‘I feel like I’m on death row, waiting for my lethal injection,’’ Vladislav Krasnov told me.

Krasnov was talking to me from Louisiana, where there are 56 people waiting for capital punishment. But he was not one of them. He’s a Russian political activist who publicly opposed Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, feared imprisonment in Russia as a result, and fled to the United States seeking asylum. Now he has been detained and threatened with deportation by the Trump administration.

After more than a year in various detention centers, Krasnov was scheduled to be flown a few hours later back to Moscow from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Louisiana where he had been held for two weeks. He told me, “I fled … to the US because I thought the US protected people like me.’’ A short time later, while he was in shackles waiting to be taken onto a plane, he was granted an emergency stay by the Board of Immigration Appeals.

While Krasnov awaits a resolution, other Russian asylum seekers are being rejected despite the likelihood they will be arrested back in Russia. It started during the Biden administration but has accelerated in President Trump’s second term. Since Trump returned to office last year, US immigration authorities have deported possibly hundreds of Russian asylum seekers. This is according to estimates by Russian America for Democracy in Russia (RADR), an organization that assists antiwar Russians with finding legal aid and that has analyzed ICE data.

Russian refugee seekers deported by the administration include a 25-year-old man who defected from the army, was arrested upon his return to Moscow, and was charged with desertion. An opposition activist named Leonid Melekhin was sent to prison straight from the airport after his deportation flight from the United States in 2025, and he now faces a lengthy prison sentence. RADR estimates that another 1,000 Russians who have requested asylum are being held in US detention facilities.

Krasnov applied for asylum at the US-Mexican border back in 2023. He spent more than 14 months in detention until he was released in October 2024 after he joined a class-action lawsuit challenging unlawful detentions. Then he was detained once again during a check-in with ICE in February 2025.

Now he is certain that he will be sent to prison the moment he lands in Russia. One common fate for Russian prisoners is to be sent off to the Ukraine war. At one point, Russian prisoners accounted for 18 percent of all Russian casualties in the war. It baffles Krasnov that the Trump administration is providing more foot soldiers to fight against Ukraine, a US ally. “In Russia, every man is a potential cog in Putin’s war machine. Why give him more cogs?’’ Krasnov asked me in Russian during a phone call from the detention center.

The Russians who have been detained by ICE include many immigrants who drive trucks for a living. It is a profession that has made them easy targets for immigration officials, who prowl the roads looking for suspicious-looking drivers or are able to look at their documents at checkpoints. “ICE officers are simply rounding up those who go right into their hands. Don’t even have to make an effort to hunt anyone down,’’ says Anastasia Topilina, whose husband, Alexander, was detained at a checkpoint in Laredo, Texas.

Alexander Topilin was being held in that detention center alongside about 20 other Russian-speaking truck drivers. His family had been forced to flee Russia because of threats from the police, who had singled Topilin out for his years-long participation in anti-Putin protests. After being detained at one of the rallies, he says that he was strangled with a “terry cloth towel’’ to force him to confess to trying to “overthrow the current president.’’

“By 2023, I had been fired from my job,’’ he told me from his detention center. “I received a draft summons. The police threatened to take our daughter away. Our home was raided — searches that left my wife weeping so uncontrollably that I couldn’t calm her down. I realized that I simply wouldn’t be able to protect my family if we remained in Russia.’’

The Topilins legally crossed the border under the US government’s CBP One program, introduced by the Biden administration to help asylum seekers. So when Topilin was stopped on Nov. 1, 2025, his immigration papers and work permit, which he always carried with him, were in order. “However, the officer said I was in the US illegally and that my documents were fake,’’ Topilin recalls. He managed to mention that he had applied for asylum, but they simply handcuffed him — “with such insolent, condescending grins,’’ Topilin said. “The Russian police had the same expression.’’

Wallie Mason, a lawyer representing Krasnov and an asylum practitioner with 30 years of experience, called Toplin’s detention illegal. “People are totally within their rights to be in the country,’’ she told me. “They have applications pending; they have work authorization. However, they’re still being detained.’’

“What is happening right now feels like a surreal nightmare,’’ Topilin told me. ’’Yet I hope it will not last long in this country, which is, after all, a good one. I continue to believe that the United States is the last place on the map where justice can be found.’’

On March 9, Topilin was released on a habeas corpus writ challenging his unlawful detention — a petition that Anastasia herself had drafted and filed, acting on the advice of the wife of another Russian truck driver who was also being held in detention. “I had to turn to ChatGPT because we had run out of money for lawyers. I just begged them to release my husband, by any means possible. Our daughter was crying so much. After all, how do you explain to a child why their dad is being kept in prison when he hasn’t done anything wrong?’’ Topilina said.

Topilin is now waiting for his asylum hearing to be scheduled. He’s wearing an ankle monitor and has to report regularly to the ICE office in Sacramento.

I spoke to Krasnov on the same day Topilin was released. He called me just hours before his plane to Russia was to depart.

During our 20-minute conversation, he described how he had spent two months in Mexico awaiting an official invitation to the United States — which, at the time, could be arranged through the government’s CBP One app — and how, immediately after crossing the border on his scheduled day, he was arrested and sent to a detention center.

For his asylum hearings before an immigration judge, he said he provided copious evidence of his persecution in Russia, including court records, photos, and videos of himself being arrested in Moscow. But it wasn’t enough for the judge, Cassie Thogersen, to find him credible at his March 1, 2024, hearing. According to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, between 2020 and 2026 Thogersen denied about 90 percent of asylum claims that came before her.

In 2025, Russians received a record number of asylum rejections — 31 percent of the cases reviewed. This was the highest rate in the last 24 years, according to a Russian-language publication, Verstka, which analyzed data from the TRAC project, an initiative dedicated to collecting information on asylum seekers in the United States. Mason, Krasnov’s lawyer, believes the immigration judges have become far more skeptical of Russians’ claims of political oppression.

“My feeling is that Trump’s administration intends to probably eliminate asylum,’’ Mason told me. Indeed, the administration has fired more than 110 immigration judges. Mason said she was “appalled’’ after hearing some remaining immigration judges argue that “Russia has a right to conscription, so you’ve got to go to the military.’’

Krasnov appealed his asylum denial and was required to check in with officials while his case was pending. During one of the visits to an ICE office in downtown Los Angeles, five ICE officers were waiting for him. Mason recalls that they looked excited as Krasnov entered, as if they were thinking “Oh, good, we have one here.’’

“They’re very much quota-based,’’ Mason said. “I tried to argue that I’m trying to reopen his whole case with the [Board of Immigration Appeals]. But they put him in handcuffs right away. They had made the decision before we went in there.’’

Just 90 minutes before his deportation flight was scheduled to depart on March 9, Krasnov was granted an emergency stay pending another appeal.

But on that very same flight, four other Russian antiwar activists and draft dodgers — one of whom already faces criminal charges at home — were flown out of the United States to Uzbekistan and Moldova. Some of them have since managed to reach third countries, while others are still trying to obtain humanitarian visas to the EU.

If Krasnov’s appeals of his asylum case are ultimately denied, he will be deported. “I definitely won’t be walking out of the airport in Moscow a free man,’’ Krasnov says. “I’ll share Melekhin’s fate and get detained the moment I land.’’

Lilia Yapparova is a Russian journalist. She can be reached at lilia.yapparova@globe.com.