Trump Admin Makes Misleading Case in High Stakes Asylum Hearing

(UNITED STATES) The Trump administration’s push to shut down asylum at the southern border ran into a wall in federal court in 2025, as judges and advocates challenged what they called misleading claims, legal overreach, and directives that cut off due process for thousands of people. A central dispute focused on a proclamation issued under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act that cited an “Invasion” at the border to bar access to asylum—an assertion a federal court rejected as unlawful and “blatantly xenophobic,” according to those involved in the case. The ruling reverberated across immigration courts and shelters, where lawyers said people fleeing danger were being blocked from the basic right to ask for protection.

The administration’s reliance on 212(f), a presidential authority to suspend the entry of certain noncitizens, collided with the longstanding statutory framework Congress designed for asylum claims. In filings and public statements, advocates said the White House attempted to supersede those protections by invoking emergency powers and then instructing immigration judges to fast-track cases in ways that denied many people a hearing at all. The outcome, they said, was chaos at ports of entry, in detention centers, and in courtrooms, along with abrupt cuts to services for refugees who had already arrived and were trying to start their lives in the United States.

“The Trump administration’s invocation of a 212(f) proclamation to block all access to asylum is blatantly xenophobic. Both U.S. and international law are clear — people have the right to seek protection at the border. We are grateful that the court has recognized this right and demand that the Trump administration comply and restart processing at the border immediately,” said Laura St. John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project.

Her statement captured the crux of the legal fight: whether the presidency can use a 212(f) proclamation to nullify the asylum statute that Congress has kept in place for decades. For context on the law the administration cited, the text of Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act outlines presidential authority to suspend the entry of noncitizens when deemed detrimental to U.S. interests.

Advocates at national legal organizations said the government had sidestepped Congress by casting the rise in border encounters as an “Invasion,” then declaring vast categories of people ineligible to even seek asylum. They argued this move left “no avenue open for people to seek asylum,” cutting off the process at its starting point.

“The government cannot wield racist, baseless claims of an ‘invasion’ to demonize refugees and unilaterally strip them of that right. For over six months, the illegal border proclamation has wrought nothing but suffering and chaos, forcing people fleeing persecution back to peril and leaving others stuck in detention, struggling to navigate a made-up process,” said Edith Sangüeza, senior staff attorney at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS).

At the same time, a 2025 memo to immigration judges instructed them to speed cases by denying hearings that have long served as the fulcrum of asylum decisions. That directive ignited a fresh round of legal and public criticism, as litigators and former officials called it a direct threat to due process.

“This directive has nothing to do with efficiency—it’s about slamming shut the courthouse door on people who have the right to seek asylum and a fair day in court. It’s part of a broader, coordinated effort to erode due process rights and fast-track deportations,” said Shayna Kessler, director at the Vera Institute of Justice.

While those courtroom battles played out in Washington and along the border, a separate case underscored the administration’s shifting claims and the consequences for individuals already in custody. In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, government filings revealed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents lacked a warrant for his arrest, contradicting earlier statements.

“DHS agents who arrested Mahmoud lied to him: they wrote in their arrest report that the agents told him that they had an arrest warrant, but DHS has now admitted in their filing that that was a lie and that there was no warrant at all at the time of the arrest,” said Marc Van Der Hout, Khalil’s attorney.

The admission, advocates said, raised broader doubts about internal standards and the reliability of official records used to justify arrests.

“The government now finally admits what the whole world already saw and knows: that ICE had no warrant to apprehend Mahmoud Khalil. No one should take seriously the government’s patent lie… that somehow Mahmoud was anything other than compliant when ICE agents unlawfully abducted him under cover of darkness,” added Ramzi Kassem, co-Director of CLEAR.

Lawyers tied the case to a pattern they argue has become common in the current enforcement environment: shifting narratives, withheld documents, and procedural shortcuts that leave the person in detention at a severe disadvantage.

On the ground, nonprofit legal service groups described a surge in families turned away or deported rapidly, often to the same places where they had faced threats.

“Every day that the United States fails to uphold its asylum process puts women, children, and families fleeing violence at risk of exploitation and serious harm,” said Jennifer Babaie, director of advocacy and legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

People who might otherwise have been screened for fear of persecution were instead, advocates said, summarily removed or stuck in detention without a path to present their claims.

The pressure on the system widened beyond border enforcement to the refugee resettlement program. On January 24, 2025, resettlement agencies received orders to stop providing services to more than 22,000 newly arrived refugees, cutting off housing placement, medical care, and school enrollment for children. “When the IRC received the stop-work order, we were actively assisting nearly 6,000 clients within their first 90 days of arrival—the most critical period for successful resettlement,” the International Rescue Committee said. Caseworkers described clients sitting in unfurnished apartments with no way to pay rent and no access to doctors for chronic conditions, all within weeks of landing in the country after multi-year vetting and travel arrangements.

The sudden freeze left local communities scrambling. Volunteer networks that typically supplement resettlement agencies found themselves fielding urgent requests for donated mattresses, prescription refills, and interpretation help for parents trying to register children for school. Staff at small nonprofits in cities that had recently welcomed charter flights of refugees reported cutting hours and rationing bus passes. Those operational reverberations echoed the court disputes over the 212(f) proclamation to bar asylum, underscoring how decisions in Washington can ripple quickly through classroom rosters, clinic waiting rooms, and crowded living rooms where new arrivals gather to share food and news of their cases.

As legal filings mounted, advocacy groups also flagged selective exceptions they said laid bare discrimination in the administration’s choices about who gets help and who is pushed aside.

“Barely three months later, 49 such people deplaned for new lives in the United States… Some refugees’ claims of racial persecution were reportedly based on loss of property, even though economic harm is not generally considered sufficient to demonstrate persecution.”

The account described Afrikaners—white South Africans—being admitted with minimal vetting while other groups were barred. Lawyers contrasted that with the administration’s blanket claims of an “Invasion” to justify sweeping restrictions on asylum for people at the southern border.

For families with pending cases, the mix of policy proclamations, emergency memos, and service shutdowns created a maze of uncertainty. Parents had to decide whether to keep children enrolled in school without access to transportation stipends. People awaiting medical screenings were told to find clinics on their own. Those with upcoming court dates struggled to find legal help as organizations retooled programs to address what they called “made-up process” steps not grounded in law. The combined effect, immigrant advocates said, was to deter people from asserting their asylum rights and to push rapid deportations before individuals could gather evidence or find counsel.

Inside immigration courts, the fallout from the 2025 directive to fast-track cases appeared quickly in hearing calendars and rulings. Judges facing heavier dockets and tighter timelines were asked to deny hearings to large categories of asylum seekers, a break from long-standing practice that relies on sworn testimony and cross-examination to assess fear claims. Defense attorneys said the shift made it far harder to prove a case, especially for people who had been recently deported or shuffled among detention facilities and lacked stable contact with their lawyers. The government’s assertion that these steps were necessary to manage the border clashed with the court’s rejection of the 212(f) blanket bar and with Congress’s design, which sets specific steps to screen and process protection claims.

The court decision rejecting the 212(f) asylum shutdown also gave advocates leverage to seek compliance at ports of entry, where, they said, officers had told asylum seekers to leave or wait for appointments that never materialized. In written statements and at press briefings, lawyers pushed the administration to “restart processing at the border immediately,” citing the judge’s order and the governing asylum statute. Travel patterns adjusted in real time as word spread through WhatsApp chats and shelter networks about which bridges or crossings were actually taking people to make protection requests and which were still turning them away.

Within detention centers, people caught up in the January memo saw their files marked for rapid decisions. Some families recounted late-night moves that made it impossible for lawyers to find them in time for scheduled interviews or filings. In the Khalil case, the government’s admission that ICE had no warrant sharpened concerns about how agents were executing arrests and documenting them. The broader question—whether federal agencies are following the rules set by Congress and the courts, rather than inventing new ones—anchored the public debate, even as the administration continued to frame rising border encounters as an “Invasion” requiring emergency action.

Advocacy groups warned that the consequences of shutting off asylum at the front door can be both swift and lasting. People turned away to dangerous border towns have been assaulted, kidnapped, or extorted as they wait. Those deported in days or weeks often lose contact with attorneys and have little chance of reopening cases. Refugees inside the United States who lost services after January 24, 2025 risked homelessness or untreated illness, problems that can delay language classes and job placement by months. The gap between an emergency proclamation under 212(f) and the everyday needs of newcomers—rent money, doctor visits, school buses—was laid bare in postcards pinned to community center bulletin boards and in spreadsheets tracking missed medical appointments.

As the legal fights continue, lawyers and service providers said they are focused on enforcing court orders that uphold the right to seek asylum and on rebuilding the support network that helps newcomers stabilize quickly. They pointed to concrete benchmarks: resuming intake at ports of entry; restoring case management for the more than 22,000 refugees left in limbo; and ensuring that immigration judges can hold hearings rather than being bound by a 2025 memo designed to deny them. In their telling, the law is not ambiguous: Congress created an asylum process, courts have reaffirmed it, and a 212(f) proclamation cannot erase it.

For people still on the move, the stakes are immediate. Families making their way north from Central America or across the Atlantic weigh rumors of policy changes against what they hear from relatives and shelters about who is being let through and who is not. The administration’s language about an “Invasion” has filtered through migrant networks and local communities alike, often obscuring the basic fact that asylum is a legal process available to those with credible fear of persecution. Lawyers and judges now face the task of translating recent rulings into day-to-day practice, a test that will determine whether the law on the books—rather than a shifting set of proclamations and memos—guides how the United States handles people who arrive seeking protection.