San Diego, May 2025.
A concrete block in the desert. The air smells of bleach and fear. Inside sits a woman in a booth so small that pain seems to pool in it. She speaks into a phone, with no face on the other side. She talks about torture, about threats of rape, about a night she only survived because she stayed silent. The officer on the other end listens. Says little. Checks a box at the end. “Credible.” Then a second. “But not likely that she will be tortured again in Ethiopia.” That settles it.
What sounds like a judicial error is now U.S. policy. And it is merciless. The woman – “the witness,” or Abeba, a pseudonym used because she cannot reveal her name out of fear – was arrested in Ethiopia for witnessing an execution. An extrajudicial killing by soldiers. She was detained, beaten, tortured for a week. Then she fled. Through Mexico, through the filth of the borderlands, to the Rio Grande. At the riverbank, she sought help – but by then, Donald Trump had just begun his second term. And the president had declared that anyone crossing the southern border without prior approval was part of an “invasion.”
From that day on, asylum was de facto abolished. What remained was one last narrow legal lifeline: protection under the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT). But even here, Trump's agencies had quietly rewritten the rules – silently, without notice. Rights were removed, lawyers excluded, appeals made impossible. Instead of a court hearing, a checkmark on a form now decides. Those affected often don’t even know they had a last chance. For many, it’s the final conversation before they disappear.
A checkmark is enough – and you're gone
On April 27, the witness sat alone in the Otay Mesa detention center in California, operated by the private company CoreCivic, notorious for violence, medical neglect, and filthy water. The hearing was conducted by phone. The interpreter cut out twice, the second time she never returned. The woman asked to continue in simple English. The officer asked only yes-or-no questions. When he summarized the conversation at the end, key details were missing. No corrections were allowed. Then she received the document: Credible, but not credible enough. No right to appeal. No new hearing. No judge, no transparency, no accountability.
“Her deportation officer just said: There’s nothing you can do,” says her lawyer Sydney Johnson. ICE has already prepared the deportation. The Ethiopian government just needs to send her travel documents. Then she’ll be flown back into the hands of her torturers. What is happening here is no accident. It’s intentional. According to a new report by Human Rights First and Refugees International, CAT screenings have become a system that serves only deportation. Some people aren’t even interviewed at all. Others, like the witness, receive unfair hearings – without interpreters, while sick, under medication, without legal representation. One attorney calls it “a farce by design.”
According to internal USCIS documents reviewed by California Newsroom, asylum officers are supposed to reschedule interviews if the applicant is unwell or without interpretation. They should cross-reference testimonies with country condition reports. But in practice, the opposite happens: The system is opaque, arbitrary, hostile. One officer said, “The Trump administration is behaving like the regimes people are fleeing from.”
Before, the witness would have had the right to appear before a judge. Now, the checkmark of an officer she never saw is enough. And ICE refuses to release the documentation of the interview. When Johnson asked, she was told to file a FOIA request – which takes two to three months. By that time, she says, “My client will already be deported.”
Other attorneys report similar experiences. Natalie Cadwalader-Schultheis, a lawyer with Human Rights First in San Diego, says, “It’s gone totally quiet. And that’s the scariest part. Because silence doesn’t mean there’s no problem. It means it’s being hidden.” In fact, many people are currently disappearing without a trace – with no indication of whether they were transferred, deported, or simply erased from the system. At night, without warning. “They don’t even know where they’re going.” For us, this isn’t a theory. It’s a daily nightmare. We have access to documents, databases, deep administrative records – and still, many of these people are untraceable. They appear on no lists, in no logs, as if they never existed. No movie – reality.
Sometimes all we have are the last known coordinates, the final digital footprints, to begin our search: We have gone to migrant shelters, to airports, to transit jails, to their home countries and to the places where they were last seen – just to prove that these people existed. That they didn’t disappear because they “deserved it,” but because a system made them vanish.
It is a silent, ghostly manhunt. Not for guilt or innocence, but for existence. For the bare fact that someone was here. That someone is alive. Still.
A president who breaks the law – and no one stops him
According to the ACLU, Trump’s executive order “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” has illegally dismantled an entire protection system. In the class-action lawsuit, they argue that CAT and removal protections are not discretionary. They are guaranteed by law. If the president overrides them, it’s a violation of the separation of powers.
If the court agrees with that argument, it could allow thousands of people to reapply – this time with lawyers, in court, with a right to appeal. But for many, that will come too late.
“She won’t survive”
The witness suffers from a chronic illness. In detention, she’s receiving poor care. Her cousin Negash, a U.S. citizen, says, “She sounds broken. Like she’s already given up.” He himself is afraid to return to Ethiopia – and has asked to keep his last name private.
“She told me she would rather die here than go back,” says attorney Johnson.
ICE says the deportation will happen as soon as the flight is arranged. And then? Then the Ethiopian government will know she has arrived. Then prison awaits. Torture. Maybe death.
America 2025 – a place where a woman who survived torture disappears in the night. Because a man in the White House wants it that way.
And in the end, all that remains is a checkmark. And a cross.
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