On the first day of his second term in office, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation prohibiting all refugees arriving at the U.S. southern border from applying for asylum. Claiming that the “situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion,” the order meant that all individuals attempting to come to the United States would be categorically refused entry, even if they risked being tortured or persecuted upon return to their home countries—a blatant violation of U.S. immigration law. Accompanying guidance distributed to U.S. asylum officers instructed them not to “ask specific fear questions” required to assess whether individuals had fled their nations out of a credible fear of harm. Only those who demonstrated fear without prompting, either verbally or otherwise, through “hysteria, trembling, shaking, unusual behavior, changes in tone of voice, incoherent speech patterns, panic attacks, or an unusual level of silence”—according to language from guidance issued by the Biden administration—could be granted further assessment, but their petitions would also almost always ultimately be denied.

The proclamation was a bald-faced attempt to close the border to asylum-seekers writ large, effectively a death certificate for the right to seek asylum in the United States. That right has been in decline for many years around the globe, its force and meaning gravely diminished alongside the worldwide retrenchment of human rights. But over the past year, states across the global north have taken further steps to permanently degrade asylum protections, hardening borders and revising immigration policies to curtail the already meager affordances that imperiled groups have relied on for decades. If their efforts are successful, the right to seek asylum—a fundamental freedom and a critical element of the postwar system—will become an artifact of a bygone era, one of many casualties of the emerging anti-liberal global order.

On the first day of his second term in office, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation prohibiting all refugees arriving at the U.S. southern border from applying for asylum. Claiming that the “situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion,” the order meant that all individuals attempting to come to the United States would be categorically refused entry, even if they risked being tortured or persecuted upon return to their home countries—a blatant violation of U.S. immigration law. Accompanying guidance distributed to U.S. asylum officers instructed them not to “ask specific fear questions” required to assess whether individuals had fled their nations out of a credible fear of harm. Only those who demonstrated fear without prompting, either verbally or otherwise, through “hysteria, trembling, shaking, unusual behavior, changes in tone of voice, incoherent speech patterns, panic attacks, or an unusual level of silence”—according to language from guidance issued by the Biden administration—could be granted further assessment, but their petitions would also almost always ultimately be denied.

The proclamation was a bald-faced attempt to close the border to asylum-seekers writ large, effectively a death certificate for the right to seek asylum in the United States. That right has been in decline for many years around the globe, its force and meaning gravely diminished alongside the worldwide retrenchment of human rights. But over the past year, states across the global north have taken further steps to permanently degrade asylum protections, hardening borders and revising immigration policies to curtail the already meager affordances that imperiled groups have relied on for decades. If their efforts are successful, the right to seek asylum—a fundamental freedom and a critical element of the postwar system—will become an artifact of a bygone era, one of many casualties of the emerging anti-liberal global order.

Protections for refugees fleeing religious, political, racial, or national persecution were enshrined in international law in the wake of World War II. The 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees prohibited signatories from returning refugees to states where their “life or freedom would be threatened.” The 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture further solidified state obligations never to deport individuals to countries where their lives would be endangered. The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), first signed in 1950, binds its constituent nations to guarantee any person inside European borders the right to a “private and family life,” allowing refugees to seek reunification with their kin inside the European Union.

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These international agreements led to the creation of a robust bureaucratic infrastructure dedicated to ensuring that the right to seek asylum—an individual right possessed by every person, irrespective of origin or citizenship—had real force. Yet they did not establish a corresponding right to receive asylum, leaving it up to states to determine which peoples can receive permanent protections inside their borders. As a result, there is a “gap between the individual’s right to seek asylum and the state’s discretion in providing it,” as the U.N. Refugee Agency presciently pointed out in 1993.

Today, that gap has grown into a veritable abyss. In 2024, the most recent year for which U.N. data is available, the number of international migrants hit a record 304 million at the same moment when nations all over the world were closing their doors and war, natural disasters, authoritarianism, and gang violence were on the rise. More than half had traveled from their home countries to reach Europe and North America. That these two phenomena are occurring simultaneously is not a coincidence: The turn away from humane border policies is a direct response to rising demand for protections. In the United States, immigration officers have for several years declined to give new arrivals “credible fear” interviews that would establish their claim to protection from abuse back home. If this trend continues, asylum risks becoming something that can only be responsibly referred to in the past tense.

Every week brings new stories of the Trump administration’s brutal crackdown on immigration and its depredations: a Bolivian asylum-seeker jailed for 17 months before ultimately being deported to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Nicaraguan activists turned away by officials who refused to even look at their documents; Russians and West Africans sent back to countries where they will almost certainly be jailed or tortured.

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Yet ongoing international efforts to significantly curtail asylum claims have not received commensurate attention. Pakistan and Iran have each pursued the mass expulsion of millions of Afghans who had sought safety inside their borders, creating what the United Nations has called a “multi-layered human rights crisis.” Last year, India threw around 40 Rohingya refugees into the sea. In Canada, a new law requiring asylum-seekers to petition for protection within a year of entering the country has left thousands of individuals facing the threat of deportation. After the retroactive measure went into force this spring, asylum-seekers who had not yet filed applications for relief received letters from the Canadian government directing them to “leave Canada as soon as possible.”

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently revised his country’s asylum policy to remove guarantees of indefinite protection and housing for asylum-seekers in an apparent effort to appease his conservative constituents. With Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, he has called for the ECHR—to which Britain is still a party—to be revised to make it easier for European nations to deport individuals back to their home countries and to raise barriers to family reunifications. “The current asylum framework was created for another era,” the two leaders wrote in a joint Guardian op-ed last December. “We will always protect those fleeing war and terror—but the world has changed and asylum systems must change with it.”

Their message seemed to be that it is time to move on from the post-World War II settlement and the protections it established because they have become out of step with political realities. After all, the preamble to the ECHR states that the convention’s fundamental freedoms are “best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the Human Rights upon which they depend.” Both preconditions for the convention’s successful application—effective democracy and observance of human rights—have been significantly diminished across the continent over the last decade. Midcentury idealism, Starmer and Frederiksen implied, has no place in a world where right-wing politics are ascendant and the will to enforce international law has all but vanished.

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Underscoring that point, Denmark and eight other European nations, including the Baltic states, Italy, and Poland, have also petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to make it easier to deport refugees who have committed crimes in their host nations back their countries of origin—even if those states have been deemed unsafe for repatriation. This summer, the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is set to come into force. It seeks to fast-track the processing of asylum-seekers at the border. Refugee organizations warn that, in practice, the measure will increase the number of people confined to detention centers and that expedited evaluation procedures will make it far less likely that individuals will be granted asylum upon arrival.

In Europe, the only nation bucking this trend is Spain, which recently implemented a mass amnesty allowing immigrants to legalize their status in the country for the low price of 38 euros (about $45). Individual applicants will receive one-year work permits, while families will be allowed to live and work in the country for no less than five years. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchéz has framed this approach to immigration as a rejection of the “zero-sum thinking of the far-right” and as an essential element of his country’s economic prosperity and “spiritual development.” The amnesty is the seventh measure of its kind implemented in Spain over the last 50 years. “When social reality outpaces bureaucracy,” a government spokesperson said, “the responsible state is the one that acts to regulate it, not the one that looks the other way.”

If that is the case, responsible states are rare indeed. Looking away from the rights, claims, and sacrifices of asylum-seekers has become the new norm. In many jurisdictions, this “looking away” takes a quite literal form, with immigration officials refusing to see or hear evidence of past persecution and politicians turning away from international laws that their predecessors bound them to follow. In the United States, the right to asylum has been almost entirely extinguished, with the processing of applications from 39 countries—including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria—and the Palestinian territories subject to an indefinite pause. (The Trump administration has expanded its refugee program only for white South Africans and capped the total number of refugees admitted this fiscal year at 7,500, down from 125,000 in the previous administration.)

In late April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump’s ban on asylum claims at the southern border was a blatant violation of U.S. law. The majority opinion argued that the right to asylum was the “most protective form of relief” that immigration law afforded. To “unilaterally and heedlessly return individuals even to countries where they will most certainly face persecution,” the court argued, violated the basic rights of refugees to apply for asylum and to be spared the threat of deportation while their applications are still pending.

The decision was hailed as a rare victory over the Trump administration’s draconian polices, but in practice, it will likely have only a meager effect. It upheld the inviolable individual right to seek asylum yet will have little sway over the U.S. government’s apparent commitment not to provide it. If applicants cannot be sent away while their claims are being processed, the United States will only continue to pursue expedited and abbreviated proceedings and will keep asylum-seekers in detention while they do so. A similar dynamic will result from tightened immigration policies across the Atlantic. The right to asylum will continue to exist on paper, but the moral force and memory that once undergirded its meaning will have perished.