‘I thought that there would be democracy’

Before ‘Ariel’ touched US soil, they had heard the country held one of the strongest democracies, that it was regarded as a place where everyone had rights and no one was above the law.

After facing political persecution in their Latin American country, Ariel fled home and applied for asylum in the US about three years ago, beginning what would be a long process they still find themselves in the midst of. They hoped to build a safe life in the US. 

But the asylum seeker’s case was recently denied without a hearing to argue their case and the judge ordered Ariel’s deportation to Ecuador, a country where they had also faced mistreatment and harm.

Both Trump administrations have used legally questionable third country agreements to restrict people from US asylum and instead send them to a country they’re not from, like in Ariel’s case. These are known as Asylum Cooperative Agreements or Safe Asylum Third Country Agreements.

“I thought that there would be democracy,” Ariel told RANGE in Spanish. “Now that I live here, it’s so different.”

Because of the danger Ariel is facing in their home country and at the request of their attorney at Manzanita House, RANGE agreed to identify Ariel under a pseudonym, and refrain from mentioning gender, country of origin or specific case details.

For years, people have been able to rely on long-standing processes to present their fear of return to their home country and apply for asylum, which is protected by various statutes and international treaties, Northwest Immigrants Rights Project (NWIRP) attorney Audrey Gilliam said.

Pretermissions – like what happened to Ariel – end someone’s application for asylum before even a “substantive process begins.” DHS or an immigration judge can initiate a pretermission. These can be filed for things like if an applicant fails to pay a fee, turns in an incomplete application or was directed to seek asylum outside the US through an existing Asylum Cooperative Agreement. Essentially, if any other country will agree to let an immigrant seek asylum there, the US can quickly move to deport them to that country.

Ariel is just one of the thousands of immigrants affected by a torrent of asylum dismissals across the country under the second Trump administration.

A concerning court practice

The use of agreements that the Trump administration signed to send asylum-seekers to third countries has been flagged by human rights advocates as violating immigrants’ rights to due process. Ongoing litigation challenging the 2019 rule and related policies as unlawful was filed in 2020 by a coalition of organizations including the ACLU and Center for Gender & Refugee Studies.

Still, the use of once-rare pretermissions to summarily dismiss cases and deny immigrants the opportunity to present the merits of their case exploded in 2025, driven mostly by motions to pretermit after an October 31 decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals under the Trump administration. This legal opinion stated that if DHS claims a third-country asylum agreement applied, the immigration judge should then consider if the applicant was barred from asylum in the US before actually considering the case's merits.

“What we’ve been seeing since November is that people continue to have valid asylum claims but aren’t able to present them to the court,” Gilliam said. “Instead, the case is just completely cut off.”

To avoid being barred from US asylum under a third country agreement, an asylum-seeker would need to prove to the court that they would more likely than not face persecution or torture in the third country, according to the Board of Immigration Appeals October decision.

On March 12, 2026, the federal government directed lawyers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stop filing these pretermission motions, The Seattle Times reported. 

But it remains unclear why the halt was ordered or if it’s temporary. In the meantime, judges will continue to make decisions on motions that were already filed before the pause.

“They were told to stop … but at the same time, we haven't seen any policy around that,” said Sam Smith, Manzanita House’s director of immigrant legal aid and immigration attorney.

Given the lack of transparency under the Trump administration, the lack of a formal policy raises concerns that the pause may not last, he said.

The civil immigration court system has proven to be a complex and at times hostile landscape for immigrants to navigate, especially those without an attorney. But Ariel was able to secure access to legal help at Manzanita House based on a referral from Latinos en Spokane last year.

Melissa Main, the attorney representing Ariel, told RANGE that the next step in Ariel’s case was to appeal the judge’s decision to pretermit Ariel’s case and order them deported.

“From there, it can still be many months or even years for the whole process to play out,” she said.

The floodgates open

Before 2025, it was incredibly rare for a case to be pretermitted in immigration court, said Northwest Immigrant Rights Project attorney Koby Jargstorf. There was a steady trickle of pretermissions in early 2025 from other cases already decided by the Board of Immigration Appeals, including dismissals for an incomplete application for relief under asylum, withholding of removal and the international treaty Convention Against Torture.

Decisions to dismiss asylum cases because an applicant did not answer every question on the form has been described by the American Immigration Lawyers Association as sacrificing fairness and compromising “the court’s ability to thoroughly review” cases.

But it was really after the Board of Immigration Appeals’ October decision that the “floodgates opened,” Jargstrof explained.

In 2024, the Department of Homeland Security filed 754 motions to pretermit cases, according to a report from bklg, a service for immigration attorneys to get records of proceedings. Then in 2025, that number rose to 27,770, mostly driven by filings from the latter part of the year.

There was a similar spike in Washington with motions to pretermit for cases filed at various stages of removal proceedings, Gilliam said.

“From where we sit, it doesn't seem like there's a rhyme or reason for the government application,” she said. “They really are applying or filing (Asylum Cooperative Agreements) motions in many cases for folks who entered on or after Nov 19, 2019.”

Bklg data shows that DHS filed over 2,000 motions to pretermit asylum cases in Washington between July 6, 2025 and January 25, 2026. The vast majority were filed in the Seattle Immigration court, with only a fraction having been filed in Tacoma.

Gilliam said the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision to allow pretermissions under the basis of the third-country agreements appears to take away alternate options for immigration judges; if someone seeking asylum can be sent to a third country, they have to be.

“What we’ve seen is that immigration judges have largely granted most of these motions to pretermit when filed by the Department of Homeland Security,” she said.

During an early April interview, Gilliam said the Removal Defense unit she works in was seeing two to three people a week who were impacted by pretermissions. That number was three to four people for Jargstorf’s unit, Washington Migrant and Asylum Seeker Support program (WA MASS.)

Smith said Manzanita House has also regularly seen people who received a motion to pretermit on their case. The local nonprofit, similarly to NWIRP, has tried to assist people with limited resources amid rapidly changing and even potentially illegal practices.

“And the thing that's incredibly disheartening and difficult about this is there's very little opportunity to successfully fight against this, at least at the first level, in immigration court,” Smith said. “We've seen some people have limited success in very particular circumstances, but otherwise we're seeing essentially mass appeals.”

And it’s still unclear how exactly the immigration appeals board will deal with these, Smith said. An analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice found that the board has failed to maintain “even the appearance” of solely focusing on interpreting law since Trump returned to office. The center argues that the board has regularly issued decisions that “significantly curtail immigrants' substantive and procedural rights.”

Still, registering opposition is vital, Smith added. Not only because there’s still a chance, even if slim, but also because it helps hold the government to account, build a record in an individual case and a record across the system of how the government is acting.

Smith noted two clients of Manzanita House were pretermitted over the span of two weeks in March. One was pretermitted in the early stages of legal proceedings, while the other  — Ariel — was pretermitted by a judge about 13 days before the scheduled hearing where Main would have had the chance to argue Ariel’s actual asylum claim.

“They filed this motion at the last minute and at the beginning of the hearing, instead of going into the asylum case that we had prepared and briefed and were ready to argue, the judge wanted to talk about the motion to pretermit and close the case early because of that,” Smith said.

Smith said Manzanita House had roughly two weeks to prepare and a 30 minute hearing to argue why the third country agreement didn't apply to Ariel and that if it did, Ariel would face persecution there.

“And that's just an insufficient amount of time both to prepare and to present a case. And so we think that there's pretty severe due process concerns when it comes to that,” he said.

The Trump administration has spent both his terms chipping away at immigration policy – particularly asylum, Smith noted.

“Theoretically, you could have … been here for almost seven years with a case pending, and just be days away from arguing your case, and the government just pulled the rug out from under you,” he said.

‘Mockery of our Asylum System’

The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies notes that the regulatory framework used to implement the Asylum Cooperative Agreements is not only “fundamentally flawed,” but also makes “a Mockery of our Asylum System.”  

All Asylum Cooperative Agreements need to comply with the Immigration and Nationality Act, which does allow the government to bar applicants from seeking asylum in the US if they can safely be deported to another country under an existing agreement. The Act states the third country would have to provide safety and a full and fair process for asylum. 

But the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies has noted that the ACAs signed under the Trump administration have “consistently failed to meet the statutory requirements,” meaning they violate federal law. 

The Trump administration signed agreements in 2019 with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador -– all countries that the ACLU described as extremely dangerous, with skeletal asylum systems. These countries produced over 778,800 refugees as of 2024. 

Before this, the only third country agreement the US held was with Canada.

The Biden administration terminated those agreements when taking office, but failed to rescind the rule and related policies that created the framework before Trump’s return.

In 2025 the Trump administration signed new agreements with Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Ecuador and Uganda.

“Given the dubious human rights records of these states and the serious inadequacy of their asylum systems, it is apparent that the administration's goal is not to share the responsibility of offering safe haven, but to deny asylum seekers access to protection in the United States and elsewhere,” the center wrote in a report.

Smith detailed some concerns with due process, including the short timeframe given to contest a motion. Once filed, people have just 10 days to oppose it.

“If someone is represented, you know that the notification should come electronically, and you get that right away, but we know most people are unrepresented and are getting it through mail,” he said. “By the time we're hearing about it or seeing people with these motions, then they really [had] 4, 5, 6 days to respond.”

 When a judge approves a motion to pretermit, then people have 30 days to appeal. 

Though the process is quick and often merciless, there is a way that the federal government could allow people to seek asylum in the US — even if a third country agreement applies. DHS or whoever they delegate has the authority to do that through what's called “a public interest determination,” Smith said.

But that process seems broken too.

“To our knowledge, they've delegated it to no one. We have explicitly asked the trial attorneys in our cases, ‘what is the process? How can we raise this to the Secretary of DHS?’ And they have told us flat out, ‘there is no process.’”

He said one of the cases Manzanita is handling has various factors that would warrant a public interest decision. In one client’s case, the US wants to send him to a Latin American country that has severed diplomatic ties with his country of origin. He also has a severe medical condition that if he is unable to get adequate medical treatment for, it would likely leave the client with only months to live, Smith said.

“And so there's a lot of really strong reasons why a public interest determination should be made, but still refusing to even engage with the process or being willing to do that … I just think that that is one: a fundamental issue of justice and I think due process is implicated there.”

It’s already hard to explain to someone the confusing and complex immigration landscape, added Ruthie Jablonsky, another Manzanita House attorney.

“And then to try to explain something that is just so unjust on its face – it's really difficult,” Jablonsky said. “I think part of it is that it breaks down the trust between attorney and client because there's basically nothing that I can do. And as an advocate, I mean, that's – it's my job to be able to do something.”

Detailing her experiences in court, Jablonsky described how judges have said the same things, almost like they’re reading from the same script. 

“It didn't seem, from one hearing to another, that [the judge] had read any of the information that we had submitted,” she said. “You show up, and the judge just says ‘have you ever been to whatever third country?’ In this case it was Ecuador, and my client had never been there. And so being able to prove that they … would be basically persecuted if they were sent to the country they'd never been to – It's a really high standard to meet.”

She also noted that the 10-day window to respond is hardly adequate time to prepare a strong case. Amid the chaos, Jablonsky said she holds onto a “kernel of hope” for a favorable outcome in the ongoing litigation challenging removals to third countries.

Nothing left but to fight

Sitting inside Main’s office about two weeks ago, Ariel told RANGE that they found it difficult to explain the feelings they had after learning about the judge’s decision to summarily dismiss their case.

“It’s like a pain without pain — but a rage mixed with helplessness. As if you can’t do anything because everything lies in the hands of someone who doesn’t care about you,” Ariel said.

The current climate has sown fear among communities of immigrants, including asylum-seekers following court procedures.

After learning their case was pretermitted, Ariel went to an ICE check-in with Main beside them. Ariel recalls feeling scared at the prospect of having to go to that check-in after receiving the judge’s decision and mentally prepared to be detained.

The Trump administration has made a show of detaining people attending immigration court hearings and check-ins, including in Spokane. This practice prompted an ongoing lawsuit that alleges the administration has illegally arrested immigrants. 

“It’s a situation where all you can really do is live in constant worry — live in fear — and just try to cope with it,” Ariel said. “It’s a choice between staying here or being sent somewhere else. It’s staying here or death — and that is very literal.” 

Ariel detailed that they’ve come to learn of many instances in which people were deported back to their country of origin and had people waiting to “disappear them.”

“I will keep fighting as far as I can go — as far as possible,” they said. “There’s no other option.”