They come from Eritrea, from Guatemala, from Pakistan, and Afghanistan. They flee from persecution, from the violence of their homelands, they hope for protection - and instead find themselves trapped in a limbo of despair. The American asylum system, once a promise, has become an opaque labyrinth under President Donald Trump, where humanity has turned into a fiction.
Just a few years ago, asylum meant a right, a firm anchor for those seeking refuge in the storm of their history. But the tides have turned. On January 20, just moments after his inauguration, Donald Trump suspended the asylum system. With a stroke of a pen, the refuge became a trap, the saving shore an abyss.
These are stories like that of the Russian man who once recorded evidence of election fraud in hopes of saving his homeland. Instead, he found himself in a cell in Costa Rica, with his wife and son - deported, stripped of rights, lost. “We felt betrayed,” he said. “We did everything right.”
The world has become a patchwork of escape. People from Ghana and Uzbekistan, from Syria and Honduras wait at the borders, stand in the mud of Tapachula, are stranded in the concrete halls of American immigration authorities. Their only crime - hoping. And their sentence - silence. Ignorance. Deportation.
But it is not just bureaucratic chaos. It is a deliberate policy. “Invasion,” Trump called the arrival of the desperate. A term that strips the helpless of their humanity, turning them into a threat that must be fought. What was once a right is now a risk. What was once a refuge is now a matter of negotiation.
In the courtrooms, the battle rages over the meaning of the word “asylum.” Lawyers who once received ten, twenty calls a day from those seeking help now sit before silent phones. The asylum centers in Panama and Costa Rica have become holding pens, “bridges” they are called, but they are bridges to nowhere. People without a home, without a destination.
“We do not know what happens when people apply for asylum,” says Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council. A sentence that sounds like a verdict. A verdict on a country that has sold its soul.
For the Russian family, hope was a process. They waited months, almost a year, in a small apartment in Mexico, counting the days until their asylum interview. Then, the day after Trump's inauguration, the news - canceled. Their story was never heard. Their fate buried in a filing cabinet.
And they are not alone. They are the faces of the forgotten, the voices no one wants to hear. They are the witnesses of a world that has turned humanity into a bargaining chip. They are the people trapped in the waiting room of humanity.
Trump may claim to have made America safer. But the price of this security is a wall - not of concrete and steel, but of coldness and indifference. A labyrinth of regulations where people become numbers, hope becomes a crime. And the world? It watches. It counts clicks and comments as lives fade away.
These are not just laws, they are life stories. They are not just numbers, they are people. And as the borders grow tighter, as the fences rise higher, one truth becomes ever clearer - a world that betrays its weakest betrays itself.
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