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

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Special flights to Moscow

On Dec. 7, a special deportation flight carrying citizens of Iran, Russia, and several Arab countries took off from the United States. At a stopover in Cairo, most of the passengers were transferred to a plane bound for Kuwait, while 60 Russians were escorted to a special flight to Moscow. It arrived in the Russian capital early on the morning of Dec. 9.

According to Dmitry Valuev, the head of the NGO Russian America for Democracy in Russia, upon arrival in Moscow the deportees were questioned by officers of the FSB, and one of them, Zair Syamiullin, was detained on charges of fraud. Russian men were also handed draft notices requiring them to register with military enlistment offices.

The deportation flight was the fourth since the start of 2025, with earlier iterations occurring in June, August, and September. This is an innovation of the Trump administration, Valuev explains: under Biden and previous presidents, no such deportations of Russians were conducted.

Immigration attorney Lia Djamilova notes that the special flights mark a move towards a new form of equality in America’s approach towards potential newcomers — albeit an undesirable one: “[The United States] has always taken a harsh approach to migrants, but previously you had to be Latin American or African for that to apply. Now they have also stopped handling Russian-speaking and post-Soviet people with care.”

The Trump administration is using special deportation flights to expel migrants from other countries as well. Since the beginning of the year, such flights have sent more than 18,000 people to Venezuela. Immigration lawyer Marina Sokolovskaya believes this practice will only expand: the Department of Homeland Security has already purchased its own Boeing aircraft, and in 2026 the process will likely accelerate “because there will no longer be a need to deal with charter flights.”

Previously, U.S. authorities deported Russian citizens on regular commercial flights or offered them the option of leaving the country on their own, which sometimes made it possible to avoid being sent to Russia.

“Most Russians are deported in small groups of two or three on regular civilian commercial flights. In the U.S. they are escorted to the plane and sent to a third country. After that, it’s a matter of luck. Some people managed to get away during these transfers,” says attorney Yulia Nikolaeva.

From the border to detention

There are still no exact figures on how many Russians have been deported from the U.S. in 2025. The website of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) states that since the beginning of the year 127 Russian citizens have been expelled. Immigration lawyers note, however, that these data may be incomplete, and that a fuller picture will only emerge after the annual report is published in early 2026. For comparison: 58 Russians were deported from the U.S. in 2022, 222 in 2023, and 455 in 2024.

The sharp increase in deportations was linked to a decision by the Biden administration to place Russians and citizens of a number of former Soviet states detained at the U.S.–Mexico border into temporary migrant detention centers, unlike migrants from other countries.

“Citizens of other countries continued to be allowed across the border under the CBP One program, while citizens of Russia and five other former Soviet countries were simply kept under arrest without any grounds. When Trump came in, he announced that he was closing the border and the CBP One program, and that everyone who crossed the border would be detained. So Trump’s policy essentially equalized everyone: the new administration treats all immigrants harshly, without a discriminatory focus specifically on Russian citizens,” attorney Nikolaeva told The Insider.

Since 2019, Russians have increasingly used the southern border to enter the U.S. According to Marina Sokolovskaya, whereas five years ago Russian speakers at the U.S.-Mexico border were a rarity, officers with knowledge of Russian, Kyrgyz, and other languages from the former Soviet space are now in high demand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In search of asylum

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

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

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

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

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

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

To make up for the resulting shortage of judges — who were already struggling to cope with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of applications — the Trump administration decided to bring in military lawyers from the Pentagon. Collectively, they have issued deportation rulings in 78% of cases.

A quota-driven system

Previously, temporary detention centers mostly held asylum seekers and other migrants taken into custody at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now, however, they are now increasingly holding people who have already applied for asylum and were awaiting a decision while living and working in the U.S. In the past, arrests of migrants inside the country were generally linked to cases involving violent crimes. Now only 7% of those detained had previously been convicted of such offenses.

Under Trump, the justifications for detaining asylum applicants include traffic checks, especially of long-haul truck drivers (among whom there are many migrants, including Russians and others from former Soviet countries). In many large cities, migration authorities carry out mass raids directly on the streets, with agents in masks and plain clothes officers taking people away in unmarked vehicles. Because law enforcement officers often focus only on race, they sometimes detain U.S. citizens as well — since the beginning of 2025, at least 170 such incidents have been recorded.

Human rights advocates are also raising the alarm over the growing practice of arrests inside courthouse buildings, where migrants come for scheduled hearings regarding their asylum cases. However, such detentions have gradually ceased due to public outcry.

“Civil society worked well here. People mobilized, large group chats were formed, and they didn’t allow people to be arrested quietly,” Lia Jamilova says. “They explained migrants’ rights, recommended attorneys, and urged them not to sign papers with ICE, because those arrests were illegal. After that, ICE stopped arrests in courts. They realized it was too public and too awkward.”

According to Jamilova , in conversations with her and other immigration lawyers, ICE officers sometimes admit that the reason for detaining their clients is the need to meet performance targets imposed from above:

“They have quotas, but no one to arrest. These officers are climbing the walls, crying crocodile tears in private conversations about being forced to do this. They arrest parents at daycare centers, they arrest people when they come to check in. Because there’s nowhere to find ‘bad’ migrants, they take anyone.”

As early as February, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was demanding that at least 1,000 migrants be detained every day, and in May the quota was raised to 3,000 people. As a result, people who were previously left alone are increasingly being picked up. Yulia Sokolovskaya gives one such example: “We had a client detained whose husband is currently serving in the U.S. Army and is being sent to combat zones. We managed to get her released, although the chances were 0.5%. ICE officers now have no taboos at all — even military service is no longer an argument, although it had always been considered sacred. As they told us, ‘nothing personal, guys — just numbers.’”

Although ICE has so far failed to meet the target (an average of about 800 people are detained daily), the overall number of arrests has already sharply increased. In an effort to boost staffing levels, the agency’s leadership has lowered recruitment standards and shortened training periods for new agents. To assist with arrests, personnel from the Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even agents from the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service are also being deployed.

Against the backdrop of mass arrests of migrants, conditions in temporary detention centers have deteriorated sharply. Since the beginning of the year, the number of detainees has increased by 70%, now totaling more than 66,000 people. Human rights advocates note that migrants are often held in cramped and unsanitary conditions, with many forced to sleep on the floor and deprived of access to doctors and lawyers. Some detainees are placed in solitary confinement for several days or even weeks, in violation of ICE’s own rules.

For example, at the recently opened Fort Bliss center in Texas, 45 migrants were able, through an attorney, to submit a complaint alleging beatings and intimidation by staff. Guards reportedly choked and beat detainees, squeezed their genitals, and threatened them with deportation to Africa or imprisonment in El Salvador.

Migrants were intimidated with handcuffs, bags placed over their heads, and threats to abandon them in the desert. Several were beaten so severely that they required hospitalization — and after treatment, they were sent to solitary confinement. In total, since the beginning of the year, 30 migrants have already died in such centers, the highest figure recorded over the past twenty years.

One for all and all for the same thing

In late November, Afghan national, Ramanullah Lakanwal opened fire on National Guard service members in Washington, killing one and seriously wounding another. Because the shooter was granted political asylum in 2025, the White House also ordered a pause in decisions on almost all refugee applications processed through USCIS, even for those who entered the US legally — the only allowable exception was for white citizens of South Africa.

Yulia Sokolovskaya notes that the consequences of the attack on the National Guard are already being felt: “This killing completely tied our hands. We had just started to notice that in a number of states the asylum review process had sped up and was finally running smoothly. Now you come to an interview with a client, and they are once again sent back to waiting. It’s unclear how long this may last.”

Although Lakanwal was in the U.S. entirely legally — thanks to his cooperation with the CIA during Operation Enduring Freedom — Donald Trump announced a suspension of the review of all immigration applications filed by Afghan citizens. They were soon joined by citizens of another 38 countries, who were similarly barred from entering the U.S. The suspension led to the cancellation of naturalization ceremonies and interviews for green card applicants, and also stripped citizens of those countries of the ability to extend their work and student visas.

Residents of these countries who already hold permanent resident status in the U.S. are set to undergo repeat screening by immigration authorities, with the possibility that their green cards could be revoked. USCIS also plans to strip several hundred people of U.S. citizenship if it was obtained fraudulently or in violation of existing rules.

On Dec. 13, a mass shooting occurred at Brown University, leaving 11 students dead, and two days later, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was killed. The suspect turned out to be Portuguese citizen Claudio Neves Valente. In 2017, he obtained permanent resident status in the U.S. through the green card lottery. Shortly afterward, the Trump administration announced an indefinite suspension of that program.

Immigration lawyers warn that in the race to meet targets handed down from the White House, immigration authorities often detain migrants indiscriminately, significantly increasing the risk of deportation for Russians living in the US.

According to sources speaking with The Insider, the highest risk of deportation now applies to Russians who lack any legal status other than a pending asylum application — especially if they are already in detention. “As a diaspora in the U.S., we need to prepare for tougher restrictive measures and for building a strategy to protect the most vulnerable people,” Dmitry Valuev says.