As Jibril prepared for his second hearing in immigration court – a hearing where he could be granted long-term legal status known as asylum – he tried to ignore warnings that it was getting more difficult for immigrants in Minnesota to see their applications approved.
“I know a lot of Somalis get denied now. But I thought I would be different. I thought the judge would understand that the only future I had in Somalia was death by the hands of my in-laws and their powerful clan,” he said.
Jibril, which is not his real name, and his lawyer attended a 15-minute online hearing last month where an out-of-state judge asked only a few questions before denying his asylum application, they said.
As is increasingly the case, the denial was issued without a full hearing ever taking place.
Jibril’s case would have been considered relatively strong just a few years ago, but the hurried way in which it was conducted is consistent with data and accounts from advocates, lawyers, academics, and immigrants about how the asylum system in Minnesota has changed since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
While getting an application for asylum approved has always been exceedingly difficult, new priorities and procedures at the federal level have trickled down to the nation’s 60 regional immigration courts, including Fort Snelling, which administers cases from Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Changes over the last 16 months have made it even harder for applicants to have their full case heard on the merits as the Trump administration narrows the legal pathways available. At the same time, judges are under pressure to clear a backlog of cases by making quick rulings, often issuing summary judgments even before the full evidentiary hearings in which applicants and lawyers traditionally bring out their strongest arguments.
The outcome is largely predictable. A MinnPost analysis of data from the Fort Snelling immigration court shows that asylum approvals are at record lows, and that Minnesota’s immigration judges closed over 60% more asylum cases in 2025 as the year before – and more than twice as many as annual average case completions during the Biden administration.
“We know that under Trump it’s extremely difficult to get [cases] approved,” said Twin Cities-area asylum lawyer R. Leo Pritchett, who has been practicing for nearly four decades. “They have done everything possible to make sure that their one final goal is reached, which is that the alien must lose.”
A family secret unravels life in Somalia
Jibril lived what many would consider a normal, middle-class life in Somalia. Despite the hardships common in a country riven by three decades of civil war, famine, and endemic corruption, he had no plans to leave. Unlike many Somalis who rely on the communal society’s system of clans and familial relations for support and safety, Jibril, his parents, and two brothers operated more like what we would consider a nuclear family. He was close to his father and he did not have strong connections with extended family.
Jibril’s primary anchor in adulthood, though, was the family he forged. He married a woman from a well-to-do family with clan relations that linked them to government and security officials, and they had three children together.
When his father died and it came time to divide his possessions, an argument over inheritance exposed a shocking revelation: the man he always considered his biological father had actually taken him in as a homeless child.
In front of his brothers and his wife’s family, his adoptive mother demanded to know:
“How can a bastard inherit anything? Why should someone we took in from the streets deserve more than my own sons?”
It was then that his world began to unravel.
Related: Fort Snelling immigration court: Hiding behind locked doors, closed video conferencing, according to Minnesota lawsuit
His wife’s family was appalled by this revelation. The man who had married their daughter, their niece, their sister, was, in this conservative corner of a conservative country, effectively an outcast. Jibril had no family and no clan. He protested that he had never knowingly misrepresented himself; the fact that he was adopted at a young age was as surprising to him as it was to almost everyone else in the room.
But it didn’t matter.
“I had brought shame to them. My wife’s aunt asked two of the relatives that were with her, ‘Are you not men? Will you allow this to happen to our family?’ And they pulled out knives and attacked me,” he said.
He escaped with serious injuries, which were documented in his asylum application. When his former family disowned him, Jibril found refuge with a friend of his late father. Meanwhile, his wife’s family utilized the broad reach of their clan and their connections with police and other officials to keep up the hunt for Jibril, intent on exacting vengeance for this perceived perfidy.
Jibril, with his world upside down and his identity inside out, felt his options dwindling. As his physical wounds healed, his father’s friend made arrangements to get him out of the country. He promised to look after Jibril’s wife and children until they could be reunited.
Minnesota asylum approval rates plunge in second Trump term
The modern U.S. asylum system was written into federal law in 1980 when Congress codified into federal statute an earlier international refugee convention. The system’s core purpose was to fulfill international humanitarian and national legal commitments to ensure individuals are not removed to countries where they face persecution, torture, or death.
Despite these lofty goals that grew out of the shadow of World War II and the mass displacement it caused, the tenets of the U.S. asylum system have been applied inconsistently over the decades, said Virgil Wiebe, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.
That has been especially true in the past year as President Trump has tried to refocus much of the immigration system on a stricter, narrower interpretation of the law that prioritizes arrests and deportations.
“It’s fair to say that this attack on asylum is the most breathtaking in [the system’s] history,” Wiebe said.
The nation’s immigration courts are not a part of the federal judicial branch. Instead, they are governed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a part of the Department of Justice. Experts say that pressure on that office from the Trump administration is responsible for the dramatic drop in asylum approval rates in Minnesota and nationwide.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review did not respond to a request for comment last week on changes within the office and their impact on case outcomes.
To see the scale of the shift one only needs to look at the court’s historical baseline for asylum cases, rather than the litany of other cases heard at Fort Snelling immigration court. A case for asylum has always been difficult to prove, but success rates plunged between the final year of the Biden administration and the first full year of the second Trump administration.
Jibril reached Minnesota through a network of friends of friends and other acquaintances. When he got to the state, that’s how he got lodging and work. The same aspects of Somali collectivistic society – a focus on community helping each other and protecting each other – that can be blamed for his traumatic flight from his home and family are in many ways responsible for shepherding him safely from the Horn of Africa to the Midwest.
He was able to borrow money to secure the services of a lawyer, who helped him begin the asylum application process. Applying for asylum would give him some security and, eventually, the possibility of reuniting the rest of his family here. More immediately, it gave him a work permit, allowing him to pay back those who had helped him get on his feet in Minnesota.
Jibril began working for rideshare companies, then earned his commercial driver’s license. Now, he drives full-time as an owner-operator of a truck and lives in his own home. Despite his relative stability, he still does not tell other Somalis in Minnesota about his roots, concerned that they will ostracize him just as his adoptive family and in-laws did.
While he was finding his footing in Minnesota, he continued to try to get news of the situation in Somalia. Would it be safe for him to go back soon, or ever? Was there any possibility of resolving his predicament peacefully? Most importantly, what happened to the wife and children he left in the care of his father’s friend?
Finally, during one phone call, the family friend’s wife picked up the phone, telling him that her husband had been killed for helping Jibril escape the country.
“She kept saying that I had killed him, that I was the reason he was dead,” Jibril said. “I told her I was so sorry for her loss. But I needed to know where my family was. She hung up the phone and stopped answering my calls.”
Since then, Jibril has had no news of his wife or children. He hopes they were taken in by his wife’s family, that the clan’s animus toward him did not extend to her or their children. He doesn’t want to think about the other possibilities.
Somali asylum seekers in Minnesota face tougher odds
The drop in asylum approval rates has happened so suddenly that academics and lawyers are at a loss to explain why they have shifted so dramatically, especially without any statutory changes to immigration law passed by Congress. Lawyers say that some of the mechanisms driving this drop are visible in daily court operations, while others stem from broader structural changes.
By one measure, immigration judges exceeded expectations: they were able to resolve 239,154 cases nationally, and 4,095 in Minnesota, nearly doubling the previous year’s totals.
One way they accomplished this feat was by cutting hearings short. Hearings that used to be three or four hours long are now two hours long, said asylum attorney Steven C. Thal.
A September 2025 appeals case bolstered an EOIR memo from April of that year that encouraged judges to, whenever possible, make final rulings on cases based only on information in the application and clarifying questions the judge may have. After taking this first pass at the materials, if a judge does not believe a case has a viable path forward, it can now be denied on the spot. This can happen as early as during an applicant’s first appearance, which in the past was used simply to straighten out paperwork and schedule future hearings.
Lawyers and advocates say that what was once a relatively rare move is now commonplace as judges try to clear their dockets and keep case completions up.
The problem, lawyers say, is that to “pretermit” a case means to dismiss it without a full evidentiary hearing, where potential legal paths for relief could be introduced.
“The system has become more demanding and less forgiving, especially for people fleeing complex forms of harm … The legal framework has narrowed and weaponized what and who qualifies for protection,” said Kim Boche, a lawyer with Advocates for Human Rights.
Related: For Minnesota Somalis in St. Cloud, ICE’s surge eroded years of hard-earned trust
In many cases, getting to the point of presenting evidence is itself a minor victory.
“To get to a full hearing these days is practically a win,” Thal said.
That has led some lawyers to try to front-load evidence in the paperwork, instead of waiting to present it at a hearing that may or may not happen.
In Jibril’s case, that did not seem to matter. His lawyer included evidence of the initial attack and the permanent scarring from it, expert testimony of the dangers of returning to Somalia without a clan or family support system, explanations of why Jibril did not trust the police (who were of the same clan as his wife’s family) and so did not have a formal police report. None of that mattered in the end, as the judge decided that it was safe for him to return to Somalia without allowing Jibril’s lawyer to question the analysis or final judgment.
Jibril’s case was seen by an out-of-state judge, an increasingly common phenomenon, especially for Somali applicants. While President Trump has long made immigration enforcement a signature issue through three presidential campaigns and two administrations, this term he has taken particular aim at Somalis in Minnesota. They have been the target of racist and xenophobic broadsides in which Trump has alleged they “contribute nothing” and do not work, and has also said they are “garbage” and called Somalia “barely a country.”
While judges have taken cases from outside of their jurisdiction in the past to help with backlogs, it has become a persistent tactic against Somali asylum applicants in Minnesota. Advocates argue that federal immigration courts are reshuffling cases to put judges with higher denial rates and faster case clearance rates on cases with Somali applicants.
This has led to what is now known as the Somali “Rocket Docket.” Because the hearings are online, court observers are generally not allowed in the video conferencing rooms as they are legally allowed to be in physical immigration courts. Amy Lange, head of the Advocates for Human Rights’ Court Observation Project, said last month that over 99% of the cases assigned to out-of-state judges involve Somali nationals. Only four cases overseen by such judges were for immigrants from other countries.
Advocates say structural changes will be hard to reverse
If someone’s asylum claim is denied, they can, if they have the time and resources, appeal the decision to the country’s top immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). In the first year of the Trump administration, nine Biden appointees to the court were fired. Some were replaced with temporary judges who, lawyers say, may be more likely to comply with the administration’s enforcement priorities.
The appeals board, in its new makeup, has been pushing out precedent-setting decisions at more than three times its historical pace, according to a forthcoming paper by University of Georgia School of Law professor Jason Cade.
Boche, of Advocates for Human Rights, noted that the board has raised evidentiary thresholds regarding the risk an asylum applicant might face in their home country.
They have changed “what counts as sufficient proof that a government is unable or unwilling to provide protection, and how individualized and recent a person’s risk must be,” they said.
Private lawyers broadly agree that the deck has become stacked even more in favor of the government’s lawyers.
“They continually restrict the ability of asylum seekers to be granted asylum,” Thal said. “They’re narrowing the ability to qualify whether it’s gang-related, gender-based, or domestic violence. So as these decisions have come out it’s definitely made it easier for judges to deny cases.”
The BIA has put out “a breathtaking number of decisions,” said Wiebe, the University of St. Thomas law professor.
Even if the courts were told to go back to pre-2025 rules, it would be difficult to see the immigration and asylum systems fully recovering without significant investments of time and energy that would shift the balance back toward a system that prioritizes due process over quick results.
“Because of the breadth and depth of these changes, it’s more structural than it is temporal,” he said. “Even though there’s not a statute that’s been passed, when the infrastructure itself is changed, and the substantive law is changed through the Board of Immigration Appeals, those are things that are very difficult to undo.”
“It’s harder to fix things than it is to break them,” Wiebe
Advocates, attorneys, asylum seekers pin hopes on appeals
The consequences of these record-low approval rates will be felt deeply across the state, where thousands of residents currently live in legal limbo, according to Ryan Allen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who recently released a study with the Center for Migration Studies estimating undocumented populations.
Of these, the largest group living in what the researchers describe as a “liminal” or temporary legal status are those waiting for their day in immigration court, including those with pending asylum claims, of which Allen estimates there are about 26,000 in Minnesota.
Related: Fort Snelling Immigration Court feeling the effects of Trump administration deportation plans
For years, that pending status provided legal protection from removal and detention. But as the court rapidly clears its backlog – currently on pace to hear even more asylum cases this year than 2025’s record-setting volume – that protection is becoming less certain.
After his case was denied in April, Jibril was in such shock that he became sick and was unable to work for weeks. When he finally got the nerve to check his status through the government’s immigration portal, he saw that he was marked for removal, despite having a pending appeal and also having Temporary Protected Status (TPS) due to the civil war in Somalia.
Judges have been sidestepping the TPS issue by sending people to so-called “safe” third countries, where they may not speak the language or have any support network, but which have agreed with Washington to take on a number of deportees.
“People who have been waiting in line and have claimed asylum a number of years ago are currently having their cases heard,” Allen said. “The long-term implications of a declining approval rate is, of course, many people are going to be forced to leave the United States.”
One of the biggest problems is how few asylum seekers even have access to a lawyer, advocates say. The system has never been kind to individuals trying to navigate a foreign legal web of paperwork and hearings. The new procedural barriers erected over the past year particularly affect children and those without representation, lawyers say.
The question now, Boche said, is “whether the system allows enough flexibility to account for the realities people are fleeing.”
For Jibril, that reality is plain and simple: his home country is now as good as a death sentence, and he is pinning all his hopes on a successful appeal.
“I still believe that our appeal could be positive,” he said.
Less than 1 in 10 appeals to the board succeed, so the odds are not in Jibril’s favor. He can further appeal to the Eighth U.S. Circuit of Appeals, which advocates consider the second-most conservative court on immigration issues, if he is willing to continue the legal battle.
