Early on a Thursday morning in June, the waiting room at the Fort Snelling immigration court was nearing capacity.
The court sits inside the Henry Bishop Whipple Federal Building, which had served as the headquarters for immigration enforcement agents during Operation Metro Surge and was the site of near-daily protests this winter.
According to the dockets pinned to a board under each judge’s name, many were here to seek asylum — a protection that would grant them legal status in the United States if they could prove a specific, legally enumerated fear of returning home, offered under international law and treaties the U.S. has been party to for decades.
Immigrants from all corners of the globe — Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas — sat or stood where they could while they waited for the 8:30 a.m. mass hearing to begin. Another reporter spoke with the head of the court observers to glean what details he could about the process.
I played a version of musical chairs, finding the rare empty seat next to a group, introducing myself, and asking if they would be willing to share their stories. More often than not, I was waved away by one of the handful of lawyers present, told no by a friend or family member, or was simply faced with a stoic stare, a furrowed brow, or a painful sob that told me they were too worried about the next half-hour of their future to explain to a stranger the events that had brought them there.
Statistically, these asylum seekers were almost guaranteed to see their cases fail. The asylum grant rate at Fort Snelling has fallen to less than 2% during the second Trump administration — down from more than 10% in 2024, the final full year of the Biden administration, and from over 28% in the final full year of the first Trump administration. For some of the countries that make up the largest share of cases at the court, such as Ecuador, the grant rate is now close to zero.
Related: Immigrants fleeing gang violence see door to asylum closing at Fort Snelling immigration court
These impending denials are not anomalies. They are the result of what immigration lawyers and legal scholars describe as a deliberate, multi-pronged tightening of the asylum system.
That day in court, I met Sofia, an Indigenous Ecuadorian national who has lived in the United States for three years and was scheduled to have her initial asylum hearing next year. I am not using her real name, to protect her from the people she says she fled. “I came here for a better life and to have the American dream,” she said.
Then, in late May, a letter from immigration authorities told her that the hearing — where a judge could decide to send her back to Ecuador, a place she feared persecution by the government and by gangs, or to a so-called “safe third country” — would happen the following week.
This gave her scant time to do what needed doing. She scrambled to find a friend to drive her into the Twin Cities from South Dakota. That friend had to take off work and arrange childcare for the multi-day trip. They had to find lodging and try to line up a lawyer in time.
After spending the previous night at a hotel near the airport, she sat, visibly exhausted, among dozens of immigrants, along with a handful of young children, lawyers and observers, in the crowded waiting room.
Asked to describe what she wanted from this hearing, she answered simply: “I hope that everything goes well.”
Shortly after 8:30, a clerk asked the group to line up and walk, single file, into Judge Monte Miller’s court.
The group was smaller than a few days earlier, when 73 immigrants were ordered to appear simultaneously in a “mega masters” hearing, but the court was still packed to capacity, leaving several observers waiting outside.
To Sofia, the size of the dockets was not incidental. The large, crowded hearings, she said, “are meant to scare people.” Some of her friends have been afraid to show up for their own hearings, she added, “because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
The Executive Office of Immigration Review, which houses the Board of Immigration Appeals, disputes that characterization. Such large dockets are routine, the agency said; each case is still heard separately and afforded due process, and all immigration courts are prepared to hold larger ones as needed. At a master calendar hearing, the agency said, the judge explains the immigrant’s rights and the charges against them, takes any plea, and — if the person is found removable and wants to seek protection — schedules a separate merits hearing where both sides can present evidence.
Few final decisions were made at that characteristically large hearing of about two dozen immigrants. But the data shows that by the time they reach the end of their proceedings, the overwhelming majority of those seeking asylum will have been denied safe harbor in the United States. Most will be ordered deported — back to their country of origin, or to one of a growing number of countries the U.S. has struck agreements with to take in asylum seekers, some with limited immigration infrastructure and inconsistent human rights records.
Between the procedural changes at the court itself, the closing of certain hearings to observers, the increase in out-of-state judges hearing cases, the shock-and-awe campaign of Operation Metro Surge and Minnesotans’ response to it, the detentions of immigrants and protestors, and watching the data consistently show a dropoff in asylum grant rates at Fort Snelling, it has been an incredible time to observe and report on what is happening to our fast-changing immigration system.
Read Shadi Bushra’s immigration court coverage:
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