By Estuardo Cifuentes, Project Corazon Program Manager
The Trump administration is preparing a new rule that would block asylum seekers from obtaining work permits while their cases are pending. If enacted, this change would eliminate one of the only remaining lifelines in the U.S. asylum system.
For over 30 years, asylum seekers have been able to apply for work permits after a certain waiting period. This proposal would undo that, turning survival into a privilege, and waiting into a punishment.
This isn’t about fraud prevention or fixing the system. It’s about cruelty. This plan doesn’t say, “Go away.” It says, “Starve while we decide if you’re allowed to stay.” And in that phrase lies the true intent: to use hunger, desperation, and homelessness as a deterrent. Not a technical reform, but a strategy of suffering.
At Project Corazon, we’ve worked with thousands of asylum seekers. We’ve seen what happens when people are denied the ability to work: families pushed to the brink, children going hungry, people forced into unsafe conditions just to survive. The right to work isn’t a luxury—it’s the only thing standing between legal limbo and total collapse.
Far from being a bureaucratic adjustment, this proposal is a deliberate escalation of cruelty as a strategy of deterrence. It is a campaign of physical, emotional, and economic exhaustion. A sustained experiment in inflicted suffering, designed to break the spirit of those who dare to seek international protection.
This policy would trap asylum seekers in a perfect paradox: they are required to wait—often for years, with no control over the process—while being denied the means to survive.
Hunger becomes a method of deterrence. Need becomes a tool of control. People are forced into extreme vulnerability, putting their physical and emotional health at risk. Ultimately, they are pushed to consider returning to the very country they fled—even if what awaits them there is violence, persecution, or death.
But this is not an isolated attack. It is part of a broader doctrine that now permeates the entire immigration system: the doctrine of punishment. It is no longer enough to shut the border, build walls, or accelerate deportations. Now, the goal is to make the mere act of seeking asylum—a right recognized under international law—an unbearable experience.
They can’t reject everyone, but they want everyone to regret having come. What’s being punished is not just the act of migration, but the audacity of having hoped for dignity.
And that puts something even deeper at risk than immigration policy—it threatens the very principle of asylum. The idea that those fleeing violence deserve to be heard. That a nation can protect its borders without dehumanizing those who arrive. That exile should not condemn a person to hunger, silence, and oblivion. Asylum is not a favor, nor an economic benefit. It is a moral and legal commitment to those who flee violence, persecution, and injustice. It is a recognition that the right to seek refuge is a core value of any democratic society.
To deny these individuals the right to work is to deny their humanity. It is to strip them of autonomy, dignity, and a future. And it sends a chilling message: that compassion is no longer a cornerstone of public policy; that the suffering of others can be weaponized as a tool of control.
“No one crosses a continent with their children, risks kidnapping, deserts, and rejection, just to earn minimum wage. Most people seeking asylum do so because we face real threats: political persecution, gender-based violence, attacks based on sexual orientation, armed conflict, institutional collapse. We do it because staying behind means dying.”
These policies will not stop migration. They will only make it more desperate, more dangerous, more degrading. They will increase human trafficking, exploitation, and abuse. They will turn the search for safety into a sentence of hunger, silence, and erasure.
The right to work while awaiting an asylum decision is not a luxury. It is an act of justice. It is the difference between resilience and collapse. Between hope and despair.
As a political asylee, I know what it means to live in that legal limbo. I’ve walked that path, I’ve endured that wait, and I’ve seen hundreds of people get lost in it. That’s why I know what’s truly at stake here—it’s not just a rule or a policy. It’s the lives of thousands of human beings.