In the 1985 Cold War thriller White Nights, Mikhail Baryshnikov plays a Soviet ballet dancer who defects to the West. Years later, when his plane makes an emergency landing in Siberia, the dancer races down the aisle in horror, screaming, “We are landing in Russia!”
Many Russians who managed to escape Putin’s iron curtain are now facing the same terrifying fate, only this time the destination isn’t an accident. The Trump administration is callously handing over dissidents and Russian Army deserters to the very goons they sought to evade in the first place. The beleaguered deportees are greeted at the Moscow arrivals lounge by F.S.B. agents with arrest warrants and handcuffs.
This became all too evident this past August, when planeloads of Russian asylum seekers were sent home via Egypt or Morocco—because there are no direct flights between the United States and Russia.
Passengers on one flight told The New York Times and other publications about Artyom Vovchenko, a 26-year-old Russian deserter who tried to hide in the men’s room during a layover in Cairo. He was dragged back to his seat by Egyptian officials with a huge lump on his forehead.
“He begged not to be put on the plane to Moscow, but Egyptian police restrained him and tied him up,” one passenger told The Guardian. “They tied him to his seat, and he cried the entire way from Egypt to Moscow.”
Trump’s contempt for refugees—be they from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, or Putin’s Russia—is the most perverse distortion of American tradition imaginable. The only migrants he has welcomed are South Africans—the white ones—and, with no apparent irony, Europeans opposed to immigration.
The roundup of Russians is particularly jarring because of our long-standing tradition of harboring Soviet dissidents and Jews. Here we are in the Cold War 2.0. Everyone knows the 21st-century Kremlin is as totalitarian as the Politburo was in its heyday, but Trump doesn’t care.
Until recently, political prisoners and refugees who could establish that they were likely to be jailed and tortured in their home countries were eligible for asylum. Now immigration judges and officials at the Department of Homeland Security seem to be taking sadistic satisfaction in using red tape and legal loopholes to seal their fates. “We are seeing concerted efforts to find people who have legal status and take it away,” says Laurie Ball Cooper, who heads litigation at the International Refugee Assistance Project.
Some of the rule tightening began before Trump’s re-election; it’s the official mindset that has turned savagely worse since Inauguration Day. “At least under President Biden, people in detention were not at risk of being sent to a torture prison in Salvador,” says Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor and longtime human-rights expert. Koh sums up the administration’s strategy for dealing with unwanted immigrants as “the four d’s: delegitimize, detain, deport, and demonize.”
Vovchenko never stood a chance. An unwilling conscript, he went AWOL from the army after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and made his way illegally into the United States through Mexico. He ended up in detention in Louisiana, a state with few immigration lawyers and an unusually high record of sending refugees back where they came from.
The judge in Vovchenko’s case, Jacob D. Bashore, had an 89.2 percent rate of denying asylum between 2019 and 2014, much higher than the 57.7 national average. And, as a former circuit judge with the army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), he seems to side with the military—even if the military is Russian.
According to the defector’s lawyer, Bashore intimated in court that the U.S. expects other countries to return our deserters, so the U.S. should do so when a foreign government requests it. He seems to be unaware that we have no extradition treaty with Russia and that Putin laughed when President Obama asked him to turn over Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. whistleblower wanted for treason who has been living in Moscow for the past 12 years.
According to the lawyer, the judge also suggested that if this defector were granted asylum, it would encourage other soldiers to go AWOL.
So what?
By supplying weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. is essentially in a proxy war against Putin and should welcome the chance to make a dent, however small, in his supply of cannon fodder.
More important, though, is the fact that the judge who posited that hordes of deserters could follow Vovchenko’s example seems to be overstepping his role. “That is a policy prediction that is not within the purview of an immigration judge. Decisions have to be fact-based on the individual,” Professor Koh says. (Judge Bashore’s office did not respond to AIR MAIL’s multiple requests for comment.)
Judicial mission creep, Trump’s chilling effect on officials (he has fired hundreds of immigration judges who don’t share his nativist zeal), and procedural reflex have turned U.S. courts into danger zones for people who came here in search of safe harbor.
Immigration is not a fashionable cause. There are no glamorous Met Balls or Live Aid rock concerts to raise money for people in detention or their families. Mostly, the giving is at a local level: the kindergarten teachers who chip in to help pay the rent for the family of a detainee, the church group that supplies groceries to a mother afraid to leave her home, the pro bono lawyer who works overtime to file habeas corpus petitions, the beat cop who warns teenagers in the park to go home before ICE gets there.
But people all over the country are increasingly troubled by our government’s lack of fairness and due process and want to do something about it. And that includes a rush of new law-school graduates bent on defending immigrants’ rights rather than just drafting mergers-and-acquisitions contracts.
It’s not altruism; it’s self-interest.
“There is a real danger that if we allow the rights of refugees to be trampled,” Cooper warns, “the rights of others will follow.”
Alessandra Stanley is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL
