothers and children from the Northern Triangle — Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala — most had fled MS-13 and Mara 18.

That evening, back at my hotel in San Antonio, I turned on the news.

Four days earlier, one hundred and thirty people had been killed in Paris. A false rumor spread that one of the attackers had entered Europe as a Syrian refugee. It was not true — a Syrian passport found at the scene was later determined not to belong to any of the attackers, who were almost all European nationals — but the correction did not travel.

It didn’t need to.

Across the Atlantic, the same playbook was already running. Orbán, Le Pen, Wilders — all riding the same current. Fear wins elections. It always has.

By that evening, more than thirty U.S. governors had declared their states closed to Syrians. A presidential candidate had called for a total shutdown of Muslim entry. Breitbart had published a story — “EXCLUSIVE — CONFIRMED: 8 Syrians Caught at Texas Border in Laredo” — that was moving through the conservative media ecosystem. Donald Trump was tweeting about it. Texas Governor Greg Abbott was using it to justify his refusal to accept Syrian refugees.

The rest of the work at Dilley continued as it always did.

The Syrian case had arrived in the days after Paris. Word spread quickly through the facility. It drew attention across the agency. Leadership was aware. A senior officer conducted the interview.

There was nothing casual about it. DHS confirmed that border patrol agents had checked the families’ identities against numerous law enforcement and national security databases and found no derogatory information.

The same was true for the mothers and children from Central America arriving after long journeys. They were processed, interviewed, and assessed against a threshold legal standard. Credible fear screenings were not final decisions—they were initial determinations of whether someone could pursue an asylum claim at all. Many could not. Claims based on generalized violence often failed to meet the legal requirement of nexus. Others did not meet the higher bar for protection under the Convention Against Torture, which requires government involvement or acquiescence.

Basic security checks were part of the process. Biometrics were collected. Names were run against available systems. Every case was reviewed by a supervisor.

It functioned as a system.

None of that made the news.

The coverage said we did not know who these people were.

If I hadn’t been doing that work, I might have believed it too.

That was the problem. Most Americans did not know how the system worked—what an asylum claim required, what a credible fear interview was, or that the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) even existed. They did not know the legal standard. They did not know the process.

The USCIS Refugee Corps itself had been built in the years after 9/11 to handle complex overseas refugee processing at scale, including the wave of displacement that followed the Iraq War—a program staffed, in part, by officers who had been doing this work since its earliest days inside the legacy INS.

The vacuum had always been there.

Paris gave it a shape.

I had spent the previous months learning what the law actually required.

Six weeks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia—the facility where many federal agencies train. Three weeks on refugee and asylum law. Three weeks on interview methodology. Mock interviews graded by evaluators. Exams. Officers who didn’t pass didn’t get the job.

Then field training. Observing interviews. Conducting them under supervision. Notes and legal assessments reviewed.

Only then was I allowed to adjudicate a case alone.

By the time Paris happened, I had. And what I knew—and the cable segments did not—was what the vetting actually looked like.

Biometrics were cross-checked against government databases and security systems. Names were run through interagency watchlists. Biographical information was assessed against country conditions. A program called the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program — CARRP — had been operating inside USCIS since the Bush administration, flagging cases with national security concerns for additional scrutiny. The Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS) supported the process, analyzing potential fraud and security issues. Interviews ran for hours, sometimes across multiple days. Every case was subject to multiple layers of interagency security checks and one hundred percent supervisory review before a decision could be finalized.

The cable segments said there was no vetting.

II.

That fall, President Obama announced the United States would admit 10,000 Syrian refugees over the coming year.

The number was small against the scale of the crisis. The United Nations had already registered more than four million Syrian refugees. Lebanon and Jordan were carrying populations that would have broken most Western states. Turkey had more displaced Syrians inside its borders than the entire annual admissions ceiling of the U.S. refugee program.

Ten thousand was a gesture.

The political response treated it as a breach.

What the political response did not describe was the system that would process those cases.

Refugees considered for U.S. resettlement did not simply arrive at the border. They were first identified and referred through international organizations, most often the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or through designated resettlement support centers. That process alone could take months or years.

Before a U.S. refugee officer ever met an applicant, their information moved through multiple layers of screening. Biometrics were collected. Fingerprints and photographs were submitted to U.S. government databases. Names were run through interagency watchlists. Biographical information—employers, addresses, family members, travel history—was documented and assessed against country conditions reporting and intelligence holdings.

That happened before the interview.

The interview itself was conducted overseas by refugee officers deployed on circuit rides. Each case was evaluated against the statutory requirements for refugee protection—persecution, nexus, credibility, and admissibility—while any concerns flagged during the vetting process were adjudicated or placed on hold for further review, where cases could sit at headquarters for months or years with no clear path forward.

Many cases were denied.

Some failed to meet the persecution standard. Others raised credibility concerns that could not be resolved. Some triggered terrorism-related inadmissibility bars under statutes so broad that even minimal or incidental contact could be disqualifying.

Cases moved forward only when every element of the legal standard was satisfied and every concern raised through the interagency vetting process had been resolved.

The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) and the ACLU had been litigating aspects of this system for years—not because it was too lax, but because applicants were denied, delayed, or left in limbo, often through standardized notices that cited statutory bars or security concerns in general terms—language that invoked discretion or inadmissibility without clearly explaining how it applied to the individual case.

This was the system the “Trojan horse” framing was describing as nonexistent.

This was what “no vetting” meant in 2015–2016.

III.

A few years later, I found myself on Nauru—deployed with a small team to process refugee cases referred from Australia’s offshore detention system—a twenty-one square kilometer island of phosphate rock and coral in the central Pacific. Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, was the other site—a former Australian naval base repurposed into an offshore detention center that the PNG Supreme Court had already declared unconstitutional by the time it was winding down. Both were part of Australia’s offshore processing architecture, built to intercept asylum seekers arriving by boat and hold them—indefinitely, in practice—outside the reach of Australian courts.

The Obama administration had negotiated a bilateral resettlement arrangement under which refugee cases from those facilities would be referred to the United States for processing — part of an effort to address the human rights concerns that had drawn international condemnation. The conditions were well documented. Children had died. Detainees had been held for years, offered the chance to return voluntarily by the Australian government, and refused—because going back meant going back to what they had fled.

Deterrence, in full view.

By the time I arrived, the broader refugee program had already been suspended for one hundred and twenty days under the first travel ban. When admissions resumed, they resumed with new layers.

The new vetting posture had arrived with the administration—updated national security indicators that triggered extra scrutiny, new lines of questioning pushed out to officers across the program, heightened coordination with FDNS. Two FDNS officers were embedded with our team on-site. Nearly every case I adjudicated went on hold for further vetting—flagged under the new indicators, queued for additional review. Interviews routinely ran three to five hours, many requiring callbacks to fully establish the record. The machinery of extreme vetting was running at full speed, producing delays and uncertainty across the caseload.

It did not change what the system was already doing.

This was what the administration called extreme vetting.

The case I’m thinking about didn’t need any of it.

He had grown up in territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the final years of Sri Lanka’s civil war. A twenty-six-year conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE had drawn its operational lines through the part of the country where he lived. He ran a small garage — fixed engines, rotated tires. Said he learned from his uncle.

Over the years, fighters from the organization brought vehicles in. He fixed them. They left. He told me he had once tuned the jeep they brought the commander around in. He said it like he was proud of the work. Thought it was just part of life.

He volunteered this during the interview. He had not been asked about it specifically. He had not been a combatant. He had not been a member. Had not carried a weapon, delivered a message, or taken an oath. He had fixed cars for men who came through his town, and he had done it more than once, and he had done it knowing who they were because by the end of that war there was no one in that part of the country who did not know.

Under U.S. law, that is material support to a Tier 1 terrorist organization.

The bar is statutory. There is no exemption available at the threshold. Once material support is established—if it was voluntary and the applicant knew who they were dealing with—the applicant is inadmissible unless a discretionary waiver is granted by the Secretary of Homeland Security. Those waivers exist. They are narrow. They are rare. There was not one available for this case.

I wrote the denial that afternoon.

The FDNS officers a few doors down did not need to review the case. The country indicators did not flag him. The new lines of inquiry rolled out after the travel ban produced nothing the statute had not already reached.

The denial was written under law that had been on the books for over fifteen years before I ever sat down across from him.

I believed him. It didn’t matter.

IV.

After Kabul fell, I spent nearly two years working on the Afghan evacuation pipeline.

It was the most intensive vetting effort I saw in my career.

The United States government scrambled to build a system capable of processing tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees moving through transit countries and military bases.

Every case I reviewed involved someone who had spent years supporting the U.S. mission. Interpreters. Soldiers. NGO staff. People who had worked on girls’ education, civil society, democratic institutions. Many came with documentation and letters of support from American military personnel, diplomats, and development officials who had worked alongside them.

There was rarely any question about who they were or the risks they faced.

What made the work difficult was navigating the layers of national security review required to reach a decision.

Every case moved through FDNS and multiple interagency partners across the national security apparatus. Classified and unclassified systems. Biometric enrollment, watchlist checks, intelligence review. Officers were deployed overseas for extended rotations to process cases in Islamabad, in Albania, in Central Asia, in transit facilities across the Gulf. Files moved through extensive background vetting before a final decision could be made.

The speed at which the program was established — combined with the level of review involved — was unprecedented in my eleven years at USCIS.

Many Americans assumed evacuees simply arrived and were admitted. They did not. Many evacuees were screened overseas and at U.S. military bases—biometrics collected, interviews conducted, names run through interagency systems—before being paroled into the United States, where they continued their cases through asylum or other forms of protection.

Thousands of others were processed through the USRAP pipeline, waiting overseas for full adjudication—some for years, including evacuees still waiting in places like Qatar today. The posture was caution. Cases sat. Some still sit. Many did not move forward. Afghans who had worked alongside American forces waited months, sometimes years, while the system confirmed what American military officers had already vouched for in writing.

This was the vetting architecture in operation during the Biden administration.

This is what current USCIS director Joseph Edlow has described as a rubber-stamping agency.

V.

This week, Joseph Edlow told a cable channel that USCIS had been “a rubber-stamping agency” under the Biden administration—that there was “no vetting.”

He has repeated variations of this claim for months. In October, he told CBS News the agency was “moving back to where it was supposed to be at the beginning” after four years of lax oversight. In February, he told Congress that since January 20, 2025, his officers had made nearly 33,000 fraud referrals to the FDNS — a 138 percent increase over the yearly average of the previous administration. That FDNS had completed investigations in more than 21,000 cases and identified fraud in 65 percent of them. That officers had conducted over 7,000 site visits and more than 26,000 social media checks.

The numbers are the evidence.

Every one of them describes the system he says did not exist.

A referral is not a finding. A 138 percent increase in referrals is evidence of a directive telling officers to refer more aggressively. It is a policy choice made by the new administration. It is not a discovery about the old one.

“Fraud identified” in 65 percent of completed investigations does not mean fraud in 65 percent of Biden-era approvals. It means that of the cases referred under the new directive, a supermajority produced some finding — documentary inconsistencies, undisclosed information, misrepresentations that do not necessarily rise to the level of intentional or prosecutable fraud. The rhetorical move collapses the distinction.

Seven thousand site visits and twenty-six thousand social media checks are volume metrics. They tell you nothing about outcomes. They describe an enforcement posture already operating at scale.

The FDNS that Edlow is invoking as proof of the new rigor is the same directorate that embedded officers with my team in Nauru in 2018. The same directorate that worked every Syrian case out of Istanbul in 2015-16. The same directorate that worked the Afghan evacuation pipeline under Biden.

It was there. It was operating. It was producing referrals and investigations and denials across four administrations and two parties.

The claim that there was no vetting, supported by statistics documenting its operation, is an argument that refutes itself.

VI.

The administration knows the system works.

Earlier this year it chose to prioritize the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees from South Africa. It did not invent a new vetting architecture. It did not wait for a new investigative arm to be stood up. It used the existing refugee adjudication framework — the same officers, the same security checks, the same interagency review — and processed cases on an expedited timeline.

The architecture Edlow calls rubber-stamping is the architecture this administration trusts to admit the refugees it wants.

The vetting is real when the applicants are favored.

The rhetoric shifts when they are not.

VII.

“No vetting” is not a description of the past.

It is a license for what is being built now.

This week, Jonathan Blitzer reported that USCIS has created a new Tactical Operations Division. Roughly eighty officers. Four teams, per the internal document he reviewed. They are called “Denaturalization.” “Refugee Re-Vetting.” “LPR Operations.” “Fraud Detection and National Security.”

USCIS was not designed as an enforcement agency. Its statutory role was adjudicatory — to evaluate applications for immigration benefits and apply the law to individual cases.

Even its investigative arm, FDNS, does not decide cases. Its role is to collect, analyze and document any relevant derogatory information for trained immigration officers to assess and apply during the adjudication process.

The creation of a unit dedicated to unwinding those decisions reflects a shift in function as much as in policy.

An agency that for decades adjudicated immigration benefits has stood up a dedicated unit to find cases where benefits can be rescinded. To review people already granted refugee status and determine whether to unwind it. To identify lawful permanent residents whose green cards might be revoked. To pursue denaturalization of U.S. citizens.

That sits alongside a June 2025 memo from the Department of Justice directing Civil Division attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence.” Alongside a Department of Homeland Security directive ordering the detention of refugees at the one-year mark, before they are eligible to apply for adjustment of status. Alongside a self-deport app offering $1,000 and forgiveness of civil fines to anyone willing to leave the country. Alongside removals to places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. Alongside detention conditions that courts have found unconstitutional and a death toll in ICE custody that has reached a two-decade high.

The mechanism is coherent.

Taken together, these are not separate policies. They are parts of a single system.

Freezes on pending cases generate out-of-status populations. The new Tactical Operations Division identifies them. The self-deport app offers the “voluntary” exit. For those who don’t take it, detention followed by removal to destinations chosen to deter.

Citizenship, once granted, was understood to be permanent. The new architecture treats it as provisional.

Every component requires the public to believe the prior system failed.

It did not.

The prior system denied a man for fixing cars.

VIII.

I do not know where he is now.

The denial is on file. The statute gave me no discretion. An officer trained at Glynco, sitting on a Pacific island, in what the administration then called the extreme vetting era, applying a law written fifteen years earlier, denied a man for fixing cars.

That was vetting.

The claim that there was none is the license for what comes next.

Editor's note, April 17, 2026: The first deportees have arrived in Kinshasa. The plane carried nationals from Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador — people with no connection to the DRC.

Less than two years ago, I spent over a month in western Tanzania co-supervising a team of refugee officers in training. It was one of dozens of overseas circuit rides conducted around the world where we reviewed case after case of people fleeing the same place: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The stories began to blur together—not because they were ordinary, but because they were so consistent in their brutality. Villages burned. Parents killed. Women subjected to systematic sexual violence by militia groups often referred to simply as the Mai-Mai—a term that has become shorthand because of how pervasive those groups are in the region.

Many of the Congolese applicants we interviewed had spent years—sometimes entire lifetimes—in refugee camps. Some had been born there. Most had fled across Lake Tanganyika with little more than what they could carry.

Even for officers who had heard these accounts for years, the stories were difficult to sit with. But the cases themselves were almost never in doubt. This was the kind of persecution the system was designed to recognize: sustained violence, a clear nexus to a protected ground, and years spent waiting for a chance at safety.

For decades, eastern DRC has been shaped by overlapping conflicts, militia control, and recurring violence tied to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Armed groups continue to operate across the region with impunity, displacing families again and again.

These conditions are not confined to the east. The government of the DRC has a well-documented record of human rights abuses and, as the persistence of violence itself makes clear, no effective system for protecting people from harm.

And now the United States is preparing to send people from within its own borders to the DRC—people with no connection to the country at all.

To a place defined by the very conditions the system was built to recognize and protect against.

The contradiction is stark. The moral inversion is starker. The legal inversion is undeniable.

The bedrock of the global refugee protection system is a simple legal rule: you do not send people back to places where they face persecution or torture. The principle—known as non-refoulement—emerged from the aftermath of World War II and was codified in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. It is embedded in U.S. law through the Refugee Act of 1980 and reinforced by the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits returning anyone to a country where they are likely to be tortured. The rule is not aspirational. It is binding. It applies regardless of how a person arrives or where they are encountered. And it reflects a basic recognition that the purpose of this system is not merely to manage migration, but to prevent the return of human beings to violence and persecution.

This logic did not emerge overnight. It took shape during the first Trump administration, as policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols and Asylum Cooperative Agreements moved asylum seekers into increasingly precarious conditions outside the United States. The logic was consistent then and remains so now: deterrence through the deliberate disregard for human dignity.

That logic has no limiting principle. It evolves.

CECOT, the Salvadoran mega-prison widely condemned by human rights organizations, is not an aberration. It is the destination the policy was always pointing toward: moving people outside the reach of U.S. law and into environments where the harm is not incidental, but structural. The DRC deportations are the same vector, extended further.

The same logic now extends inside our own borders. More than thirty people died in ICE custody in 2025—a two-decade high, nearly triple the year before. Fifteen more have died already this year.

This is not an accident. It is a consequence of policy.

Inadequate medical care, prolonged detention, and inhumane conditions that several courts found violated the law are not system failures. They are the system itself. Deterrence requires that the cost be visible. That people know what awaits them. These deaths are not incidental. They are part of the message.

This is what it looks like when a government decides that human dignity is a variable, not a floor.

I know what that floor looks like. I sat across from children who described what had happened to their mothers when the Mai-Mai came to the door. Their cases were not complicated. The system worked exactly as designed: it recognized persecution, documented it, and offered protection.

That same system now loads planes to Kinshasa.

Ronald Reagan, borrowing from John Winthrop, called America a shining city on a hill — a beacon, a place the world looked to. The image was always aspirational. But aspiration implies direction—you are either moving toward it, or away from it.

The city on the hill is still there. But we are building the boats to send people back to the shore they fled.

As immigration raids and deportations dominate the news, Americans are debating who belongs here — and who does not. Enforcement now defines the public face of our immigration system.

Less visible is what has happened to the humanitarian side — the part designed not to remove people, but to protect them.

For years, I served in the Refugee Affairs Division of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. I helped decide who qualified for resettlement under one of the most demanding screening regimes in the world. Refugees do not cross a border and receive protection. They wait — often for years. They submit biometric data. Their names are run through intelligence databases. Their travel histories and family ties are dissected. Any possible connection — however indirect — to armed groups is examined under broad terrorism-related inadmissibility bars.

The result is a process so exacting that even minor inconsistencies can delay — or derail — a case.

In 2020, while still serving in government, I wrote in The Washington Post about what I feared was not only the dismantling of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, but a broader shift toward deterrence as the defining lens of immigration policy.

By late 2024, the program was expanding. More than 100,000 refugees were admitted that year from across the globe, one of the highest totals in decades. Officers conducted record numbers of interviews across multiple regions. New pathways, including the first-of-its-kind public-private sponsorship model through the Welcome Corps, expanded access and public participation. Operation Allies Welcome and related efforts sought to address the urgent needs of Afghan evacuees.

At the same time, the system demonstrated that it could operate at scale while intensifying its standards. When tens of thousands of Afghans were evacuated from Kabul, a robust vetting pipeline was quickly established — one capable of processing large volumes of cases while incorporating additional layers of national security review across multiple federal agencies.

Inside the system, that scrutiny only deepened. We worked in secure facilities reviewing reporting from law enforcement and national security agencies. Each Afghan case moved through multiple layers of review, including senior leadership. We held cases for months over minor inconsistencies. We denied decorated Afghan allies because of tenuous family ties or technical statutory bars. The standard was exacting — and, at times, unforgiving by design. If anything, the process grew slower and more rigid. We made it that way.

Then it was redirected.

The machinery remains intact: the interviews, the biometric checks, the statutory bars, the interagency coordination.

What has shifted are executive priorities.

Over the past year, the resettlement pipeline has been overwhelmingly concentrated in South Africa, focused on expedited processing of Afrikaner applicants — even as traditional circuit rides elsewhere have been grounded. In Istanbul, where refugee interviews once filled the halls of the International Catholic Migration Commission building from morning to evening, the American interview presence has grown quiet. Officers who once rotated through multiple regions have seen those trips canceled.

Recent policy changes underscore that shift. A new Department of Homeland Security memo directs ICE to detain certain refugees who have not adjusted to lawful permanent residence after one year in the United States — even though they cannot apply for permanent residence until that first year has passed.

Protection, once the conclusion of a rigorous years-long screening process, now appears conditional.

That conditionality is not abstract. Refugees who are starting to build their lives in America now face the possibility of detention, prolonged legal uncertainty, shifting enforcement priorities that can upend their status after arrival — and, in some cases, death — as in the case of a Rohingya refugee who died alone in Buffalo.

The line between protection and enforcement, once clear, has effectively disappeared.

The statute has not changed. The definition of persecution remains narrow, and the security bars remain broad.

What has always been flexible is prioritization.

Immigration policy is an area where executive authority is at its apex. Each year, the President sets the refugee admissions ceiling and regional priorities. That discretion shapes not only how many arrive, but how institutional attention and resources are distributed across regions. The Refugee Act of 1980 envisioned a humanitarian framework anchored in persecution and consultation with Congress. It did not anticipate how profoundly the program’s direction could shift through prioritization alone.

When one pipeline accelerates while longtime U.S. partners remain mired in years-long backlogs, the shift is not merely administrative. It is strategic.

For decades, the United States resettled people fleeing both left-wing and right-wing dictatorships — Jews escaping the Soviet Union, Cubans fleeing Castro, Vietnamese families after the fall of Saigon, refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans and beyond. The program did not ask whether persecution came from communism or fascism. It asked whether the applicant met the statutory definition.

Great powers throughout history have moved people by force — through conquest, expulsion or collapse. The United States, for all its flaws and contradictions, built something unusual: a system that used its power to absorb the persecuted rather than produce them. That inversion became part of America’s global identity.

During my years in the program, I never saw senior political leadership greet refugee arrivals on the tarmac — not for Iraqi interpreters who had worked alongside American troops, not for Afghan families evacuated under threat. In May 2025, when a group of South African Afrikaners arrived at Dulles International Airport, they were publicly welcomed there by senior U.S. officials, including the Deputy Secretary of State and the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security. For someone inside the system, the symbolism was unmistakable: the refugee apparatus had not vanished — it had been morally inverted.

Refugee resettlement is not charity. It is credibility. In Iraq and Afghanistan, American soldiers relied on interpreters and civil-society partners who trusted that if things went wrong, the United States would keep its word. That promise was operational.

When refugee processing for those partners stretches into years — or is halted altogether — while other priorities accelerate, the message is noticed not only by refugees, but by future allies calculating risk. Soft power erodes not with a speech, but with quiet choices about who moves and who waits.

I left government service after watching the system I once defended take on a different mission. The executive branch has lawful authority to set ceilings and priorities. But authority and intent are not the same thing.

A refugee program designed to identify the world’s most vulnerable people can, over time, begin to reflect the politics of the moment. When that happens, it is not dismantled.

It is repurposed.

America can enforce its immigration laws. It can debate admissions levels. But it cannot quietly redefine the purpose of its refugee program without altering how American power is understood around the world.

The machinery remains. The mission has changed.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me —

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

— Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1883)

Editor’s note (May 12, 2026): Since this piece was published, the administration has admitted approximately 6,000 Afrikaner refugees — all but three of the refugees admitted to the United States this fiscal year. The New York Times reported this week that the administration is now preparing to invoke an “unforeseen emergency” to admit thousands more, while the rest of the refugee program remains effectively shut down. The pattern documented below has not changed. It has accelerated.

Editor’s note (May 19, 2026): Multiple outlets now report that the “unforeseen emergency” referenced in the earlier update has become a proposal to raise the refugee ceiling from 7,500 to 17,500 for white South Africans. USRAP — once the crown jewel of the American humanitarian system — has been repurposed into a special program for one favored group.

Less than two years ago, I spent over a month in western Tanzania co-supervising a team of refugee officers in training. It was one of dozens of overseas circuit rides — the quiet, months-long rotations where officers from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services travel across the world, interviewing and vetting applicants, and deciding who will be allowed to come to the United States.

In reviewing and signing off on dozens of cases, and sitting in on interviews as part of training, the stories began to blur together. There was a familiarity to them — not because they were ordinary, but because they were so consistent in their brutality.

Villages burned. Parents killed. Women subjected to systematic sexual violence by militia groups — often referred to simply as the Mai-Mai, a term that has become shorthand in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) because of how ubiquitous those groups have become.

These applicants had no place to return to. For decades, the eastern DRC has been shaped by overlapping conflicts, militia control, and recurring violence tied to the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Armed groups continue to operate across the region with impunity, displacing families again and again.

Even for officers who had heard these accounts for years, the details were difficult to sit with. But the cases themselves were almost never in doubt. This was the kind of persecution the system was designed to recognize — sustained violence, a clear nexus to a protected ground, displacement, and years spent waiting in a camp for a chance to move forward.

Many of the Congolese applicants we interviewed had spent years — in some cases, entire lifetimes — in a refugee camp in western Tanzania. Some had been born there. Most had fled across Lake Tanganyika with little more than what they could carry.

The camp sits far from the parts of Tanzania most people ever see, deep in a region few Americans travel to. But the work there is steady. The International Organization for Migration maintains a nearby compound. U.S. officers rotate through regularly. Cases move forward in measured numbers each year.

It is also where new officers receive their in-field training, applying what they have learned over months of lesson plans and exams — how to conduct interviews, elicit testimony, assess credibility, flag national security concerns, and apply a legal standard that is exacting in its requirements, but more straightforward in some cases than others.

The System I Knew

The modern refugee system rests on a framework established by the Refugee Act of 1980, which created a structured process for resettlement and aligned U.S. law with international obligations. Each year, the president sets admissions targets by region, in consultation with Congress, and that decision sets the pipeline in motion. The United States has been the leading resettlement country in the world for decades.

The system has always been selective. It has always been slow. But it has also followed a consistent set of legal and humanitarian priorities — rooted in a definition of persecution that officers spent months training to apply.

By late 2024, the program was expanding. More than 100,000 refugees were admitted that year from across the globe, one of the highest totals in decades. Officers conducted record numbers of interviews across multiple regions.

When tens of thousands of Afghans were evacuated from Kabul, a robust vetting pipeline was quickly established — one capable of processing large volumes of cases while incorporating additional layers of national security review coordinated across multiple federal agencies. New initiatives, including the first of its kind public-private sponsorship through the Welcome Corps, further expanded access.

The machinery of protection was working — more efficiently than ever.

Those priorities have since been fundamentally redefined.

A System Reoriented

In early 2025, a new pipeline was effectively built from scratch as a new, dedicated pathway and rolled out at a pace rarely seen in the history of the U.S. refugee program.

Afrikaner applicants from South Africa were processed and resettled in a matter of months — a pace that stands in sharp contrast to the years-long timelines that have defined the program for decades. Their arrival was not quiet. When a group landed at Dulles International Airport, they were greeted by senior Department of Homeland Security and State Department officials — families walked through a private airplane hangar with their luggage while their children carried small American flags and stuffed animals — a level of visibility and ceremony I had never seen in eleven years at USCIS. Most refugee families arrive carrying little more than an identification card and the clothes on their backs — and the blue bag issued by the International Organization for Migration that has become an iconic symbol of refugee resettlement worldwide.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller described what was happening in South Africa as “race-based persecution,” calling it “the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.”

I spent months in training learning what persecution means under U.S. law. I then spent eleven years applying that standard to thousands of applicants across dozens of countries.

What the executive order describes is not persecution.

It describes harassment. It describes proposed land seizure legislation — legislation that has not, according to the South African government, resulted in a single expropriation without compensation. It describes discrimination.

Those are not the same thing legally. Not even close.

Persecution must be severe. Discrimination alone is not persecution. Harassment alone is not persecution. Threatened legislation is not persecution. The harm must rise to a level that would cause a reasonable person to flee — serious physical harm, threats to life or freedom, or severe violations of fundamental human rights. It must have a nexus to a protected ground. And it must be carried out by a government, or by forces a government cannot or will not control.

Individual cases of severe persecution exist in virtually every country in the world — including South Africa. There may well be Afrikaner applicants who, on the specific facts of their individual case, meet the legal definition of a refugee.

But that is precisely the point.

The refugee system was designed to evaluate individual claims on their specific merits — not to designate entire ethnic groups for accelerated resettlement based on a political narrative.

What Persecution Actually Looks Like

Compare that to what persecution looks like when it meets the legal standard.

In the eastern part of the DRC families are burned out of their villages, women subjected to systematic sexual violence by militia groups, and men executed in front of their children — targeted because of their ethnicity, their tribe, or their refusal to cooperate with armed groups. They flee across Lake Tanganyika with nothing. They spend years, sometimes entire lifetimes, in a camp in western Tanzania waiting for a chance to tell their story to an American officer.

That is persecution.

In Myanmar, the Rohingya have been denied citizenship for generations, rendered stateless by their own government, and subjected to mass killings and the destruction of entire villages — not because of anything they did, but because of who they are. More than a million people live in camps in Bangladesh.

That is persecution.

In Afghanistan, if you worked alongside American forces — as an interpreter, a driver, or a civil society worker — returning home means living under threat of retaliation. The Taliban know who you are. They have the lists. They have already acted on them.

That is persecution.

In Sudan, entire communities have been targeted by militias, with villages burned, families displaced, and systematic violence against civilians — because of their ethnicity, religion, or identity. Some have been waiting for resettlement longer than their children have been alive.

That is persecution.

I spent many years in rooms with people carrying these stories. I know what persecution looks like when it meets the legal standard. I know what it sounds like. I know what it costs a person to walk through it again under oath in a small fluorescent-lit room, across a desk from someone they’ve never met, while that person holds their future in their hands.

The Congolese woman waits years. The Rohingya father waits years. The Afghan interpreter waits years. The Sudanese boy waits years — and many are still waiting.

Now many of these populations have been effectively shut out of the system as currently operating — even those who have already been approved for resettlement.

What Changed

The shift was not abstract. It was measurable.

For fiscal year 2026, the refugee admissions ceiling was set at 7,500 — the lowest in the history of the modern program — with Afrikaners explicitly identified among the primary populations included.

Most applicants who access the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program are first referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which identifies the most vulnerable individuals and serves as the primary gateway into the system. That referral function has been the backbone of refugee resettlement for decades.

There are exceptions. Certain populations can access the program through Priority 2 (P-2) designations — group-based pathways created for specific categories of applicants, such as Afghan allies or religious minorities from designated countries. But even those programs are structured, limited, and grounded in longstanding statutory and humanitarian frameworks.

They operate alongside UNHCR referrals — not as a replacement for them, and not in a way that diverts resources away from other populations in the pipeline.

The Afrikaner pipeline operates differently.

Rather than relying on the traditional UNHCR referral process or an established Priority 2 (P-2) designation, this pipeline relied in part on a self-referral mechanism and a newly created group known as Amerikaners, described as a State Department referral partner for the program.

That departure from established practice is not a minor procedural change.

It is a structural one.

At the same time, the pipelines that once defined U.S. refugee resettlement — for Congolese, Afghan, Sudanese, and Rohingya applicants — have been suspended or effectively shut down. Applicants already interviewed, vetted, and cleared for travel remain stranded. Families who spent years navigating the system, who did everything right, have no path forward.

The travel ban remains in effect.

The statute has not changed. The definition of persecution has not changed. The legal standard remains the same.

What has changed are the priorities of the executive branch.

A System Hollowed Out

The barriers to rapid resettlement were never just technical. They were built into the law — and ultimately determined by policy choices. The Afrikaner pipeline demonstrated that clearly — and then exposed something else.

The consequences are already visible — and documented.

An investigation by The Free Press found that newly arrived Afrikaner refugees — the population the administration fast-tracked, championed publicly, and greeted personally at Dulles — were placed in moldy apartments and extended motel stays, eating one meal a day as their initial government stipend was quickly depleted. A social worker spent hundreds of dollars of her own money buying air mattresses and pillows. “I feel like they’re being neglected,” she told The Free Press, “and the agency is setting them up for failure.”

This is not a failure of the Afrikaner refugees. It is a failure of the system built to receive them — a system that was hollowed out in the months before they arrived. And it is the same system failure that thousands of resettled refugees across every population have faced as the infrastructure supporting them has been systematically dismantled. The pipeline that received every procedural advantage hit the same broken floor as everyone else.

You cannot dismantle decades of institutional infrastructure, gut the nonprofit resettlement network, and strip resources from the agencies responsible for integration, and then expect a newly constructed pipeline to deliver. The capacity is gone. The resettlement infrastructure — especially the nonprofit network responsible for receiving arrivals — has been gutted.

The system I worked in for eleven years was built in response to the failures of the twentieth century — from the refusal to admit European Jews fleeing Nazi Germany to the turning away of the St. Louis — and formalized in the Refugee Act of 1980 as a structured process for identifying and resettling those most in need of protection. It was, in many ways, an effort to give institutional meaning to the country’s self-image as a place of refuge — the “shining city” ideal invoked by generations of American leaders.

It was imperfect. It was slow. It was bureaucratic. But it followed a consistent legal standard applied case by case, story by story, in small rooms around the world.

That standard has not changed. The people who need it have not changed.

What has changed is who the system is built to recognize.

The only variable that explains the deviation — the speed, the bypassed referral system, the public reception, the new infrastructure — is who these applicants are.

I don’t need to say anything more than that.

The facts already have.

During my years as a refugee officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, I interviewed thousands of refugees seeking resettlement in the United States and determined who would be allowed to begin new lives here.

Those interviews were the front line of protection.

So when I read about Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a 56-year-old, nearly blind Rohingya refugee who was dropped at a Tim Hortons several miles from his home in Buffalo one night in late February by U.S. Border Patrol, one detail stood out.

He had already survived one of the most difficult journeys in the world.

Days later, he was found dead.

But the fact that he had reached Buffalo at all tells us something important. Refugees do not arrive in the United States by accident. By the time someone is admitted through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), they have already passed through one of the most rigorous vetting and screening processes in the world.

The Rohingya are often described as one of the most persecuted peoples on earth. For decades Myanmar’s government has denied citizenship to the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in a Buddhist-majority country, effectively rendering them stateless. Their movement is restricted, their villages destroyed, and entire communities forced to flee.

In 2017, the Myanmar military launched a brutal campaign that drove more than 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh.

For many Rohingya, survival means waiting.

Camps intended as temporary shelters become long-term settlements. Today roughly one million Rohingya refugees live in vast camps in southern Bangladesh — bamboo settlements that have effectively become cities of displacement.

Most will never leave.

Only a tiny fraction of the world’s refugees will ever be resettled in another country.

Refugee resettlement is often misunderstood in the United States. It is neither quick nor random. The journey from a refugee camp to an American city usually takes years — sometimes decades.

Each year, the President sets the refugee admissions ceiling through a process known as the Presidential Determination, after consultation with Congress. That ceiling determines how many refugees the United States will admit and how those admissions are allocated across different regions of the world.

Even then, most refugees never gain access to the program. Applicants must first be referred — most often by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — based on vulnerability: survivors of violence, families facing particular danger if they remain where they are, or individuals eligible through specific U.S. programs.

Eventually, some are scheduled for interviews with USCIS refugee officers who travel overseas to adjudicate their cases.

One of those missions took me to Kuala Lumpur in early 2016, where Rohingya applicants were being processed for possible resettlement to the United States.

Over the course of that trip, I sat across from hundreds of refugees in small interview rooms, listening as they described burned villages, missing family members, and years spent waiting after fleeing Myanmar. Living in Malaysia on temporary status, many endured daily harassment from local authorities and constant fear of immigration detention.

The interviews were quiet and methodical.

Applicants took an oath. Interpreters took an oath. Children sometimes sat in the corner drawing with crayons while their parents spoke. A thick case file rested on the table between us.

As the interview unfolded, I typed continuously, recording answers as they were translated through the interpreter. A refugee officer in that room becomes several things at once — stenographer, investigator, therapist, and judge — listening carefully, documenting each response while formulating the next question in real time.

Beyond the interview itself, every case moves through multiple layers of security screening. Biometric fingerprints are checked against intelligence and law-enforcement databases. Names and biographic details are reviewed across several federal agencies. The process can take years.

By the time many applicants reach that interview room, they have already spent years — sometimes a decade — waiting. And then they are asked to walk carefully through the worst moments of their lives once again.

The questions move slowly through a person’s life: where they were born, when they fled, who was still alive, what had happened along the way.

Among officers there was a kind of shorthand about these cases. Once identity was established — the language, the physical characteristics, the UN referral — the persecution itself was rarely in doubt.

One colleague once joked, darkly, “You had me at Rohingya.”

The real work of the interview was confirming identity, reconstructing timelines, and determining whether the applicant met the legal requirements for admission.

By the time someone reached that interview room, they had already beaten extraordinary odds.

Which is why the story out of Buffalo has unsettled so many people.

But outrage alone does not explain what happened.

Refugee resettlement is designed to do one thing: move people out of persecution and into safety.

By the time a refugee reaches an American city, the machinery of that system — the interviews, the background checks, the security vetting, and the paperwork — has already done the work it was designed to do.

What comes next is something far more fragile.

For many refugees, arrival in the United States is not the end of a journey but the beginning of another long process: learning a new language, navigating unfamiliar institutions, and rebuilding a life in a country that feels nothing like the one they left behind.

Over the past decade, Rohingya communities have quietly taken root in several American cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Buffalo. Many arrived through the same refugee resettlement pipeline described above.

But life after arrival comes with its own long road.

Refugees must repay the travel loans that financed their journeys to the United States, learn a new language, and navigate unfamiliar systems of work, school, and healthcare. Only after several years can they apply to become American citizens and participate fully in the political life of the country that offered them refuge.

What makes the moment we are living through even more striking is that much of the protection infrastructure described above has quietly slowed or stopped.

For decades, the United States operated an overseas adjudication pipeline designed to identify refugees before they ever reached the American border. Officers traveled abroad to conduct interviews, verify identities, and determine who qualified for resettlement under U.S. law. Those interviews were the gatekeeping function of the system — the point where protection decisions were made.

Today, much of that pipeline has been suspended or dramatically reduced. The few remaining interview missions are concentrated in narrow categories and specific regions, while many traditional refugee-processing locations have gone quiet.

The result is a profound shift in how the United States encounters displaced people. Instead of identifying refugees abroad through a structured protection system, the system increasingly meets them through enforcement — at borders, in detention facilities, or after they have already arrived.

When the front end of protection weakens, the pressure does not disappear. It simply moves somewhere else.

The nearly blind Rohingya refugee who died in Buffalo had already traveled much of that journey.

By the time he reached the United States, he had endured the journey, the waiting, and the interviews that determine who is allowed to start over.

In the year before his death, Alam spent months in the Erie County Holding Center after being arrested in Buffalo following a misunderstanding when he wandered onto private property while using a curtain rod as a cane.

In February 2026, after resolving the misdemeanor charges against him, he was released from jail and briefly taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol. Agents later dropped him at a Tim Hortons several miles from his home. Five days later, he was found dead in downtown Buffalo.

What happened next is still being investigated.

But his story is a reminder of something important.

The machinery of protection can still bring someone to safety.

But what comes after arrival is now far more precarious.

Afghan evacuees aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 during the evacuation from Kabul in August 2021. More than 120,000 people were airlifted in one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history.

Editor's Note (April 22, 2026): Since this piece was first published, The New York Times has reported that U.S. officials are in talks to relocate more than 1,000 Afghan allies — including hundreds of women and children — to the Democratic Republic of Congo, with some facing a choice between relocation there or return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Last weekend, Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal — a 41-year-old Afghan father of six who had worked alongside U.S. Special Forces during the war in Afghanistan — died less than twenty-four hours after being taken into custody by ICE outside his apartment in the Dallas area. He was taken to a local hospital after reporting chest pain during intake, where he died hours later. The cause of death remains under investigation.

His story reveals something larger: the evacuation pipeline built after Kabul’s fall is no longer there.

Paktyawal had served alongside American forces in eastern Afghanistan beginning around 2005, according to advocates who later produced documentation of his service. After the fall of Kabul in 2021, he fled Afghanistan and was among the tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated by the United States as the Taliban returned to power.

Like many evacuees, he was trying to rebuild his life in Texas while seeking permanent protection in the United States. His youngest child is an American citizen.

His brother later described him in simple terms:

“He was a hero.”

Like tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated during the fall of Kabul, Paktyawal arrived in the United States on humanitarian parole — a temporary legal status that allowed the government to move evacuees to safety while they pursued permanent protection through the immigration system.

At the time, humanitarian parole was widely understood as a bridge — a way to move people out of immediate danger while more permanent immigration pathways were expected to follow. Most evacuees, like Paktyawal, applied for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and his case is reportedly still pending a decision.

Four years later, that bridge to a new life has largely disappeared.

Recent reporting suggests a shift toward detaining asylum seekers may already be underway. A Department of Homeland Security directive instructs ICE to detain certain non-citizens, including refugees and asylum seekers, who have not adjusted to lawful permanent residence after one year — even though they cannot apply for that status until they have been present in the United States for that full year.

Whether that policy shift played a role in Paktyawal’s detention is not yet clear. But the circumstances surrounding his arrest reflect a broader shift in how the United States is handling Afghan evacuees whose legal status remains unresolved years after the evacuation from Kabul.

Paktyawal’s story represents only one path out of Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul. While many evacuees entered the United States directly on humanitarian parole, tens of thousands of other Afghans were routed through a different channel — the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or USRAP — where they were transferred to temporary processing locations overseas while their cases were reviewed.

In the chaotic weeks after Kabul fell, the United States flew more than 100,000 Afghans out of the country in one of the largest evacuation operations in modern history. Many were brought first to temporary transit and processing locations across the region—including Qatar, Albania, Germany, Central Asia, and U.S. military bases—where officers from across the U.S. government worked to screen evacuees, review immigration pathways, and determine how they could be admitted to the United States.

The same fact that makes them eligible for protection in the United States—their cooperation with the U.S. government—is often the very reason they are targeted if they return home.

Building the Evacuation Pipeline

After Kabul fell, the United States government scrambled to build a system capable of processing tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees.

I spent nearly two years working on that effort as part of the refugee program, serving as a Supervisory Refugee Officer helping to stand up portions of the Afghan evacuation pipeline.

These cases were unusually complex. While many Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul clearly met the legal definition of a refugee, their backgrounds often triggered additional national security and admissibility reviews simply because of the environment in which they had lived and worked.

Nearly every case I reviewed involved individuals who had spent years supporting the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

They had documentation and letters of support from American military personnel, diplomats, and development officials who had worked alongside them.

There was rarely any question about who these people were or the risks they had taken.

What made the work difficult was not determining whether they qualified for protection. It was navigating the layers of national security review required to reach that decision.

The same vetting framework that our teams helped establish for refugee processing was eventually applied more broadly across Afghan evacuation cases, including individuals who had entered the United States on humanitarian parole, and later sought protection through the asylum system.

These were not only interpreters or soldiers. Many applicants had spent years helping build Afghanistan’s civil society — working with NGOs, supporting girls’ education, assisting democratic institutions, or partnering with U.S. development programs. Operating in Afghanistan meant that even well-documented allies could appear in intelligence reporting or security databases in ways that required careful review.

As a result, the processing pipeline involved extensive coordination with USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, as well as other national security partners. Each case moved through multiple layers of vetting across both classified and unclassified systems to ensure that decisions were legally sound and posed no threat to the United States.

The speed at which the program was established — combined with the level of review involved — was unprecedented in my eleven years at USCIS.

Much of this work happened behind the scenes. Small teams of officers, analysts, and policy officials worked across agencies to build databases, establish vetting procedures, and construct the systems needed to process evacuees moving through transit countries and military bases.

Many Americans assume that evacuees simply arrived in the United States and were admitted. In reality, the process involved multiple layers of screening by intelligence, law enforcement, and national security agencies.

Officers were deployed overseas for extended rotations to process cases in places such as Islamabad, Albania, Central Asia, and transit facilities across the Gulf. Files moved through a complex system of background checks, intelligence reporting, and immigration law before a final decision could be made.

It was an extraordinary effort carried out under extraordinary circumstances.

When the Pipeline Stops

Much of the evacuation infrastructure built after Kabul’s fall has now slowed or halted.

In early 2026, new travel restrictions and policy changes effectively paused most Afghan processing. Refugee admissions for Afghans were curtailed, and resources once dedicated to the evacuation pipeline were redirected elsewhere.

For many Afghans still waiting overseas, the consequences have been immediate.

In Pakistan, where thousands of Afghan applicants had spent years awaiting decisions on their U.S. cases, authorities have begun deporting Afghan nationals back to Afghanistan as part of broader immigration crackdowns. Some of those deported had pending U.S. refugee cases. Others had already been approved for resettlement and were waiting for travel.

Meanwhile, conditions inside Afghanistan continue to deteriorate. The Taliban have consolidated control, and restrictions on women and civil society have intensified in ways that further endanger many of those who once worked alongside the United States.

For those who never made it onto evacuation flights, the window for relocation is rapidly closing.

But even for those who did make it to the United States, the situation is becoming increasingly precarious.

Many Afghan evacuees entered the country on temporary humanitarian parole while they pursued asylum or other permanent immigration pathways. Years later, thousands remain in legal limbo — navigating backlogged cases, expiring statuses, and now the possibility of detention.

That is the landscape in which Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal died.

Around the world, people who work alongside the United States in conflict zones pay close attention to what happens after the war ends. Translators, drivers, civil society leaders, and local partners take enormous risks on the assumption that their cooperation will not be forgotten.

As conflict again escalates across parts of the Middle East, including the growing confrontation with Iran, the question of what happens to America’s allies after the fighting stops is no longer theoretical. The answer will shape not only the lives of those left behind in Afghanistan, but the willingness of future allies to stand alongside the United States.