{"id":461622,"date":"2026-02-11T06:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T06:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/461622\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T06:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T06:13:08","slug":"on-seeking-asylum-and-refuge-in-a-hostile-trumpian-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/461622\/","title":{"rendered":"On Seeking Asylum and Refuge in a Hostile Trumpian United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

( Tomdispatch.com <\/a>) \u2013 Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, \u201cPunto y Raya<\/a>\u201d \u2014 \u201cThe Dot and the Dash\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cEntre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,
la raya dice no hay paso el punto v\u00eda cerrada\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween your people and mine,\u201d says the song, \u201cthere\u2019s a dot and a dash. The dash says, \u2018No entrance,\u2019 and the dot, \u2018The road is closed.\u2019\u201d Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.<\/p>\n

\u201cPorque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadas
para que mi hambre y la tuya est\u00e9n siempre separadas.\u201d<\/p>\n

And she adds, \u201cBecause those things aren\u2019t real, they were created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two Immigration Stories<\/p>\n

Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported<\/a> that the \u201cUnited States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.\u201d Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump\u2019s vicious and deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5 million-person net decline in immigration.<\/p>\n

Much more significant were the barriers to entry created under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the man Steve Bannon has labelled the president\u2019s \u201cprime minister.\u201d Those include the effective closing of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also made legal entry to the U.S. much more difficult in a variety of ways, including:<\/p>\n

Instituting a $100,000 fee<\/a> to be paid by employers seeking to hire professional workers under an H1-B visa;
\nErecting barriers to foreign students<\/a>, leading to a 17% drop in new ones enrolling in American universities;
\nFully or partially restricting entry<\/a> by the citizens (including refugees) of 19 nations: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen (full restrictions) and Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela (partial restrictions);
\nPausing all asylum applications<\/a> by citizens of any nation in the world, leaving a backlog of 1.4 million cases;
\nCapping all refugee admissions<\/a> at 7,500 per year, a reduction of 94%<\/a> from previous limits (with the exception, of course, of white South African farmers<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Why does it matter that the U.S. population is growing more slowly while also aging? As the Times points out, this country \u201cneeds a large enough population of young workers and taxpayers to finance care for the nation\u2019s older residents, whose numbers are swelling as the Baby Boom generation retires.\u201d As any good Marxist will tell you, labor creates all wealth. In other words, a nation\u2019s wealth (including that of its millionaires and billionaires) represents the accumulated value of work done by actual human beings. And that means an economy lacking enough workers will not be able to satisfy the grow-or-die logic of capitalism. Nor, if a reduction of the workforce is concentrated in jobs traditionally performed by immigrants, will that economy be able to feed its people. In other words, the stubbornly high price of groceries is not unconnected to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror campaign around the country.<\/p>\n

Immigration reductions are part of the story of slowing population growth, but there\u2019s another piece of the puzzle. During the Great Recession that began with a mortgage meltdown in 2008, Americans began having fewer children. In my world of higher education, we\u2019ve known about this precipitous drop for a while. It\u2019s been described as a \u201cdemographic cliff\u201d that would become a (predictable) emergency for college enrollment 18-20 years later \u2014 that is, now. The entire higher education sector, which has grown steadily since the institution of the GI Bill at the end of World War II, now faces layoffs, retrenchment, and the closing of institutions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What of the second story I read this morning? It concerned Spain, a country taking an entirely different approach to immigration. I\u2019ve been lucky enough to spend time in Spain, meeting there, in addition, of course, to Spaniards, farmworkers from Mali and other parts of francophone Africa, and Central American waiters and taxi drivers, who could use their native language in a new land. (I wonder if they sound to the Spanish much the way I do \u2014 like a hick from the faraway sticks.)<\/p>\n

Like that of the United States, Spain\u2019s population is aging, but its response is the opposite of the Trump administration\u2019s. Our president and his minions have made it clear in word and deed not just that they want almost no new immigrants, but also which few they would consider accepting. \u201cWhy is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?\u201d the president asked<\/a> last December. \u201cWhy can\u2019t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let\u2019s have a few from Denmark,\u201d he added. (Of course, that was before his spat with that country over his urge to take possession of Greenland.)<\/p>\n

Unlike Trump\u2019s crew, the Spanish government has issued a decree<\/a> permitting undocumented migrants already in the country to apply for temporary residency, with permission to work legally there. Recognizing their contributions to fueling the major engines of the Spanish economy \u2014 agriculture, tourism, and construction \u2014 Spain has bucked a European and American tide of anti-migrant sentiment, the very one Trump sought to stoke with his remarks<\/a> at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. Because of mass migration, he opined, \u201ccertain places in Europe are not even recognizable.\u201d Critics of Spain\u2019s new policy on the left argue that the country has been less welcoming to African migrants, but the socialist government of President Pedro S\u00e1nchez denies this (at least publicly).<\/p>\n

Homesickness<\/p>\n

All of this has left me thinking about the sacrifices people make when they choose, or are forced, to find a new home nation. Those of us in the U.S., even many who support immigrants, documented and otherwise, can fall into a trap of believing that, given the choice, everyone would rather live here. But it\u2019s not that simple.<\/p>\n

I spent some time in the Nicaraguan war zone in the mid-1980s. In spite of everything I loved<\/a> about the early days of that country\u2019s revolution, and how angry I became at the campaign of sabotage and torture my country unleashed to support the anti-government \u201ccontras,\u201d there were days when I ached for the familiarity of home. The Greek roots of the word nostalgia refer to the literal pain of not being in one\u2019s home, which describes just what I felt. I missed the everyday ease of knowing how to act without giving offense. I missed automatically understanding what was happening around me as well as, in a war zone, being able to distinguish the difference between people\u2019s ordinary behavior and preparing for a possible attack. Most of all, I missed the feel of my native tongue in my mouth and its sound in my ears.<\/p>\n

I knew that I would be going home in a few months, which set a limit to my homesickness. But I remember wondering then what it would be like to be a refugee, to know I\u2019d never truly be home again. I thought about my friend Tiana, a Brazilian emigre with many years in the U.S., who used to talk about how she ached to hear Brazilian Portuguese. \u201cEverything we say sounds so much more affectionate in Portuguese,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe don\u2019t just ask someone to pass \u2018the butter\u2019; we call it \u2018the little butter,\u2019 like a pet name.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

My grandfather must have felt that same nostalgic ache. The story my father told me was this: In 1910, after the Cossacks came to my grandfather\u2019s village in what is now Ukraine and killed his youngest brother, the family hid him under the hay in a horse-drawn wooden wagon and had him driven out of town. He then made his way across Europe to Antwerp in Belgium, where he boarded a ship for New York City with nothing more than the name and address of a distant cousin in Norfolk, Virginia, who\u2019d paid for his passage. He was just 18. He would then work for that cousin, almost like an indentured servant, until he eventually saved up enough money to bring the rest of his family to this country. I found evidence to support this tale when I visited the Ellis Island website and found his name and the cousin\u2019s address in Norfolk listed in the manifest of the ship he took from Antwerp.<\/p>\n

Cruelty Is the Point (of the Spear)<\/p>\n

All of this is on my mind a lot these days, because most weeks I spend some time accompanying people to immigration court hearings or to their appointments with ICE. Each time I do so, I\u2019m struck by the courage it takes to leave your familiar home, however dangerous it may have become, carrying that ache of nostalgia with you, maybe for the rest of your life. Last week, I waited outside an imposing building in downtown San Francisco, while a woman I\u2019ll call Celia entered for an ICE check-in. The last time she\u2019d done that, in October 2025, she hadn\u2019t come out. Instead, she was sent to one of California\u2019s privately-run ICE centers, the California City Detention Facility (CCDF), where she was imprisoned for the next two months.<\/p>\n

California Senator Alex Padilla visited that detention center<\/a> recently. Having been to many jails and prisons over the years, he reported that, among other things, he expected complaints about issues like the quality of the food. \u201cBut I was shocked,\u201d he said, \u201cat the amount and intensity of the complaints about lack of medical care. Like, even in prisons, even under conditions of war, there [are] basic standards that we are supposed to hold and maintain. That is not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

A New Yorker story<\/a> by Oren Peleg about the CCDF supports Padilla\u2019s claims. Detainees with gastric ulcers, prostate cancer, bloody urine, heart failure, and other serious medical problems told Peleg that they couldn\u2019t get the medications or treatment they needed. It seems that CoreCivic, the company that runs CCDF, may be withholding medical treatment to encourage people to leave the country \u201cvoluntarily.\u201d That may help explain why eight medical positions, including those of a physician and a psychiatrist, have gone unfilled for months. As Peleg writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut staffing issues do not fully explain the lack of basic medical care at California City. \u2018They do it so you give up,\u2019 Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was a detainee at California City from September to November, told me. When he arrived at C.C.D.F., Santos Avalos recalls a consistent push by staff for detainees to sign away their rights and self-deport. Instructions for how to self-deport are displayed prominently near phones where detainees communicate with their lawyers. Santos Avalos and many of the detainees and attorneys I spoke to believe the lack of medical care is part of that push.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peleg concludes that the \u201cdetention center is aiming to make conditions so terrible that detainees stop fighting and decide to leave.\u201d The case of Santos Avalos is particularly searing. He lives with \u201cchronic pain owing to a foot deformity caused by childhood cases of polio and Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome,\u201d but he was denied pain medication and forced to sleep in a top bunk at the detention center. He eventually chose to return to El Salvador, a country he\u2019d left at the age of seven. As is true for many immigrants who came here as children, the home he now aches for is one in the United States.<\/p>\n

Imagine the courage it took for Celia to smile, give herself a shake, and walk through those doors, knowing that she could very well end up back at CCDF. That day, however, we were lucky. After about 30 minutes, she emerged through the large bronze doors free \u2014 at least until her next appointment in a few months (and assuming there\u2019s no Bay Area ICE surge in the meantime). I say \u201cwe\u201d were lucky, because, while my fears are minor compared to hers and those of other immigrants like her, I\u2019m always afraid that someone I\u2019m accompanying will be taken away, leaving me angry and helpless.<\/p>\n

Seeking Refuge<\/p>\n

Like nostalgia, the word asylum has Greek roots. It suggests being free from someone else\u2019s right of seizure, and so, by extension, \u201crefuge.\u201d When people come to this country seeking asylum, they are looking for refuge from horrors of all kinds: political oppression, familial or institutional violence, war, torture, you name it. An asylum is, by definition, a refuge, a safe place. That\u2019s why institutions for people with mental illness used to be called \u201cinsane asylums.\u201d (It\u2019s been suggested<\/a> that Donald Trump confuses the legal concept of seeking asylum with the term insane asylum, which is why he thinks that other countries are sending their mental patients here.)<\/p>\n

An asylum should be a safe place, even if it may never feel like home. But in the first year of Trump\u2019s second term as president, it\u2019s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place. Increasingly, as those two recent ICE murders<\/a> in Minneapolis have shown, it\u2019s not even a safe place for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

In his poem \u201cThe Death of the Hired Man,\u201d Robert Frost wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cHome is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what asylum is supposed to be in international law: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.<\/p>\n

In these dark and frightening days, I often find a short sentence bubbling to the top of my mind: \u201cI just want to go home.\u201d I\u2019m not quite sure what it means, but I think that, like so many people in Donald Trump\u2019s America, I\u2019m looking for a place that doesn\u2019t yet exist, a refuge we will have to build with our own hands.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 Rebecca Gordon<\/p>\n

Via Tomdispatch.com <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"( Tomdispatch.com ) \u2013 Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461623,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,12,790,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-461622","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-immigration","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-united-states-of-america","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","16":"tag-us","17":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}