Alongside dozens of other immigrants, Sofia, an immigrant from Ecuador, anxiously waited for her initial asylum hearing at Fort Snelling immigration court earlier this month.
Sofia, which is not her real name, vacillated between optimism that she would be granted the opportunity “for a better life and to have the American dream,” and fear that these could be the last moments of that dream if her case was denied and she was detained.
Though she was not detained at the hearing, the data shows that she has almost no chance of winning her asylum case, which rests on a fear of gang violence and persecution because of her Indigenous heritage.
Asylum seekers fleeing gang violence make up a growing share of cases at Fort Snelling. Almost none are successful, largely due to legal precedents set at the region’s federal appeals court in past years.
While immigration case law was already unfavorable to most asylum applicants, it has been further constricted in the past 18 months by Justice Department decisions and administrative changes. The result is that the door to lawful permanent status for many immigrants appears to be closing fast, with asylum approval rates at Fort Snelling dropping from over 10% in 2024, to less than 2% in President Donald Trump’s second term.
How Trump has reshaped federal immigration courts
Immigration courts are part of the executive branch, not the judiciary. They answer to the U.S. Justice Department – as do the government lawyers arguing for deportation, and the board that considers appeals.
“All immigration judges and Board of Immigration Appeals judges are employees of the Department of Justice, and their ultimate boss is the attorney general,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who leads its Immigration and Human Rights Clinic.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, the Justice Department has overhauled the courts to align with the administration’s agenda – firing Biden-era judges and shrinking the panel that considers appeals, which experts say are now routinely dismissed within 15 days unless a majority of board members votes to review it.
The Justice Department casts the changes as corrections. “The Biden Administration allowed millions of unvetted migrants into our communities,” a DOJ spokesperson said, and reducing the court backlog “remains one of the highest priorities for this administration.”
The regional immigration court at Fort Snelling was already among the most challenging venues for asylum seekers, putting applicants at a significant disadvantage compared with those in other jurisdictions.
Related: Asylum approvals plummet at Fort Snelling immigration court as case numbers soar
The tough odds faced by asylum seekers at Fort Snelling are largely due to legal precedents set by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal court that hears appeals from Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. It’s one of the nation’s most conservative appeals courts, with 10 of its 11 justices appointed by Republican presidents.
Attorney Sara Glesne pointed to the precedent-setting 8th Circuit case Gomez Rivera v. Sessions, which established that opposition to gangs or criminal enterprises does not amount to a “political opinion” – which would otherwise be grounds for asylum. That makes entire categories of applicants who claim a fear of gang violence ineligible for asylum, which has especially affected people from Latin America.
“The odds are not in your favor here,” said attorney Steven Thaal, who advises clients to avoid the Fort Snelling court if possible, even if it ends up costing more to fight a case in another state.
Gloria Contreras Edin, an immigration and criminal defense lawyer in the Twin Cities, sees the 8th Circuit less as “conservative” and more as “vanilla in its approach,” meaning it frequently declines to take positions on complex immigration questions. That passivity, she said, leaves few clear lines in the sand and effectively allows restrictive lower-court rulings to stand unchecked.
For Sofia, the challenge was clear within the first minutes of her recent hearing. She alleged discrimination and threats from the government and from gangs because of her Indigenous status.
After paging through her application, Judge Monte Miller was polite but straightforward: given the jurisdiction’s precedents, her case had little chance. A government lawyer urged him to deny it without moving to a full hearing.
“This does not seem to be a viable claim,” Miller said. “This discrimination, under the law in the 8th Circuit, is not persecution.”
Asylum seekers have less opportunity to make, or appeal cases
One of the most consequential changes under President Donald Trump has been a September 2025 decision that if a judge reviews an initial application and concludes it would fail even when viewed in the most favorable light, the judge can deny it without ever holding a full evidentiary hearing.
During Sofia’s brief hearing, Judge Miller noted as he weighed whether to decide or schedule another hearing: “There are 3.5 million other cases waiting to be heard.”
Her lawyer, appearing by video, acknowledged that she had been brought onto the case only the previous day and had not had time to review the materials.
Observers worry about what is being lost amid the zeal to clear out the backlog.
“Even if someone is going to be rejected, they should have the opportunity to try to prove their case,” said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “But in this case that is bypassed for the sake of efficiency.”
The Justice Department frames that speed as a feature, not a flaw. The Executive Office of Immigration Review, which houses the immigration appeals board, “prioritizes the timely completion of all cases,” an agency spokesperson said, and “unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible.” As it adds immigration judges, the spokesperson said, the agency will keep adjusting schedules to handle cases “in a timely and lawful manner.”
Related: Fort Snelling joins nationwide trend of holding ‘mega master’ immigration hearings, raising due process concerns
Asylum seekers can appeal immigration court decisions to a federal Board of Immigration Appeals, but the odds of success there, too, have been significantly restrained by the Trump administration, experts say.
Kim Boche, a lawyer with Advocates for Human Rights, says the Justice Department under President Donald Trump has reversed decades of precedent on asylum specifically around “how courts assess fear of harm from nongovernment actors,” what counts as sufficient proof that a person’s home government cannot protect them, and how recent and individualized the risk must be.
For example, domestic violence survivors now must prove their home government is “unable or unwilling” to protect them from private abusers – not merely that it failed to in a given instance. And threats against one’s family, as opposed to persecution based on race, religion, or political views, are no longer grounds for asylum.
Especially troubling to some court watchers was a series of decisions making it harder to win protection under a landmark 1984 international treaty that prohibits sending individuals back to countries where they are likely to be tortured.
Immigration appeals board decisions set precedent for immigration courts nationwide – unless a decision is challenged and overturned in a circuit court, in which case the appellate ruling governs within that circuit.
Growing threat of detention and deportation raises stakes
The odds have never been lower, and the stakes have never been higher, as immigration courts now detain many applicants during their proceedings and sometimes deport them to third countries.
In a September 2025 decision, the immigration appeals board stripped immigration judges of the ability to grant bond to many immigrants who crossed the border without authorization.
“The administration reinterpreted the law on their own,” said Ryan Wood, a former military JAG officer and ICE prosecutor who was the assistant chief immigration judge in charge of the Fort Snelling court until early last year.
That reinterpretation has swelled the population at detention centers. Wood said the system was designed so that about 95% of immigrants could remain free while only 5% were detained. Those numbers, he said, have been flipped on their head – with only a handful able to get bond hearings at all and the rest funneled into detention.
Wood is also sharply critical of the government’s decision to detain people who have pending asylum applications, which he called “bananas crazy.”
More broadly, the former judge laments the “cruelty of the process,” which he said has poured money into enforcement without comparable funding to ensure detention facilities meet basic standards. He cited Minnesotans detained in Texas who were released without their phones, money or identification.
Related: As immigration courts narrow legal pathways, ‘refugee roulette’ still favors Russian asylum seekers
The administration has also moved to send people with credible fears of returning home to third countries, often without significant vetting of those countries’ ability to absorb migrants and process their claims.
Beginning in 2025, the U.S. dramatically expanded its use of third-country agreements to dismiss asylum cases and deport migrants. The network now spans more than 30 countries.
Historically, the U.S. held just one such deal: the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement with Canada. The current administration has gone much further – adding partners such as Ecuador, Paraguay and Belize, and expanding into Africa and Eastern Europe.
The administration frames the strategy as both burden-sharing and enforcement. Critics see it differently. Savi Arvey of Human Rights First describes the approach bluntly, as a way of “externalizing the USA’s international legal obligations to another country.”
Many of the 2025-2026 agreements were never published as treaties. Instead, they were struck through diplomatic notes or verbal accords – meaning their exact terms, and the due process protections they guarantee, or don’t, are largely shielded from public view.
Ariel Ruiz Soto of the Migration Policy Institute said developing nations agree to these deals mainly under duress, citing “U.S. pressure either via sanctions or economic tariffs or threats to reduce visa availability.”
The deportations themselves, he argued, may not even be the primary goal. The real objective, he said, is “less about using them for scaling up migration deportations and more about trying to scare migrants to either abandon their asylum application or to voluntarily deport.”
‘Surgical’ use of administrative authority
For all the litigation, the administration has been remarkably successful in reshaping immigration policy without any change in the law from Congress.
“It’s very surgical, how they are using all of the executive and administrative authority that they have to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants and for lawyers,” Pottratz Acosta said.
Some lawyers now urge clients to omit any reference to gangs or non-state actors, and instead describe the individuals threatening their lives without revealing ties to a specific criminal group.
“If you identify any gang or any criminal syndicate, that tends to disadvantage you in court,” Glesne said.
With the asylum system increasingly impossible to navigate, the weight of the administration’s enforcement push is being felt far beyond the people who stand before a judge.
Adam Jarvis, director of refugee services for Catholic Charities of Southern Minnesota, said the fear now reaches refugees who are not in removal proceedings at all. Many of the people his organization works with have lost their jobs, he said, because they are too afraid to leave home.
That anxiety has set in as the system built to help them has come apart. After the federal government withheld millions in Congressionally-mandated refugee resettlement funds last year, Catholic Charities’ national organization entered into expensive litigation against the administration. The group eventually settled, accepting that the federal resettlement structure that they and other organizations relied on had been dismantled. The organization has since shifted to state grants to keep its wraparound services running.
Jarvis worries the damage runs deeper than most people assume.
“I think a lot of people have this idea that it’s just on pause, and all we have to do is hit play and it’ll start working again,” he said. “But all of the different policies that have been in place for years effectively don’t exist today.”
For those still fighting to stay, asylum was never the only door.
Temporary Protected Status is another, though the administration has moved to strip TPS from immigrants from Somalia, in the throes of a 35-year civil war, and Haiti, where gangs control much of the country. Both rollbacks are under court review.
A stay of deportation offers another avenue. It grants no long-term status, but it lets a person remain in the country legally while they pursue other forms of relief if conditions back home are dangerous – the kind of reprieve that might apply to someone from the Congo, amid an Ebola outbreak the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency in May.
That tool, too, experts said, is being used less and less.
For Sofia, the fight is not over – but it did not end the day I watched her walk into Judge Miller’s courtroom. Rather than pretermit her case, the judge granted a 30-day continuance so the lawyer who had joined only the day before could prepare. She left the Whipple building still free, and still allowed to stay in the country.
I caught up with her outside and asked how she felt.
“I feel good,” she said, relieved that she would not be deported or detained that day. “I’m just happy I don’t have to leave the country today. For now, I am happy.”
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