The U.S. Has Been Denying Asylum To Belarusians More Frequently
- 5.08.2026, 12:36
Many people are facing deportation.
In May 2026, only 22.2% of applicants were granted asylum, while 77.8% were denied. Just a year and a half ago, 92% of those seeking asylum received positive decisions, according to "Radio Svaboda".
According to volunteers from the organization ByAction, the U.S. has become Belarusians seeking political asylum are now at risk of deportation. The country of potential deportation is said to be Belize, a Central American country bordering Mexico and Guatemala. Volunteers with the initiative are aware of at least two such cases, which were heard by an immigration judge in the state of California.
According to ByAction volunteers, the individuals involved in these cases arrived in the U.S. more than two years ago, went through the legal immigration process, and were awaiting the adjudication of their cases. The Belarusians were detained during random document checks (after their vehicles were pulled over).
According to the co-founder of the ByAction initiative Yevgeny Zhdanovich, who is drawing conclusions based on circumstantial evidence, the court did not consider the substance of the asylum seekers’ applications and ruled to send them to a third country—Belize.
“We do not yet have all the case materials. We are trying to locate these individuals and the attorneys who represented them in court to learn all the circumstances,” explains Yevgeny Zhdanovich.
According to Zhdanovich, ByAction has developed an analytical system that tracks all cases involving Belarusian citizens in U.S. immigration courts.
“We work only with materials that do not contain personal data, and we see only the dates of procedural events and the decisions rendered. To our knowledge, this is the first such decision, although we cannot rule out the possibility that we may have simply missed some individual cases. It is likely that a new practice is emerging—the referral of immigrants seeking political asylum in the U.S. to third countries,” believes ByAction co-founder Yevgeny Zhdanovich.
U.S. immigration policy has changed since President Donald Trump took office. A number of humanitarian programs aimed at assisting migrants have been suspended. Controls over the issuance of U.S. visas have been tightened, requirements for migrant workers have been expanded, and the number of document checks during special immigration police raids has risen sharply.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of a sharp increase in the number of Belarusians seeking political asylum in the U.S.
According to the nonprofit organization OpenImmigration, which compiles statistics on the adjudication of immigration cases from U.S. courts in individual states, the number of Belarusians seeking asylum in the U.S. has increased significantly since 2020. While 98 cases were heard across the U.S. in 2020, that number rose to 780 in 2021 and 939 in 2022.
The number of cases involving Russian citizens has increased similarly, though the number of applications filed in those cases is significantly higher—7,007 in 2022 and 19,358 in 2023. According to these same statistics, Russians are denied asylum in the U.S. nearly three times as often as Belarusians.
According to OpenImmigration, between 2000 and the first half of 2026, U.S. authorities deported only 8 Belarusian citizens who had sought asylum there. About one-third of all “Belarusian” cases during this period resulted in the granting of asylum; the others were reclassified, closed without deportation, or resulted in a denial for the applicants.
In total, U.S. immigration courts are currently reviewing more than two million cases involving foreign nationals who have applied for asylum in the United States.
Among those who passed through immigration detention centers in the U.S. was one of the leaders of the 2020 protests at “Belaruskali” Anatoly Bokun. He is currently free.
According to ByAction’s analytical monitoring, the percentage of approved political asylum applications from Belarusians in U.S. immigration courts is declining. The organization’s experts, citing their own sources, say that the number of positive decisions dropped significantly in May, although as recently as last winter, denials were still quite rare.
Irina Aksyonchik, an analyst with the ByAction initiative , told “Svaboda” that in the first half of 2026, the organization’s volunteers had already recorded more denials than in all of 2025.
According to the expert, immigration courts hearing cases involving Belarusian citizens seeking asylum have begun to conclude that the human rights situation in Belarus has improved.
“We are seeing a steady trend toward a decrease in the number of positive decisions by immigration courts granting Belarusian citizens refugee status in the U.S.,” says Irina Aksyonchik.
The expert adds that, according to her information, at least 78 Belarusian citizens were placed in detention centers (U.S. immigration prisons) in 2025. By comparison: in 2024, the ByAction initiative was aware of 13 such cases. In the first two months of 2026, 27 Belarusian citizens are known to have been arrested.
Those involved in such cases do not always want their stories made public, fearing repercussions back home. As for public figures among them, there are reports of the arrest and detention in an immigration detention center of a well-known labor union leader and former employee of “Belaruskali,” Anatoly Bokun, activist Artur Senko, the family of Lev and Olga Babaevskikh, and Veronika Kozlovskaya.
In response to a request from “Radio Svaboda,” the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) stated that it does not maintain separate statistics on Belarusian citizens and advised consulting the publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
For its part, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stated that it does not track the grounds on which applicants seek asylum in its database.