The Asylum Process: Navigating Immigration & Asylum

Are you curious about how asylum works in the United States? There are 2 primary processes in the path of asylum. Discover the difference between the two as Lead Attorney Deron Smallcomb breaks it down for us.
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What is that process like if you think they have legal grounds for it? How does it start? What's the process like? It's a really good question. There's two processes. One of them is called ‘affirmative asylum’. That is, if you have a visa, say a visitor visa. Well, let's say you're a student. You came here from a country that's been upended. You've been here for four years
and you can't go back because you've been here. You've been talking about the politics in your country. You’ve been posting on TH-cam or Facebook or whatever it may be and now there's a penalty for that going home. That person's going to say, I'm going to apply for asylum with USCIS, with Immigration Services.’ And it's a little bit more straightforward process, so they're going to apply. Now, if they win, that's it. They get asylum, they're on the process. They're on the path long term for green card, citizenship, everything. If they get declined, then they're referred to the courts. The courts is where most people have their asylum process. So the examples we've used so far where somebody flies into Mexico, for example in the Cancun and then comes to the US border asking for asylum, that is a court process. So they're what they call ‘defensive asylum.’ They didn't have any permission to be here, but they came anyway to the border and said, ‘please help me if you send me home, I'm going to die or go to prison.’ So there, they're going to start off with what they call a credible fear interview. So first the officers are going to say, ‘Who are you? Why are you here? ‘Okay, I'm John. I'm from this country. I'm here to claim asylum.’ Okay, wait here. Now hours or days later, they're going to have an officer that's going to ask them questions about your case, specific questions - ‘Why are you afraid to go home? What happened? Tell me everything.’ And it'll be like a three hour interview. If they pass that credible fear interview, then they may have a court hearing. All local? Depends where they're going to end up. So this is where it gets really complicated, Scott. Because some people get detained, some people don't. So if you're detained - if you're a single man coming to the border asking for asylum, you're probably going to get detained. So they're going to send you to whatever facility in the country has capacity. Right now, it happens to be a lot of Louisiana. Sometimes it's Colorado, sometimes it's Washington, sometimes it's California. It's all over the place. You just never know. So when you're there, you're in their court system while you're detained. And those are tougher cases. We try really hard to get people out. Once we get them out and let's say they live in New York, their cases are transferred to New York. So it's local for them. Now let's say a single woman shows up with two small kids. She's not getting detained, its not going to happen. They're going to let her out as quickly, as humanely possible.