In a saner America, Viktor Murikhanov would have been welcomed as a hero. That isn’t how it has worked out.
Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Murikhanov—a Russian citizen living in Irkutsk, 2,600 miles east of Moscow—took part in anti-war protests and posted a video criticizing the invasion. He knew that his actions would come at a cost, and he also knew that they were unlikely to receive much publicity. But he did what he did because he knew it was right. In an interview, he told me: “I just can’t accept it. Peaceful people are being killed, cities are being destroyed, millions of refugees are fleeing. And Russia is the aggressor.”
The authorities soon opened a criminal case against him. Murikhanov fled the country, and in September 2022 he appeared at the U.S.-Mexican border, where he filed a proper request for political asylum. Last month, at his second hearing before an immigration court, the judge rejected his application, saying that the evidence linking Murikhanov to any Russian anti-war group and anti-war protests was inconclusive. Murikhanov responded by filing an appeal that will allow him, his wife, and their young son to remain in the country for the moment. But he is all too aware that they could be on a deportation flight to Russia at any time. Upon his arrival in Russia, he could either face arrest—or forcible induction into the army and transfer to the front line in Ukraine. “It’s a terrifying prospect,” he said.
Things could be worse; at least he hasn’t been arrested yet. Dmitry Valuev, head of Russian America for Democracy in Russia, estimated that around 1,000 Russians are currently languishing in detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is unclear how many of them are escaping actual persecution rather than leaving for economic reasons or fleeing punishment for non-political crimes. All of them face an imminent risk of deportation. Thousands of others, like Murikhanov and his family, could soon follow. On Aug. 27, ICE put somewhere between 30 and 60 Russians—the precise number has not been revealed—on a plane and dispatched them back to their country. At least one of them, a military deserter named Artyom Vovchenko, was arrested immediately upon arrival. The others were interrogated by the security services and at least some of them were later released, at least for now.
Émigré Russian human rights organizations are deeply worried about the situation. They say that many genuine opponents of Putin’s regime are now threatened by the Trump administration’s immigration policies. They include people who are already in detention, in some cases separated from their children, who have been given to foster families. Three leading Russian dissidents, including the late Alexei Navalny’s wife, Yulia, recently sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that pleaded with him to give safe haven to Russian asylum-seekers threatened by deportation in the United States. (The Canadians responded by pointing to a U.S.-Canadian agreement that prevents each country from sending their asylum-seekers to the other.)
All of this raises a question: Why should we care? Surely, some might say, the fate of Russian dissidents is the least of our worries. What about the thousands of Ukrainian refugees whom the Trump administration has been threatening to deport? And how do we know that these Russians are the dissidents that they claim to be? Surely some of them are run-of-the-mill economic migrants—as well as fraudsters, criminals, or security risks? And aren’t some of these self-proclaimed liberals actually just as ethnonationalist and imperialist as the regime, as evidenced by recent comments by opposition figures, now living in the West, that have caused public outcry in Ukraine and elsewhere? Perhaps it would be better to just leave them to their fate?
Let’s take each of these in turn. Some 500,000 Ukrainian refugees have been admitted to the United States since the start of the full-scale invasion, and they should be given the right to stay until the war is over. Simply arguing that Ukraine is a democracy, as some immigration courts have done, is not enough; it is indeed a democracy, but it remains profoundly unsafe, given Moscow’s penchant for attacking civilian targets. But this is one area where we shouldn’t be pitting Ukrainians and Russians against each other. If it can be determined that a Russian is seeking asylum in this country for opposing the regime back home, he or she should be given a chance to stay. Some Russian pro-democracy activists recently echoed the dissidents’ appeal to Carney by asking for similar protection for Ukrainian refugees who are in danger of deportation from the United States.
And what about that issue of bona fides? The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration data, says that 85 percent of the Russians who applied for asylum were granted it in 2024. Yet Leonid Volkov, an activist with the Anti-Corruption Foundation (a nonprofit established by Navalny), acknowledged that there were many Russians in the first large wave of asylum-seekers who were gradually found to have submitted forged documents or other faulty information with their applications; he estimated the number of faked applications at around 60 percent of the total. That helps to explain, he said, why the initially welcoming Biden administration gradually grew much tougher in its handling of Russian asylum applications. Since President Donald Trump’s return to power, Volkov said, things have gotten much worse: “Now the pendulum has swung all the way back in the other direction.” Tales of harsh treatment and brutal detention conditions are piling up.
Yet Volkov and other activists argue that verifying asylum-seeker claims is not hard. A number of European countries have mechanisms that screen the dissident credentials of asylum-seekers, often drawing on the detailed knowledge of Russian émigré organizations. The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor used to collaborate with such groups when it advised the government on asylum applications. The Trump administration has gutted that capacity—which might help to explain why officials involved in the asylum process today sometimes seem strikingly uninformed. Asylum-seekers and their supporters describe encounters with ICE officials and immigration judges who blithely describe Russia as a democracy, completely ignoring the brutal punishments meted out to critics of Putin’s authoritarian regime. It’s worth a reminder, by the way, that asylum-seekers are not illegal immigrants. Like Murikhanov, the majority duly applied using the established legal channels.
And what about the accusation that Russian dissidents just can’t be trusted? It is true that Navalny and other prominent opponents of the Kremlin have expressed nationalist opinions of various stripes. But should that be allowed to negate their demands for democracy? Any democratic opposition includes, by its very nature, a wide range of views. The priority right now should be clear: The United States should be doing whatever it takes to help Ukraine win the war and hasten Moscow’s defeat. If the Russian opposition can help to organize resistance to the regime from abroad, that should only be welcomed. (It is hard to imagine, by the way, that Putin’s regime could survive a full-scale military setback; Russia has a long history of military disasters that prompted reforms and revolutions.) But let’s not make things too complicated: Anyone who clearly supports Ukrainian victory deserves support. The best Russian dissidents—but certainly not all of them—pass that test.
Ultimately, though, it seems unlikely that the Trump administration really cares about any of these fine distinctions. The current version of its policy toward Russian asylum-seekers shows clear intent: As many as possible should be sent home. If this means collaborating even more closely with Putin’s regime, so be it. When the Aug. 27 flight stopped in Cairo on its way to Moscow, Russian FSB agents were there to greet it. They were equipped with a passenger checklist that had evidently been supplied by their American counterparts. What sort of secret agreement has Trump, his Russia negotiator Steve Witkoff, or someone else in the U.S. government made with the Russians to facilitate past and future deportations? Congress has the power to ask for the details; it should do so soon.
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