Asylum Farce for Sudanese and South Sudanese in USA

[John Ashworth]

Poor Historians

In the state’s twisted logic, being a victim of violence is reason for
deportation.

Joshua Craze
Boston Review
Winter 2026 issue

I had been staring at his medical records for a couple of hours,
reminding myself of the details of the case. Back in 2021, I wrote a
“County of Origin Expert Affidavit” for a man in Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention I’ll call Chuol (I’m using a
pseudonym to protect his privacy). For such statements, I’m supposed
to lean on my years of experience doing research in Sudan and South
Sudan—since 2010 I’ve conducted extensive fieldwork in the Horn of
Africa—to render an opinion on the likely consequences of someone
being deported to one or the other country. Chuol was born in 1987, at
the peak of Sudan’s second civil war (1983–2005), in what is now South
Sudan, rendering him vulnerable to deportation to both states. As a
child, he fled to Ethiopia, where he spent almost a decade in a
refugee camp before being resettled in Virginia in 2009.

His case file was confusing. Chuol wrote that as a child, he was
conscripted into a Christian militia, though no such organization has
ever existed in Sudan. It wasn’t clear whether his father was killed
in 1991 or 1996, or if Chuol was captured by the Sudanese government
in 2000 or 2002. His story was full of holes, and the more he
explained, the more confused I became. This was perhaps to be
expected: Chuol had a long history of psychiatric trouble, and it is
understandable that a severely mentally ill man would only have a
minimal grasp of events that had occurred when he was a child. His
medical records stated that he had trouble remembering things
accurately. A doctor’s note pondered whether he had “intellectual
disabilities” and accused him of being a “poor historian.” If you read
his testimony with sympathy, however, you can glimpse a reality broken
into pieces by poverty and violence, and marked by the absences that
trauma leaves. The holes are the story. That didn’t stop government
lawyers from arguing that his case should be thrown out. For
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staffers looking for evidence of
fraud, all the contradictions and messiness of life are invitations to
a deportation.

In 2021 Chuol’s case never made it to court, after ICE released him
from detention for reasons I never quite grasped. Three years on, he
found himself back in prison, facing deportation once again. I was
preparing to testify in his case. The situation in the Sudans had not
improved. A civil war had begun in Sudan in 2023 that had devastated
the country, turning it into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Just before he left office, Biden declared a genocide had occurred in
Darfur. People of southern Sudanese origin were being executed, their
bodies left in mass graves. In South Sudan, a government
counterinsurgency was blowing up hospitals and massacring civilians.
Neither country would be a viable home for Chuol.

Not that America had been much of a refuge since he arrived in 2009.
Chuol only had a minimal command of English, and had never really held
down a job. He had spent long periods being homeless, and had
accumulated a litany of crimes, principally theft and resisting
arrest. His “A-file,” the legal document containing his immigration
history, charts, in the clinical language of the state, his descent
into addiction and mental illness. His rap sheet meant that he would
no longer be eligible for a renewed asylum claim, which is disbarred
to all those convicted of serious crimes, no matter the situation in
their country of origin. His last hope of remaining in America was
what is known as a “Deferral of Removal” under the Convention Against
Torture. It’s a high bar. To get a DCAT ruling, as they are called, a
lawyer has to show that it is more likely than not someone will face
torture if they are deported, and that such torture has the
acquiescence or sanction of a public official. This is precisely what
was likely to happen to Chuol: the U.S. State Department and the UN
have found that torture in detention by the security services of both
countries is ubiquitous, a fact I hoped to make clear in my testimony.
But even if Chuol got DCAT, his deportation would simply be deferred,
and the matter could be re-opened at any time.

I used to get a couple of DCAT files a year, but since Trump slouched
into office last January, my caseload has gone up asymptotically. None
of the refugees whose cases I work on have actually fled the region’s
wars, despite Sudan’s status as the world’s worst displacement crisis.
Would that these refugees could reach the United States: the U.S.
resettlement program was cancelled at the beginning of Trump’s term
and Europe has hired militias to block refugees from coming north.
Those that flee Sudan tend to be warehoused in camps in the Horn of
Africa. The people whose cases I’ve been working on all came to the
United States as children in the ’80s and ’90s, when the country’s
refugee policy was more open and its concern for the Sudanese people
more deeply felt.

All these refugees have a similar story. After arriving in America,
they fell between the cracks, careening between halfway houses and
prisons, desperately looking for something onto which they could hold.
To read their files and speak to them over bad phone lines from state
prisons is to encounter fractured homes, failed schools, and fingers
lost to frostbite while drunk in Minnesota. One refugee was found
ineligible for asylum due to a “serious crime”—in this case,
assaulting an ICE officer by spitting on him as he tried to arrest
her, while she was strapped to a gurney having a psychotic episode.
None of these people understand anything about Sudan’s wars, which are
as incomprehensible to them as to their white suburban counterparts.
The only thing people like Chuol know is the name of their own ethnic
group—the very fact that, in the countries to which they may be
deported, will put their lives in danger.

________________________________

Despite the parlous situation in the Horn of Africa, I hadn’t been
successful in convincing the courts that people should not be deported
to countries like Sudan, where the American government had already
acknowledged a genocide was occurring. Being tortured or raped on
account of your ethnic or racial background proved impossible for
immigration judges in Denver or Phoenix to fathom. The centrality of
Big Pharma to American life, though, turned out to offer us unexpected
assistance. Most of the people for whom I wrote affidavits were
severely mentally ill, and had long lists of prescription medicines
accompanying their diagnoses. Neither Sudan nor South Sudan had any
means of providing care for those with psychiatric problems, and
neither country imported any of the drugs relied upon by the refugees
I was trying to assist. In the burned remnants of hospitals in El
Fasher and Old Fangak there is no Tylenol, let alone Sertraline,
Risperidone, or Mirtazapine. The lawyers for those threatened with
deportation used my affidavits to argue that to be deprived of one’s
God-given American right to antidepressants was itself a form of
torture. To my astonishment, this argument convinced judges. We won,
and won again, and kept winning. If imagining racialized violence
abroad was beyond the U.S. immigration system, the iniquities of the
country’s health care meant that judges could at least empathize with
being deprived of drugs, and to such an extent that this deprivation
could be the basis for DCAT decisions. I hoped we could obtain such a
ruling for Chuol.

I’d been asked to testify in his deportation proceedings back in
October 2024, but the case had kept getting rescheduled, leaving Chuol
languishing in jail. It was June 2025 by the time his file finally
came to the docket, and I was in Watamu, Kenya, a quiet town on the
Indian Ocean. Reading over Chuol’s medical records, I was struck by
his obsession with white meat. In note after note, Chuol demanded
chicken. “When you’re let me get the chicken please medice,” one entry
read. His repeated demands would have been inexplicable if not for a
later note in which Chuol told his doctors that he vomits when he eats
anything else. In one three-month period in prison, he lost eight
pounds. Maybe he has Crohn’s disease, one friend speculated. It was
hard to tell from his medical records. Ailments surged up and then
disappeared without a trace. One note he wrote reads:

MEDICAL NEED (Necesidad Medica/Bezwen Medikal):

I can sleep all time

Make Dream like to kill somebody

i need more sleeping pill fore sleep never go sleep for ever

Mental hleath

As I looked through Chuol’s file I kept checking my watch. The trial
was due to begin at 2 p.m. Eastern Time—9 p.m. on the Kenyan coast. I
joined the virtual courtroom early, only to hear Chuol’s lawyer
chatting with his DHS counterpart. When I first started doing
deportation cases, the degree of collaboration between what I thought
were dueling opponents shocked me. The final decisions always felt
like a conversation—a way of getting the two lawyers and the judge to
agree together on a reasonable account of what should happen. Nothing
about this felt reasonable. How could they discuss deporting someone
who had only known America—and encountered the core of America’s
problems, the racism and the homelessness and the willful blindness—to
a country that didn’t even exist when Chuol last set foot in Africa,
sixteen years ago? The lawyers were talking like old friends.

DHS: If he gets DCAT, we might just send him to Libya.

Chuol’s lawyer: Who is handling the removal proceedings from Djibouti?
[Eight migrants were being held there, pending legal appeal, on their
way to South Sudan, though most of them—Vietnamese and Laotians among
their number—had no link to the country.]

When the lawyers realized I was online, their friendly chatter ceased.

The courtroom was one square of the virtual grid. Another was occupied
by Chuol’s translator. Chuol himself was absent. He had been
transferred to Texas, and the prison guards didn’t seem able to get
him to a conference room to attend his own hearing. Regardless, the
case continued. The DHS lawyer had been tardy in filing some
paperwork, and the judge berated him. “When there are no consequences
for actions, then people will do whatever they want,” she told the
courtroom.

After I was called to the virtual stand and swore my oath, I had to
prove my eligibility to be an expert witness. After twenty years of
working as a conflict researcher in the Sudans, I’ve always been
recognized. The DHS lawyer seemed resigned to letting me testify, and
only wanted to insist that—as must be obvious—I am not an expert in
mental health. He proffered this point as a gotcha, as if it
invalidated what I was about to say.

Chuol’s lawyer opened proceedings. Most immigration lawyers are
harried and harassed, with too many cases and not enough time. If they
have country of origin expertise, it is in Central America, not the
Horn of Africa. Chuol’s lawyer was no exception, and while I have no
legal training, I thought his questions were poor. The Padang Dinka,
the group from which Chuol hails, were being forcibly recruited into
government militias. Instead of asking me about this, and so
establishing the particularity of Chuol’s situation, the lawyer simply
noted that militia recruitment in general was ongoing in South Sudan—a
point the DHS would later seize upon in cross-examination to establish
that the risk to Chuol was no greater than that posed to the general
population. “He might be recruited,” the DHS lawyer claimed, “but only
because everyone will be recruited.” In her ruling, the judge would
primly note that “sovereign nations have the right to enforce laws of
conscription and penalties for evasion.”

After a cursory examination by Chuol’s lawyer, my cross-examination
was held up for a moment: Chuol had finally arrived in the virtual
courtroom. He wore an oversized orange jumpsuit, and nodded as his
translator briefly explained the case to him. A prison guard slumbered
on a chair nearby.

During cross-examination, the DHS lawyer acknowledged that while Dr.
Craze had shown there are almost no mental health facilities in South
Sudan, and those that did exist in Sudan had been destroyed by the
civil war, and while yes, he conceded, there was only one psychiatric
ward in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, with only twelve beds (three were
recently broken and there was no money to replace them), and while
yes, he admitted, in Juba, if you were lucky and mentally ill, you
went to the central prison, and got chained, naked, to the floor on
which you defecated, in a dark room devoted to “the lunatics,” he
insisted that we should not be in the business of looking down at
African standards of care. That the mentally ill were beaten with
rubber hoses spiked with plastic fragments went unmentioned during his
remarks. The judge later noted in her final judgment that “torture
does not include . . . gross overcrowding and inadequate access to
food, potable water, sanitation, heating, ventilation, lighting, or
medical care.”

The cross-examination became a grandstanding performance by the DHS
lawyer. It might be the case, he continued, that there is a civil war
in Sudan, and a counterinsurgency in South Sudan, and both countries
might be in the grip of humanitarian crises, but if Chuol dies like
other Sudanese or South Sudanese, then he is simply dying, and he is
not dying because he is Chuol, because of some special reason, some
special thing, that makes him Chuol. It’s not personal. He is just
dead. And as he will die, just like other Sudanese, he is not eligible
for DCAT.

Chuol was unmoving, entirely mute.

After the cross-examination concluded, there was no redirect from
Chuol’s lawyer. I was told that I could leave, but I stayed on to hear
the closing arguments.

Chuol’s lawyer took less than five minutes to argue for DCAT. His
phrasing was generic. There was a civil war in Sudan. Conditions were
bad. Chuol shouldn’t be deported.

The DHS lawyer, in closing, made what seemed like an entirely spurious
argument. Yes, Dr. Craze has shown that it is likely that security
officers will burn Chuol with cigarettes. Yes, he will be beaten with
sticks and rubber hoses. That is unfortunate. But if Chuol is indeed
detained by national security at the airport after being deported, he
will likely not be kept in detention for long, because he is a nobody,
a nothing, not a rebel, and so not a threat to the government. (It was
no longer clear, at this point, if the lawyer was talking about Sudan
or South Sudan, not that anyone seemed to mind.) Because Chuol will
likely be quickly released from detention, he will not have been
burned with sufficient cigarettes for it to constitute torture.

The whole farce took two hours. The judge declared that she would make
a decision within thirty-one days. She told Chuol, “I will never see
you again, but I will pass my judgement to your lawyer.” Chuol’s
translator didn’t translate the message. The screen went black.

A month later, on July 8, the judge ruled that Chuol was inadmissible
for DCAT. He would be, as the ruling put it, “REMOVED to South Sudan
or Sudan.”

Joshua Craze is writing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions on war,
violence, and bureaucracy in South Sudan. His writing has also
appeared in n+1, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other places.

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/poor-historians/

END
______________________
John Ashworth

ashwor...@gmail.com

+254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile, WhatsApp and Signal)

PO Box 403 - 00206, Kiserian, Kenya