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asylum services

What is asylum?

Asylum is the legal protection granted to people who have come to the United States and are afraid to return to their home country. Asylum can be granted to people who are unable or unwilling to return to their home country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.

Who is an aslyum seeker?

How to Qualify for Asylum

To qualify for asylum, a foreign national must prove that he or she is unwilling to return to the home country because of past persecution or a fear that he or she will be persecuted upon return to the home country. The past or feared future harm must be because of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. It is also important for asylum-seekers to file their application within the one-year period after the person’s last date of entry into the United States.

Benefits of Aslyum

An asylee—or a person granted asylum—is protected from being returned to his or her home country, is authorized to work in the United States, may apply for a Social Security card, may request permission to travel overseas, and can petition to bring family members to the United States. Asylees may also be eligible for certain government programs, such as Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance.

After one year, an asylee may apply for lawful permanent resident status (i.e., a green card). Once the individual becomes a permanent resident, he or she must wait four years to apply for citizenship.

Asylum seekers include some of the most vulnerable members of society—children, single mothers, victims of domestic violence or torture, and other individuals who have suffered persecution and trauma.

There are two primary ways in which a person may apply for asylum in the United States: the affirmative process and the defensive process.

Affirmative Asylum: A person who is not in removal proceedings may affirmatively apply for asylum through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). If the USCIS asylum officer does not grant the asylum application and the applicant does not have a lawful immigration status, he or she is referred to the immigration court for removal proceedings, where he or she may renew the request for asylum through the defensive process and appear before an immigration judge.
Defensive Asylum: A person who is in removal proceedings may apply for asylum defensively by filing the application with an immigration judge at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) in the Department of Justice. In other words, asylum is applied for as a defense against removal from the U.S. Unlike the criminal court system, EOIR does not provide appointed counsel for individuals in immigration court, even if they are unable to retain an attorney on their own.

Asylum seekers who arrive at a U.S. port of entry or enter the United States without inspection generally must apply through the defensive asylum process. Both application processes require the asylum seeker to be physically present in the United States.

Learn more from the American Immigration Council.