Donald J. Trump will return to the presidency after yet another campaign soaked in anti-immigration rhetoric, including a series of ads during Sunday’s Detroit Lions/Green Bay Packers game showing black skinned men entering the United States from Mexico. Unknown to many Americans is the fact that among the migrants arriving at our southern border are Central American women who have fled rape, mutilation, kidnappings, threats and extortion by husbands, boyfriends, or gang members. Applying for asylum in the United States is their hope for relief from severe gender-based violence.
Unfortunately, the GOP’s “Project 2025” agenda envisions a complete disruption of the legal immigration system, including targeting women by codifying that domestic and gang violence won’t be grounds for asylum. It would reinstate Mr. Trump’s Remain in Mexico program, which led to people living in squalid camps and receiving deportation orders in absentia. It would also make it substantially more difficult for applicants to meet asylum criteria.
We spent five years engaged in research with women seeking asylum in this country from Central America and Mexico, as well as immigration lawyers and retired judges. What we learned about the women and their motivations for seeking asylum shows just how deliberately brutal the Project 2025 plan will be if implemented. And we argue that it’s not the end of asylum that our nation needs—it’s the ability for women fleeing gender-based violence to more easily win their cases to remain here and live free lives.
Since the Cold War, the US asylum system has offered people who have suffered persecution the opportunity to plead for the right to remain in the United States and escape future violence. Under both international and national law, the right to seek asylum is enshrined as necessary to ensure human rights. These laws contain strict criteria that an applicant must meet to win her case including proving that she will suffer persecution if returned to her home country. She also must prove that she suffered persecution because of her membership in one of five protected classes: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Project 2025 wants to eliminate most women’s ability to win asylum, stating that survivors of domestic and gang violence do not qualify for protection. This point is critical because, as noted by the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights, almost 92 percent of women (evaluated over nine years) sought asylum because of violence by individuals that the government was unable or unwilling to control.
During our research, we witnessed 36 closed asylum hearings in which women from Central America made their case before an Immigration Judge that they need to remain here permanently to avoid suffering severe violence if returned home. Often women who suffered this violence went to law enforcement at home, only to be told that police were too frightened of gangs to intervene, or to learn that police expected them to comply with gang imperatives (such as paying bribes).
During his previous presidency, Trump and his Attorneys General declared that women who suffered gender-based violence by gang members and/or domestic partners would be largely ineligible for protection via the asylum system, diminishing these offenses as “private violence.” But this violence is anything but private, thriving in countries where men violate women with impunity. Poverty, a lack of social services, and years of civil war and authoritarian governments have bred unbearable conditions in Mexico and Central America, leading to cycles of violence. The women we interviewed came to the US’s southern border with only what they could carry, often leaving children behind because they knew the journey would be too dangerous. They sought out US Border and Customs Patrol officers and were voluntarily approved so they could ask for asylum. It is customary that while in detention at the border, women sit for a credible fear interview to determine if she has reason to believe she will be subject to persecution or death if returned. If she passes, she must then make a case before an immigration judge. Included in the Project 2025 blueprint is a proposal to make the standards for a credible fear the same as for asylum—this is a calculatedly brutal standard given that women work with attorneys for many months to compile the evidence that they need to win an asylum hearing .
We would be remiss if we did not note some of the personal stories of the women we interviewed. They include Teresita, a 29-year-old Honduran who left her seven-year-old daughter behind with her parents to escape the man who put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her. Guadalupe, whose father was murdered in the street by gang members, who then told her that she and her family would “end up in black bags” if they went to the police. Alejandra’s husband raped her and scalded her with coffee, and Yolanda was kidnapped and raped by a gang member after refusing to become his girlfriend. These women simply want the basic human rights that all should share: a safe place to live and raise families, and the chance to work and to provide for themselves. Under Project 2025, all of these women would be ineligible for asylum.
The United States has held a unique position on the international stage since the asylum system was developed in the years following World War II. We are a nation that has earned considerable credibility for protecting the human rights for women who otherwise faced severe violence and persecution. The US has been a safe haven for women fleeing persecution and severe violence: survivors of female genital mutilation, China’s “one child” policy, and the Taliban’s brutal regime.
To avoid a human rights catastrophe, at minimum, the asylum system should remain in place, and attempts to terminate our legal asylum system and forfeit our international responsibilities must be stopped. Women must have a fair opportunity to apply for asylum and have their cases heard. We advocate for adopting the Refugee Protection Act proposed in 2022. That law would have codified that people fleeing persecution by non-state actors may meet the criteria for asylum, including women who are forced to flee their home countries because of gang and domestic violence. We also call for additional immigration judges and resources for the immigration courts.
Americans may know less about the suffering of Mexican and Central American women who come to this country because of state failures to protect them in comparison to those who fled the Taliban or China’s brutal one child policy; indifferent or corrupt police officers are somehow less shocking to us than culturally sanctioned genital mutilation. But the rapes, threats at gun point, murders of family members, and efforts to recruit children into gangs are no less terrifying for the women who experience them. We suspect that most Americans, when presented with the evidence of the crimes suffered by the women we interviewed, would want better for them than the senseless loss of human rights promised by Trump and Project 2025.
About the authors: Carol Cleaveland is an associate professor of social work at George Mason University. Michele Waslin is assistant director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. They are the co-authors of the new book PRIVATE VIOLENCE: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum (NYU Press)
