When I last wrote for this paper, I was determined to highlight the myriad attacks on our immigration system and, more specifically, on asylum seekers to ensure that readers knew the depth and breadth of the damage that was being done not only to immigrants but to all of us who depend on immigrants for our country’s future. Today, everything—and nothing—has changed. We have a new president and directives from this administration that acknowledge that immigrants are people, to be treated with human dignity, that the United States is a humane country and that due process matters. But too little has happened to ensure that these directives are implemented: the reauthorization of Title 42 (permitting the expulsion of immigrants without due process ostensibly for public health reasons but public health experts have publicly stated that they did not ask for this reauthorization nor do they think that it is warranted); the deporting of African immigrants after President Joe Biden declared a moratorium on deportations; and the still low refugee ceiling after months of promises to increase it. Less newsworthy but no less critical is the remaining in place of decisions like that of in Matter of Negusie, 28 I&N Dec. 120 (A.G. 2020), currently on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

This case involved a gentleman, Daniel Girmai Negusie, who was both an Eritrean and an Ethiopian national. He was conscripted into military service by the Eritrean government, then imprisoned and tortured, then released but forced by the Eritrean government to serve as a prison guard at the same prison where he had been tortured when a prisoner. While Negusie contended that he made some efforts, while guarding other prisoners, to help some of those prisoners, he did concede that he also was engaged in persecution as a guard although claims that he did so under duress. He ultimately escaped, boarded a cargo ship and came here seeking asylum in 2004.