The US is turning its back on Russian asylum seekers

I feel like I’m on death row, waiting for my lethal injection,” Vladislav Krasnov told me.

Krasnov was talking to me from Louisiana, where there are 56 people waiting for capital punishment. But he was not one of them. He’s a Russian political activist who publicly opposed Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, feared imprisonment in Russia as a result, and fled to the United States seeking asylum. Now he has been detained and threatened with deportation by the Trump administration.

After more than a year in various detention centers, Krasnov was scheduled to be flown a few hours later back to Moscow from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana where he had been held for two weeks. He told me, “I fled … to the US because I thought the US protected people like me.” A short time later, while he was in shackles waiting to be taken onto a plane, he was granted an emergency stay by the Board of Immigration Appeals.

While Krasnov awaits a resolution, other Russian asylum seekers are being rejected despite the likelihood they will be arrested back in Russia. It started during the Biden administration but has accelerated in President Trump’s second term. Since Trump returned to office last year, US immigration authorities have deported possibly hundreds of Russian asylum seekers. This is according to estimates by Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR), an organization that assists antiwar Russians with finding legal aid and that has analyzed ICE data.

Russian refugee seekers deported by the administration include a 25-year-old man who defected from the army, was arrested upon his return to Moscow, and was charged with desertion. An opposition activist named Leonid Melekhin was sent to prison straight from the airport after his deportation flight from the United States in 2025, and he now faces a lengthy prison sentence. RADR estimates that another 1,000 Russians who have requested asylum are being held in US detention facilities.

Krasnov applied for asylum at the US-Mexican border back in 2023. He spent more than 14 months in detention until he was released in October 2024 after he joined a class-action lawsuit challenging unlawful detentions. Then he was detained once again during a check-in with ICE in February 2025.