Mark Betancourt, The California Newsroom
May 27
A view of the CoreCivic Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California, on Feb. 7, 2025. The private institution has been plagued by allegations of medical negligence, abusive and retaliatory behavior against immigrants, sexual harassment, poor food and water quality and other dangerous conditions. (Carlos Moreno/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Abeba’s story is summarized only briefly in the document that seals her impending deportation: After she inadvertently witnessed an extrajudicial killing by members of the Ethiopian military, she was imprisoned and beaten for more than a week.
But that was only the beginning. Abeba — who asked to be called by a pseudonym due to safety concerns for herself and her family — fled Ethiopia and made her way to Mexico. She was planning to ask for protection in the United States. But by the time she made it to the banks of the Rio Grande, her options had narrowed.
President Donald Trump, on the day he was inaugurated for the second time, had declared that anyone trying to cross the southern border without prior authorization was part of an “invasion.” The order suspended their right to apply for asylum at the border. So Abeba swam across the river to Texas, where she sought out Border Patrol agents to ask for help.
She didn’t know it, but there was still a way to avoid being sent home — a narrow form of protection, called the United Nations Convention Against Torture, that applies to people whose governments could torture them or allow them to be tortured. CAT is harder to qualify for than asylum and doesn’t come with the same benefits, like a path to citizenship and the possibility of bringing her family to the U.S. as well. It would, however, stop her from being deported to Ethiopia.
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But under the president’s order, nearly all of Abeba’s rights as a CAT applicant — such as the right to bring a lawyer to interviews with asylum officers and to appeal denials — had been quietly and deliberately erased, and what remains of the process now takes place under a veil of secrecy. That’s according to federal guidance cited in a class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, a new report by two prominent human rights organizations, and independent reporting by the California Newsroom, including nearly a dozen interviews with immigration attorneys and immigrants’ rights advocates around the country, as well as a former asylum officer.
The Department of Homeland Security has declined to answer the California Newsroom’s questions about Abeba’s case or how the asylum system — in particular the process of applying for protection under the Convention Against Torture — is currently working.
But the changes in practice appear to mean that, for thousands of people fleeing or trying to avoid torture by their own governments, the process of applying for humanitarian protection in the U.S. provides little more than false hope. And its dismantling has been so well hidden that immigration attorneys are only just now starting to catch on.
Ginger Jacobs, a senior partner at the San Diego firm that represents Abeba, worries that many people who have legitimate claims to humanitarian protection could end up casualties of the Trump administration’s zeal to effect mass deportations.
“The danger is that it’s another way to disappear people,” she said.
‘There’s nothing you can do’
Before they can go before an immigration judge to formally plead their cases, applicants for CAT protection must first convince an asylum officer with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that their fear of torture is credible. For her interview on April 27th, Abeba spoke with the officer by phone. She sat alone in a tiny booth in the Otay Mesa Detention Center, a massive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility outside San Diego, where she has been detained since early April.
Afterward, Abeba was handed the two-page document containing the short summary of what she’d told the asylum officer. A box on the document had been checked to indicate that her story was credible. But further down, another checked box indicated that Abeba “did not establish it is more likely than not that she will be tortured in Ethiopia.” There was no explanation of the decision.
Before Jan. 20, that determination could only have been made in court by an immigration judge. Now, that single checkmark, made by an official who Abeba never saw, is the final and uncontestable decision that will send her back to the government that she believes will imprison and torture her, or worse.
“Her deportation officer just said, there’s nothing you can do,” said Sydney Johnson, who became Abeba’s attorney after the decision was made, referring to the ICE official in charge of arranging Abeba’s return to Ethiopia. (Johnson requested that her client not be interviewed directly because ICE records detainee phone calls.)
Had Abeba arrived in the U.S. before Trump signed his executive order, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” she would have been given time to find a lawyer before the interview, and been allowed to have the lawyer present on the call. She would have received detailed documentation of how the asylum officer made the decision, and had the right to ask an immigration judge to review and possibly overturn it.
However, new federal guidance for asylum officers, made public by the ACLU lawsuit, clarifies that those rights no longer exist. In addition to claiming that the president’s suspension of asylum is illegal, the ACLU complaint specifies that his order is “depriving noncitizens of a meaningful opportunity to present CAT claims.”
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A report published in early May by researchers with Human Rights First and Refugees International calls screenings for CAT applicants a “sham” that is now being used to fast-track deportations. Some who have asked for humanitarian protection at the U.S.-Mexico border are not even granted interviews like the one Abeba had, according to the report.
Immigration attorneys say that also includes screenings for a form of protection, similar to CAT, called “withholding of removal,” which applies to people who have been threatened or persecuted but are not facing torture. (It’s why the U.S. government was not supposed to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador.)
Both withholding of removal and CAT are enshrined in international law, and are not up for interpretation by U.S. officials, said Jennifer Scarborough, an immigration attorney who focuses on detained clients at the border and around the country. “Withholding is not discretionary,” she said. “The law says that if you meet those requirements, then the government may not deport you.”
If the government isn’t screening people for withholding of removal, Scarborough said, it has no way of knowing whether they meet the requirements.
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped publishing semi-monthly data about screenings, making it difficult to determine how many people have been denied access to protection since the new rules went into effect.
“It’s such a terrifying situation,” said Jennifer Babaie, director of legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas. The organization is a plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit.
A former USCIS asylum officer who routinely conducted screening interviews called the new system “an erosion of due process and these people’s rights.” The person asked not to be named due to fear of reprisal from the current administration.
By removing these checks and balances that protect the rights of immigrants, the former asylum officer said, “the Trump administration is behaving in the same way as those governments we offer protection from.”
‘A farce by design’
The night before her phone screening with the asylum officer, Abeba had been ill. A chronic medical condition had flared up, and that morning, she was groggy and lethargic after ICE doctors increased the dosage of her medication. She had a splitting headache. According to Johnson, her attorney, Abeba said the asylum officer did not ask if she felt up to the screening interview, and Abeba didn’t think she had the option to reschedule.
Abeba told Johnson the interview lasted two hours. Twice, as she told the asylum officer her story — how prison guards had touched her breasts and taunted her as they beat her, how they poured water on her when she urinated on herself — the Amharic interpreter, who had been patched into the call, suddenly dropped off.
After the second time, toward the end of the call, the interpreter didn’t come back. Abeba said she could continue in English as long as the asylum officer spoke slowly. She told Johnson that throughout the entire screening, the officer asked only “yes” or “no” questions. When the officer finally read back a summary, details were missing, but Abeba said she was not allowed to add anything.
According to the current guidance under Trump’s order, “at the end of the interview, the AO [Asylum Officer] must review the summary with the individual and give him or her an opportunity to correct errors.” Officers also have the option to reschedule the interview if needed, including if the applicant doesn’t feel well or is having trouble communicating. In fact, officers were previously required to ask whether an applicant felt well enough to be interviewed, and “should avoid communicating” without an interpreter, according to internal USCIS documents reviewed by the California Newsroom.
Training documents also recommend that asylum officers cross-check applicants’ fear claims with contextual information about the conditions in their countries. While USCIS has declined to provide documentation of the information used to make the decision in Abeba’s case, the California Newsroom spoke with people with knowledge of the current unrest in Ethiopia.
Since 2018, the country has been embroiled in ethnically charged fighting between the government and armed militias, these people explained. A physician based in Addis Ababa, the capital, said detention and torture are commonplace for anyone the government perceives as an enemy.
The California Newsroom has omitted some details of Abeba’s experience and background to protect her and her family.
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Johnson said she thinks her client’s illness, along with the incomplete translation, likely muddied what should have been an open-and-shut CAT case. She asked ICE to refer Abeba back to USCIS for another interview when Abeba felt well enough and proper translation was available. In an email reviewed by the California Newsroom, an ICE officer wrote that Abeba is “not eligible” for a second interview, because she’d already had one.
In other words, the asylum officer’s decision was final, and under the new rules, there was no way to appeal it.
Advocates for immigrants say there are further signs that the screening process is deteriorating as applicants’ attorneys and judges have been sidelined. Natalie Cadwalader-Schultheis, a San Diego-based attorney with Human Rights First, said screenings used to take anywhere from half an hour to four hours. She now has clients who say their interviews lasted as little as five minutes.
According to her organization’s new report, “these torture screenings are a farce by design.”
The report also highlights a trend that alarms human rights watchdogs. Some asylum seekers at the border told the researchers that their requests for humanitarian protection were ignored. “In some instances, officers told [asylum seekers] they were being transported to other facilities where they would have asylum interviews, only to be taken to staging areas for their removal,” the report says.
In one testimonial from the report, a Russian woman refused to board a government flight to Costa Rica, demanding to know why she was being deported. According to the report, officers “falsely stated that there had been a court decision and told her she should just go quietly so as not to traumatize her children, who were crying.”
‘It’s too quiet’
Both ICE and USCIS have refused to give Abeba any further documents related to her interview, according to Johnson. In one email to Johnson, reviewed by the California Newsroom, USCIS implied that either the interview did not happen or that the agency doesn’t have to share the records with detainees’ lawyers. “The whole thing is just this incredibly frustrating cycle where nobody can tell me anything,” Johnson said.
When Abeba asked to see the detailed notes from her interview, which asylum officers are required to take, an ICE officer suggested she file a Freedom of Information Act request, or FOIA.
When told about this suggestion, Scarborough, a veteran immigration attorney, called it “stupid.”
“You know how long it takes to get a FOIA response? Two to three months,” she said. “You know what’s going to happen in two to three months? Your client’s going to be deported.”
The California Newsroom spoke with several immigration attorneys around the country who say they’re being stonewalled in similar ways.
“The CAT application process has been disappeared from us,” Cadwalader-Schultheis said. “It’s happening absolutely in secret, and they don’t want us understanding how it works. If we did, I think it would be very apparent just how illegal and how much of a sham this whole thing is.”
Several of the asylum-focused attorneys the California Newsroom spoke with convene a weekly phone call to compare cases and try to piece together the administration’s new rules amidst a gaping lack of transparency. “We’re all just trying to figure it out in real time,” said Babaie, the Texas legal services director, who participates in the call.
The group seems to be at the bleeding edge of an unfolding situation that even most immigration lawyers have not yet realized, just as even the savviest experts took months to catch on to Trump’s family separation policy in 2018.
Tess Feldman, an immigration attorney who directs Southwestern Law School’s Asylum Law Clinic, said she suspects CAT applicants are being rushed through the screening process, if they get one, then being deported quickly. Because the Trump administration has done away with a “consultation period” that previously allowed applicants to contact an attorney before their screening, she thinks many applicants may not be reaching out to lawyers at all. “It’s just silent,” she said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. In fact, it’s too quiet.”
“In 90 days,” she said, “I think we’ll look back and say, how did we not know this was happening in May?”
‘They’re going to know she’s there’
It’s unclear what high-level immigration officials actually know about recent changes to humanitarian protection. Asked about what is currently happening when detained migrants express fear of returning to their countries, a spokesperson for USCIS provided links to several websites that don’t reflect the new rules, including that judges no longer review screening decisions.
The USCIS did not answer specific questions about the discrepancy, and why public websites that contain outdated information are still online.
In its class-action lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the ACLU argues that the president does not have the power to broadly suspend protections laid out in law by Congress.
If the judge hearing the case rules to suspend the president’s executive order, thousands of asylum seekers could be allowed to stay in the country until they can apply for protection in immigration court. Those like Abeba, who have already failed screenings under the order, would be allowed a do-over. But this time, they could have their lawyers present, and they’d have the right to appeal negative decisions.
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In the meantime, Abeba has told Johnson that other detainees at Otay Mesa have also failed their CAT screenings — and that some have disappeared in the middle of the night. Abeba said she doesn’t know whether they have been moved to other facilities or deported.
ICE officials did not respond to questions from the California Newsroom about when Abeba will be deported. Johnson said ICE told her that Abeba will be sent home as soon as the Ethiopian government provides her passport and a flight can be arranged.
Jacobs, who has been advising Johnson on the case, said that even by requesting Abeba’s travel documents, ICE is putting her in danger. Once she arrives in Ethiopia, Jacobs said, “They’re going to know she’s there. I don’t see how she escapes from just being sent straight back to detention or prison, where she will be tortured again.”
This week, Johnson filed a request for an administrative stay, essentially asking ICE not to deport Abeba until the ACLU lawsuit is resolved, and also requested that she be released from detention so that she can get proper medical care.
According to Johnson, Abeba believes that if she is sent back to her country, Ethiopian officials will kill her. “She told me she would rather die here than return to die in Ethiopia,” Johnson said.
Abeba’s cousin, a U.S. citizen who lives in California, said he knows her as a smart, kind woman who is always easy to talk to. Now, when she calls him from detention, she sounds subdued, nervous and scared. The cousin asked to be referred to only as Negash, his middle name, out of fear that the Ethiopian government would harm him if he were to return.
Negash said he was shocked to learn that Abeba was denied the opportunity to make her case before a judge.
“This is my country,” he said, referring to the United States. “It’s the best country in the world. How are we going to send her to die over there?”
The California Newsroom is a collaboration of public media outlets throughout the state, with NPR as its national partner.
Anna Sussman contributed to this story.