In the summer of 2019, Saulo Kintu got off a plane in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and asked around about how to request asylum in the United States. Locals gave him a choice: He could climb the border fence, they said. Or Mexican authorities could give him a number, and he would wait for them to announce it, like waiting for an order at a sandwich shop.

Kintu chose the latter; he wanted to do things the right way. He took his spot in line behind roughly 15,000 other aspirants.

The Ugandan migrant stayed at a shelter called El Buen Pastor, a sweltering and dusty place where men, women, and children slept in bunks and between church pews and on the hard ground of an open-air courtyard. All of the roughly 130 individuals housed there engaged in the same agonizing vocation of biding time.

While he waited, Kintu began putting words to what would eventually become his argument for asylum in the US. A team of American pastors had visited the shelter and advised him to write about himself. On a sheet of paper, he flattened his life into a few lines: Where was he from? Why did he leave? What did he hope to do in America? He stapled to the page a photo of himself.

The allure of asylum drew masses of migrants to America’s southern border for years before the Trump administration, in January, began turning away anyone seeking refuge. Asylum has also inspired false hope: Every year for the last ten years, judges denied anywhere from half to two-thirds of asylum cases.  Presidents Biden and Trump have both sought to curb access to asylum, in disregard of US law and treaties that guarantee the right to request it.

But asylum is also one of the primary avenues by which undocumented immigrants already in the country can get right with the law. Given that three in four evangelicals support pathways toward citizenship for people here illegally—and that 70 percent believe the US has a moral responsibility to accept those fleeing persecution—we might look to Kintu’s case as a kind of scorecard for how America’s immigration system measures up on these priorities.

Or, as the Trump administration each week arrests thousands of immigrants without criminal records, upending life for any of them seeking legal status, we might simply ask: What happens next?

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Kintu had what lawyers call “good facts.”

For starters, he had worked in Uganda as a radio host for Christian and secular stations. The country’s government had a history of violence against journalists like him. It tried to intimidate them, inviting broadcasters to regular meetings, for example, where officials laid out which stories were acceptable for reporters to pursue and which were not. “Those that do not go to the meetings have always faced the music,” Kintu told me during one of several conversations about his experience. “You understand?”

Kintu’s profession earned him membership in a “particular social group” targeted for persecution, an essential qualification to win asylum under US law.

A second qualification: Kintu could testify to his own torture.

On a Friday night shortly before Christmas in 2018, Kintu was walking out of the radio station in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, where he hosted a weekly politics talk show. A pair of police officers approached him in the dark and asked if he was the man who interviewed politicians.

“We have recordings,” they told him. Recordings of listeners phoning into his show and criticizing Uganda’s strongman president, Yoweri Museveni. Recordings of Kintu sometimes interviewing opposition politicians. “We are giving you a warning.”

A month later, in January, someone who sounded like an elderly man begging for help knocked on the door of Kintu’s home just after midnight.

But when Kintu’s brother opened the door, the old man’s voice vanished, and soldiers rushed inside with batons and guns. They knocked Kintu down and began kicking him. They pulled him outside, put him in a truck, and drove him to a military barracks, where for two and a half months they beat him and doused him with pepper spray.

In captivity, Kintu contracted malaria. He grew so ill that his captors took him to a hospital under police guard. When the officer assigned to him stepped out of the room for a cigarette, a nurse slipped Kintu out a back door and helped him onto a motorcycle taxi that carried him out of the city.

A few weeks later, in March 2019, Kintu boarded a series of flights that took him to Mexico City. From there he stumbled along a circuitous route north to the US-Mexico border.

Crucially, Kintu held one more high card in his play for asylum: He could prove he was afraid to go back to Uganda, what the law calls a “well-founded fear” of future persecution.

Kintu’s father and brother called him in Mexico and whispered: Strange people still came around the house, talking about radio recordings and asking where Kintu was. The police summoned his brother to the station every month to interrogate him.

Three key ingredients: government persecution, membership in a targeted group, and fear of return. Kintu’s case had them all.

One final tragedy helped put the wind at Kintu’s back. In September 2019, another Ugandan at El Buen Pastor died from a cocktail of sepsis, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. Her fellow migrants alleged that local doctors failed to provide appropriate care. A group of Ugandans, including Kintu, hiked to the Paso del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso and complained to US Border Patrol that Mexican authorities were mistreating them. (Local police had robbed Kintu of the last of his cash.) The Ugandans argued they could not shelter in Juárez any longer or they might die, too. They pleaded to be allowed to request asylum.

To their surprise, border agents waved them through.

The practice of “metering”—in which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) assigned Kintu a place in a queue before turning him away—was common along the southern border. CBP has since abandoned the policy, which courts ruled illegal.

In Kintu’s case, however, the choice to wait in line gifted him with an “inspected entry,” an event in the official record demonstrating that he was following the rules.

So when Kintu entered CBP custody, he possessed about as strong a case for asylum as a migrant can. That was lost on him, of course. What did he know of American laws? “I was just ready to get in and tell my story,” said Kintu, who asked to use his tribal name instead of his English name for fear of the Ugandan government.

All he needed was some help putting his story in writing and steering it into the bewildering machinery of US immigration.

Even so, it would take Kintu more than three years, thousands of dollars, and at least six legal representatives to make it through the system.

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Veterans of immigration law know that three years is nothing. In fiscal year 2024, successful asylum cases took an average of 1,451 days—nearly four years—to filter through America’s immigration courts. In some months, judges granted asylum to migrants whose cases had languished for a decade.

Asylum is not the only option—or even the most significant option—for immigrants to be in the United States “the right way.” Most immigrants nowadays come because resident family members petition for visas on their behalf. In 2024, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) approved more than three-quarters of a million immigrant visas for relatives and fiancées.

But for the undocumented, any route toward becoming legal is an overwhelmingly uphill climb through immigration courts. Last year, judges informed more than 300,000 immigrants that they were ineligible for status of any kind. They didn’t qualify as part of a persecuted group. They weren’t related to the right people. They didn’t have employers sponsoring them. For every immigrant granted asylum in 2024, nine were ordered deported.

“We expect immigrants to have legal status,” said Erin Hall, executive director of Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic in Indianapolis. “It’s like, Well, do you know how hard that actually is?”

In cases where the undocumented do have legitimate claims to stay, what determines whether they get papers is largely whether they find legal representation. Court data show that, in cases closed during 2024, 77 percent of immigrants who faced deportation for entering the country illegally but who had a lawyer were permitted to remain. Other studies have found that immigrants in detention who have legal counsel double their odds of getting relief.

It’s possible, in theory, for migrants to manage their own cases. Nonprofit groups in recent years have rolled out more educational offerings for legal DIYers, including federally funded programs the Trump administration axed earlier this year then, days later, abruptly reinstated. But “immigration law is notoriously technical, and there are all sorts of ways to screw things up,” said Maureen Sweeney, an immigration law professor at the University of Maryland who previously worked at Catholic Charities.

When do you file a form with USCIS, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and when do you file with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which belongs to the Department of Justice? When will applying for one exemption disqualify you from a potentially better one? If Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rolls out a policy to arrest people at interviews for marriage green cards, will you learn about it before it’s too late?

Just north of Indianapolis, Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic employs nine full-time immigration staff members at a beige church outreach center wrapped in trees. Hall has one team member spend part of each day simply tracking unending revisions to immigration law, such as updates to the 600-page manual that governs immigration court proceedings. “We have an administrative agency that literally changes the practice daily. We’re going to add this rule, change this form, no longer accept this, change this process,” Hall told me. “It just makes it so difficult.”

The quantity of information barraging immigration lawyers has always been daunting. With the new Trump administration, the deluge has turned suffocating. “It’s not just federal executive orders but our state executive orders and policy memos,” said Angelin Fisher, an attorney at the Indianapolis clinic. “There’s internal agency things that are happening as well—some that get leaked, some that don’t.”

Without help, undocumented immigrants are left to navigate a labyrinthine system on their own, usually in a foreign language, and always at their own risk. “Being represented is always better than being unrepresented,” Fisher said.

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During five months of ICE detention, Kintu read 25 books. He read Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. (“It helped in restoring my faith.”) But Kintu’s favorite books to check out from the detention center library were crime novels. At the end of every murder mystery, the characters went to court. Kintu had never been in a courtroom; he wanted to know how to address a judge and how to respond.

“These books, they helped me with my vocabulary. I used words like ostensibly,” Kintu said. “I think the judge didn’t think I would use words like that.”

In late 2019, after several weeks in various ICE facilities—including two nights shivering in a cold room migrants called “the freezer”—Kintu was moved to the Otero County Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico. Human rights groups have reported that detention at Otero “amounts to torture,” citing complaints of unsanitary conditions and lack of food and water. But for his part, Kintu saw it as an upgrade from sheltering in Mexico. He thought the meals were decent, and he watched TV news.

A few weeks in, Kintu had a three-hour phone call with an asylum officer, what’s known as a credible fear interview. He also phoned an American missionary whose number he had memorized when she visited him in Juárez. She arranged for a pro bono lawyer in El Paso, about half an hour away, to take his case.

Most detained migrants don’t stumble upon legal counsel so readily. Detention complicates a case, such that representing clients in ICE facilities is its own specialty within immigration law. Lawyers often must move swiftly to prevent clients from being deported. Detainees can call out, but lawyers and relatives cannot easily call in. Judges at detention facilities have their own protocols.

The vast majority of lawyers avoid detained cases. “They are just really hard and cumbersome, and you have to be really willing to work,” said Angela Adams, an immigration attorney in Indianapolis who has mostly stopped representing clients in detention. Lawyers need to be available day and night, she said. They need relationships with agents. “It’s better off to get an immigration attorney who knows the ICE officers, who can pick up the phone and be like, ‘Hey, man.’ I can’t do that.”

There are no public defenders in immigration court—the Sixth Amendment guarantees counsel for accused criminals but not for immigrants. Private-practice immigration attorneys charge as much as $20,000 to represent detained clients, a sum few in detention can afford. So nonprofit groups handle the bulk of detained casework.

At some detention centers, such as those along the southwest border, immigrant-rights groups and pro bono lawyers pay regular visits, apprising detainees of their options and connecting them with representation. At other ICE facilities, especially in the US interior, immigrants may find only a list of phone numbers posted in a cell. Dialing them often resembles pulling the handle on a legal-counsel slot machine.

“The reality is, there is not capacity to represent everybody,” said Sweeney, whose law students at the University of Maryland sometimes represent detained immigrants. “Especially in detained cases.”

ICE locates many of its largest facilities in legal deserts. The agency transfers detainees between centers based on its own logistical needs, often without warning and sometimes across the country, creating nightmares for the detainees’ lawyers. If you are taken to the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi—ICE’s largest detention facility, currently housing more than 2,000 immigrants—the nearest nonprofit legal group that might take your case is a five-hour drive away in Memphis.

“Detention equals a deprivation of due process,” Sweeney said. “It’s harder to gather documents. It’s harder to talk to witnesses. You show up in court probably on a video screen as opposed to in person, which makes it much harder for you to convince the judge that you’re a trustworthy person.”

In truth, for some immigrants, detention is a worse outcome than deportation. That’s what concerns many lawyers about the Trump administration’s promised mass deportations. Immigrants can’t just be whisked away overnight; red tape and logistical snags and the right to legal appeals exert a gravitational pull that tends to keep detainees in custody longer than necessary. Mass deportation could, in practice, simply amount to mass detention.

“I have no doubt they’re going to keep as many people locked up as they can,” Sweeney said. Across the country, the number of detentions has grown to its highest level since Trump’s first term. ICE was holding nearly 44,000 detainees at the end of February, according to government data. Despite the administration’s pledge to focus on violent criminals, more than half of immigrants arrested this year had no criminal record.

While detained in New Mexico, Kintu appeared three times in court. At his first hearing, the judge told Kintu he had to remain in detention while his case was processed because he was a flight risk—a common designation for migrants with no community ties. ICE assumes that loners are more likely to miss their immigration hearings.

At Kintu’s second court hearing, his lawyer failed to appear because of a snow storm in El Paso. “After some time, I learned that it does not usually snow in Texas,” Kintu said. In detention, such glitches rattle nerves. The longer Kintu was there, one of his lawyers told me, the greater his risk was of being sent back to a place where he might be killed. At night, Kintu would wake when agents came into cells to take fellow detainees and put them on deportation flights.

By the time of Kintu’s third court hearing in March 2020, a network of churches had gone to work on his behalf. A ministry passed his information to Heather Ghormley, an Anglican pastor in South Bend, Indiana, who located a family willing to house and sponsor him while his asylum case progressed.

“As a pastor, as a Christian, I really don’t want people to have to go through detention,” Ghormley said. “It’s not like prison. It’s worse.”

The judge agreed to release Kintu into the family’s care on a $7,500 bond. It was an unnecessary condition: ICE’s detention guidelines did not require bond for an asylum seeker with a clean record and a sponsor. Kintu said his host family, a Mennonite couple then in their late 70s, posted the bond.

A full year after escaping Uganda, Kintu boarded a plane in El Paso and flew north to Indiana, at the mercy of a pair of strangers and carrying a $10,000 debt his family had accrued sending him to the US.

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In South Bend, Kintu wanted a job. He needed to cover his children’s schooling in Uganda and pay back what his family had borrowed. But to get a job, Kintu needed a work permit. The Mennonite congregation, which became Kintu’s church family, helped him find representation at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), a pro bono law firm based in Chicago. Lawyers there began working on his asylum case and drafting the paperwork for his work permit.

An applicant for asylum can request a work permit after 150 days; USCIS must process the application within a month. For reasons Kintu still does not understand—maybe paperwork delays, maybe someone filed at the wrong time—two years passed before his permit was approved. From 2020 to 2022, Kintu depended on his host family and his church for everything. “Life was so hard without a job,” he said. Unable to earn income, he went back to school for his GED.

Meanwhile, Kintu’s first lawyer left NIJC. Another lawyer there took up his case. Soon that lawyer also left, and NIJC assigned him a third. Support staff members rolled on and off his team, Kintu said, and at one point another lawyer from an outside firm in Chicago joined his case.

Burnout and turnover are high at nonprofit immigration practices. More than 13 million undocumented immigrants in the US compete for the attention of roughly 9,500 lawyers and other government-approved legal representatives. Because there are not enough lawyers to go around, offices field more inquiries than they can possibly get to.

“There are hundreds of calls to us every month that we have to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, we don’t have capacity to help you,’” said Hall, at the Indianapolis legal clinic. The shortage is growing more acute: Nationally, the share of individuals facing potential deportation without representation rose from 57 percent in 2021 to 67 percent in 2024.

Churches are slowly stepping in to help fill the representation gap. Immigrant Connection, a Wesleyan network of church-based legal providers, has coached dozens of congregations over the past decade through launching and running an immigration legal-services ministry.

Director Zach Szmara said churches make ideal providers, thanks to a unique Department of Justice provision that allows nonlawyers to represent immigration clients after completing a certification process. They need only office space and a couple of folks willing to work part-time. Congregations can help immigrants gain status and keep status. “Churches get using tax professionals,” Szmara said. “It’s the same thing with immigrants. They need guides. They need an expert walking beside them.”

As Kintu’s case moved forward, his legal team assembled a standard asylum toolset. Lawyers interviewed his relatives and compiled testimonies. They collected photographs of tortured journalists in Uganda. They drafted reports about Ugandan history and politics. These things they would use to argue before a judge and against attorneys representing ICE that Kintu merited relief.

In the fall of 2021, Kintu’s sponsors twice drove him to hearings at a Chicago courthouse, each one requiring a three-hour round trip. At the first hearing, the government’s attorney failed to show. When the judge got her on a video call, she apologized. She said the government was not ready and needed more time. The judge scheduled another hearing for a month later. At that one, the attorney said she had family issues and was still not ready. The judge, according to Kintu, was irate. She requested a new attorney and gave ICE one more month to prepare its defense against Kintu’s petition.

Lawyers often encounter chaos in immigration court. ICE, like the people it aims to deport, also suffers from a chronic representation shortage. In 2024, the government’s immigration legal arm, the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, employed around 1,700 attorneys to manage a growing backlog of more than 3.5 million immigration cases. That’s upward of 2,000 cases apiece.

On February 9, 2023, Kintu appeared at the Chicago immigration court for the last time. Two members of his legal team sat beside him and helped him answer questions from the judge and from the government’s new attorney. At one point Kintu used the word bamboozled, a choice piece of vocabulary he had picked up from his detention reading, and the judge laughed.

During cross-examination, the attorney for ICE caught Kintu off guard by asking if, on the radio, he had ever interviewed members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the terrorist group founded by Joseph Kony that fled Uganda nearly 20 years ago. “I told him that during that time I was a young boy. I was in elementary school,” Kintu said. “How could I do that?” The attorney asked the judge for another extension to further review Kintu’s file.

This time, the judge refused. She signed Kintu’s asylum papers and ordered him to go tell his sponsors the news.

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Once Kintu’s work permit arrived, he tried to find a job in American radio. But he was told his strong accent wasn’t marketable. He got certified as a nursing assistant instead and now works nights at a hospital in South Bend. He moved out from his sponsors’ home and rents his own apartment.

Kintu has not seen his wife or kids in six years, except on video calls. He’s trying to bring them to America—with help from a whole new set of lawyers at NIJC. Asylees, like refugees, can petition to have their spouses and unmarried children join them. Kintu was told approval might take around 6 months; so far, he’s waited 15. He’s called his congressional office. He’s done all he can. “Patience pays, but it pays by pains,” he said.

America’s immigration legal framework is, if nothing else, a national test of patience. Immigration practice has long been viewed as the grunt work of the legal profession—grueling hours at a social worker’s salary. President Trump’s immigration crackdown, however, is persuading some young lawyers and students to see it differently. Legal clinics across the country say they’ve gotten more calls in recent months from attorneys in other fields offering to volunteer. “There’s an upswing of interest,” Sweeney said. “It now feels like the frontlines of civil rights work.”

Ghormley is one who stepped to the frontlines. She pastors Tree of Life Anglican Church in South Bend. Years ago, when she first heard Kintu’s story and helped place him with a sponsor family, she had been helping Anglican churches across the country grow their immigrant ministries.

Tree of Life is small, and Ghormley has long worked other jobs on the side—as a teacher, as a college professor. She had done some immigration law part-time, but after the 2024 election she dove in. Now she works immigration cases around 30 hours a week when she’s not pastoring her small church. “The shortage is just so bad, and we need to do as much as we can.”

When Kintu was cleared to apply for permanent residency, he could have used his other lawyers. But he came to Ghormley for help instead. “I could get to his case a lot faster,” she said.

Earlier this month, Ghormley held the fruits of her labor in her own hand, when she delivered Kintu his freshly minted green card. It’s actually green.

“We have a mandate from our Lord Jesus Christ to welcome the stranger as we would welcome him,” Ghormley said. “Part of welcome and hospitality in the United States is helping people navigate our really complex legal system.”

Sometimes help comes as hard truth. Several legal representatives I spoke with said they tell clients when deportation is their only likely outcome. To clients struggling with substance abuse or those who are alone and have few viable options to remain in the US, Ghormley has said, “If it’s at all possible for you to go home, I want you to think about that, because you need to be around a community that cares about you.”

None has taken her advice yet. But the job fosters thick skin. Ghormley has clients whose families have been martyred. She has clients who have wasted all their money on uncertified legal providers, known as notarios, who can’t actually represent cases to federal authorities. She has clients who tell her, as a pastor, things they say they have never told another soul before.

“There are a lot of predators out there,” Ghormley said. “People trust churches. We are here for them, not for money.”

Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.