Trump’s Shameful Effort to Deport Russian Dissenters Fleeing Putin

As a recent Boston Globe article explains, the Trump Administration is trying to deport Russian dissenters against Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression:

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?”….

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.”

I previously wrote about this issue back in September of last year, and the points I made still apply:

[A]busive treatment of Russian dissenters fleeing Putin occurred under Biden, as well. And I condemned it at the time. But Trump’s expansion of the deportations and collaboration with the Russian government is worse.

Beginning soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I have argued the US and other Western nations should open their doors to Russians fleeing Putin’s increasingly repressive regime. It’s the right thing to do for both moral and strategic reasons. Morally, it’s wrong to bar people fleeing brutal repression and, in some cases, seeking to avoid being drafted into an unjust war of aggression. Strategically, we benefit from depriving Putin of valuable manpower and from enabling the Russian refugees to contribute to our economy and scientific innovation (Russian immigrants and refugees are disproportionate contributors to the latter).  I have also advocated for Ukrainian refugees, whose interest I cannot easily be accused of neglecting.

I would add that the 1980 Refugee Act gives anyone crossing a US border the right to apply for asylum, and Russians fleeing persecution for opposing Putin’s war have an obviously strong case for getting it. US law grants asylum to people who enter the United States and meet the legal definition of “refugee,” defined as “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality…. and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” Russians threatened with imprisonment and other repression because they oppose Putin’s war undeniably qualify as victims of persecution based on “political opinion.” In today’s Russia, you can get a prison sentence for spreading what the Kremlin calls “false information” about the war, which includes such things as referring to Putin’s “special military operation” as a “war.”

Elsewhere, I have made the case for expanding the legal definition of “refugee,” which excludes many people fleeing various types of horrific violence and oppression. But Russian war dissenters clearly qualify under the current narrow definition.

In sum, Trump’s effort to deport Russian anti-Ukraine War dissenters is simultaneously unjust, illegal, and harmful to US foreign policy interests.  But at least you can say Trump is consistent. His abusive treatment of Russian dissenters is of a piece with his efforts to deport people seeking to escape other oppressive anti-American regimes, such as those who fled Cuba and Venezuela, Iranian Christians, and Afghans who escaped the Taliban (including many who aided the US during the war).

Conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby makes some additional related points in this article.