Asylum-seekers with no criminal records are being detained around the country as the Trump administration seeks to remove immigrants looking for legal pathways to remain in the United States. The move is a major departure from previous practice, under which asylum applicants were allowed to work and build lives in U.S. communities as their cases played out.
The arrests follow a pattern, attorneys and advocates told NBC News. One day, the asylum-seekers are with their families, often after having lived in the U.S. for years. Then an errand or a drive to work ends with their being swept into ICE’s vast detention system. There, they face difficult conditions and a more adversarial immigration process, along with pressure to self-deport, the attorneys and families say. Their arrests have been reported around the U.S., including in Minnesota, New York, Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Maine, Alaska, Wisconsin, California and Texas.
Six of attorney Robin Nice’s asylum applicants were detained by ICE despite not having criminal issues, she said, as a federal immigration law enforcement operation swept over Maine near the end of January. Some were finishing shifts at work. One was driving to work. One was going to buy medicine and groceries. One was picked up on the way to get their newborn a U.S. passport.
“This is absolutely unprecedented,” Nice said, adding that up until around six months ago she felt confident telling her clients that if they had pending applications for asylum, they did not need to worry about being detained. “We talked about it in the same way as getting struck by lightning.”
People from around the world come to the U.S. to claim asylum, some fleeing war, violence or religious and political persecution. As of December, more than 2.3 million immigrants were awaiting asylum hearings, a number that has been growing in recent years. The number of people who obtain asylum fluctuates year to year. From Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, more than 28,000 out of more than 118,000 applicants were granted asylum, and nearly 5,000 received some other form of immigration relief. The administration says the backlog of cases includes many “meritless applications.”
Attorneys and advocates say the new practice of detaining asylum-seekers is harmful and unnecessary, as applicants are already known to the government and are going through a legal process that involves going to all of their government check-ins. They say the administration is placing law-abiding immigrants in detention centers with inhumane conditions, where they lack sufficient medical care and access to their lawyers and are given inedible food.
“It destroys people’s sense of stability as they are trying to do the right thing and pursue their claims for safety in the United States,” said Elora Mukherjee, a Columbia Law School professor and director of its Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “I’ve had clients in detention, literally from New Jersey to Texas, who’ve given up on their cases because conditions are so unbearable.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson previously denied claims that there are “subprime conditions” at ICE detention facilities.
DHS said in a statement that “a pending asylum case does NOT confer any type of legal status in the United States. If a person enters our country illegally, they are subject to detention or deportation. Each illegal alien receives due process.”
“USCIS’ top priority remains the screening and vetting of all aliens seeking to come, live, or work in the United States,” the statement said, referring to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the DHS agency that is responsible for legal immigration. The department declined to provide data on how many asylum-seekers with active cases have been detained during the Trump administration.
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While Nice was able to secure the release of her six clients, asylum-seekers around the country remain in detention, including the husband of a woman named Tatiana.
She said the life she and her husband built in Florida for their two daughters for over 10 years was torn apart in December when, on his way to work as a handyman, her husband never came home. The family is seeking asylum after having fled Ecuador and says they faced death threats for speaking out politically. Tatiana, who is a member of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a membership organization serving asylum-seekers in the U.S., asked that her full name not be used because of fear of immigration reprisal.
“You feel overwhelmed, suffocated. I’m now a single mother with my two daughters, trying to make ends meet, rent, food,” she told NBC News in Spanish, adding that she has been working 11- to 12-hour days. “I’m counting every penny to be able to cover everything.”
The detention has also upended life for her daughter, a high school honor student with dreams of going to college in the U.S. The teenager is now looking for work to help their family. Tatiana worries that “college is coming up soon, and we just can’t afford it.”
“She tells me, ‘Mom, don’t worry, everything’s going to be OK,’” Tatiana said, her voice breaking. “But I’m heartbroken, because I don’t know if it’s going to be OK.”
Since his arrest in December, Tatiana’s husband has been moved to different detention facilities, including the one in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” where detainees have complained of unsanitary conditions, swarms of mosquitoes and a lack of medical treatment. The administration has denied allegations about poor conditions at the facility.
“They kept bringing my husband the paperwork for voluntary deportation,” Tatiana said.
They are still fighting for her husband’s release.
“He’s devastated seeing how difficult everything is for us financially. He feels powerless,” she said. “We try to encourage him. We try to tell him that this won’t last forever and that God will give us a solution.”
The conditions were too much for César Pulido, who agreed in February to leave the country voluntarily after more than six months in detention.
He and his son, César Andrés Caicedo Hincapié, 19, were in the middle of their asylum case when ICE arrested Pulido for reasons they say were never made clear to them.
“When we first came here, we didn’t have anything, so we started building our lives from scratch,” Caicedo Hincapié told NBC News. “School was hard, work for him was hard, culture and language was hard. Then we were getting somewhere, we already were building something. This happened, and it’s like, just, stopped my life. It stopped my dad’s life.”
Now, Caicedo Hincapié, who had been working long days at a warehouse in a struggle to pay for rent and attorney fees, has lost the work permit granted under his father’s asylum case, which has ended with his agreement to self-deport. It remains unclear when his father will be removed from the U.S.
Pulido told NBC News from a detention center in Texas that he and his son fled Colombia following threats to their lives amid political persecution. They did all they could to make sure they “went about things the right way” in the U.S., he said in Spanish.
“I haven’t committed any crimes here nor in my country, but I have no idea how long I’m going to be detained here,” he said, before he agreed to self-deport.
“I’m judged as if I were a criminal,” he said. “They treat me like a criminal here.”
DHS said in a statement without providing evidence that Pulido was “an associate of a South American Theft Group operating throughout southern California.” The agency did not say Pulido had been charged with or convicted of a crime. It did not respond to requests for comment to elaborate on its claim.
“He entered the United States in 2023 under the Biden administration as a B-2 tourist visitor and overstayed his visa,” the statement said, adding that Pulido “will remain in ICE custody pending removal from the U.S.”
“Any application for asylum does not preclude immigration enforcement,” DHS said.
The agency proposed a rule last month that would deny asylum-seekers work authorization while their applications are being processed, in another major overhaul of the asylum system.
“For too long, a fraudulent asylum claim has been an easy path to working in the United States, overwhelming our immigration system with meritless applications,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement announcing the proposed rule. “Aliens are not entitled to work while we process their asylum applications. The Trump administration is strengthening the vetting of asylum applicants and restoring integrity to the asylum and work authorization processes.”
Caicedo Hincapié said he wants to work with his lawyer to see whether he can apply for a visa and finish college.
“It’s scary. I don’t really know how I am supposed to maintain myself,” he said. “I just never expected it to be like this.”
Conchita Cruz, a co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, echoed that sentiment.
“It’s a shock,” she said, “not just for that individual or their family, but for the community around them and the people that rely on them that had no idea that anything like that could ever happen.”
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