LGBT and opposition figures from Russia have been in immigration prisons in the United States for months. That’s what they’re going through there
Due to the war in Ukraine, the number of refugees from Russia has increased drastically in the United States. According to the US Border Agency, in 2021 around ten thousand Russians crossed the country’s border, then in 2022 their number increased to 36 thousand people, and in 2023 it reached the number 57 thousand.
Since at least last year, Russian citizens have been detained for a long time at the border with Mexico or in migration prisons, lawyers told ASTRA. Immigration police officers do not take into account persecution at home – neither for opposition to the government nor LGBT people. And political immigrants with children are separated from them, following the policy of the presidency of Donald Trump.
The situation at the border reached the point that on September 9, 30 applicants filed a class action lawsuit against U.S. President Joe Biden. ASTRA tells the stories of Russians who came to the United States across the southern border and were stuck in migration and most ordinary prisons for months.
“Get out of the country, you fuckers, you don’t belong here”
21-year-old Oksana (name changed) was four months pregnant when she realized she had to leave Russia. This was in February 2024, shortly after the recognition of LGBT as an “extremist organization.”
Oksana is from a same-sex family, she has two mothers. One mother worked in a bank, and there her colleagues knew about her partner. The second one had a construction business. “Since it was mostly men who worked there, no one knew, because in Russia men are mostly homophobic” says Oksana.
Oksana says that relatives and family friends knew that her two moms had a family with her. “They were fine, but outsiders… I was constantly being bullied and beaten at school because of this. There was harassment even from teachers,” Oksana recalls. Because of the growing homophobia of the Russian authorities, others have become more openly intolerant. — We had a neighbor who has been doing this lately… We couldn’t leave the house in peace. He held the car of my moms, threw himself on the hood, threatened that he would call the police, that we allegedly hit him or something else. And strangers and neighbors said, “You are like that and you don’t belong here.” They also painted the doors and walls in the entrance: “get out of the country, you don’t belong here,” they threw leaflets into mailboxes.”
Despite her young age, Oksana has always tried to help LGBT people. According to her, she looked for psychologists and raised money as a volunteer.
On the evening of February 19, Oksana and her husband were going to a private night party and a meeting of the LGBT community at the Full House club. They stayed at home — the woman felt unwell due to pregnancy. In the morning, they learned from the media that FSB officers had raided the party. In the club, they laid everyone face down on the floor. Oksana’s friends were detained by security forces. Many of the visitors had their phones taken away, from which their private videos were then leaked.
As the local newspaper Karelia news wrote, the FSB “suspects the organizers of the club not only of getting together, but also of involving new people in the community, that is, they were engaged in promoting LGBT culture,” although the event was closed.
“I thanked God we didn’t go there,” Oksana recalls.
During the raid, the FSB obtained a list of invited party participants. “There were both men and women on the shocking list. There are married and divorced people. There are mothers, even with three children,” Karelia news wrote. Oksana’s husband worked in law enforcement at that time and was also on the list.
“As soon as they found out at work that he was invited to this party, they fired him. They threatened him with prison and that he would never be hired for any other job. That’s when we realized it was time to leave Russia.”
It was decided to go to the USA together — both mothers, Oksana and her husband. They decided to get across the border with Mexico. Previously, the family applied in the official application of the US Border and Customs Service CBP-one (named after the department of Customs and Border Protection).
The CBP-one application was launched under the Biden administration to resolve the situation at the border. “With CBP-one, you seem to inform in advance: guys, I want to break your law at such and such a time and date, I will cross the border illegally: without a passport, visa, or anything,” explains Marina Sokolovskaya, a journalist and consultant on emigration to the United States. Nevertheless, immigration lawyer Raisa Stepanova notes, at the moment this is the only “legal option for crossing the border for refugees.”
Oksana and her family crossed the border on July 3, 2024. Since Oksana was already 9 months pregnant at that moment, they did not detain her. She was released without documents — only the I-94 form was left on her hands, which contains basic information about the person and information about entering the United States.
“That is, they just took me out pregnant, like that, threw me out and said, like, well, there’s a stop there, go. I couldn’t buy a SIM card without documents, I couldn’t rent a hotel without documents. If the people who came out with me hadn’t helped me, I don’t know what I would have done. Well, a pregnant woman would probably have spent the night on the street,” says Oksana.
Two mothers and the girl’s husband were placed in the Otay Mesa Detention Center migration prison in California. One of Oksana’s mothers recently suffered 2 micro-strokes, the other mother has cancer. “Both mothers feel bad because one has a blood pressure of 180, the other has cancer, her hair is falling out. They gave her some kind of pill for the pressure, but they don’t even say what kind of medicine it is. This pill made her feel even worse,” says Oksana. While moms and Oksana’s husband are in prison, she gave birth to a son. Pregnancy in the US may be covered by insurance.
Last week, Oksana spent several hours on the road — she was on her way to the migration prison to see her husband to show him their son. She was refused a date without explanation.
“You will sit here indefinitely, because you are Russians, we have a war with you”
“Already at the border in California, they told us: “the best Russian is the one who flies home on the plane.” Moreover, people from Latin America were sitting there with us, they were not told this,” says Andrey Zyablov.
At the beginning of the war, he went to rallies in Lipetsk and wrote anti-war posts on social networks. For this, he was detained once, but, according to the man, they did not draw up a protocol. They left for the United States with his wife, crossed the border between Mexico and the United States on October 26, 2023 after recording in the CBP-one application. They did not detain his wife, but Andrei was detained at the border.
After the migration prison at the border, Andrei spent six months in private prisons for migrants of the American company CoreCivic. It used to be called the Corrections Corporation of America. It is one of the largest companies in the market in the country. The first CoreCivic prison in which a man was placed is Otay Mesa in California, where Oksana’s moms are currently being held. This migrant detention center is known for the fact that a woman from Mexico was held here for 759 consecutive days in solitary confinement.
In California, Andrei says, “everything was still more or less fine.” After Otay Mesa, Andrei was sent to another CoreCivic prison called Stewart Detention Center.
It is the deadliest prison for migrants in the United States — from 2017 to May 2024, at least 10 migrants died there.
“There we organized two barracks of Russians — 120 people. The temperature in the barracks is about 16 degrees, humidity is close to 100 percent, it is difficult to breathe. It was cold and wet, and water ran down the walls, especially when it was raining. There were 3 showers and 2 toilets for 60 people, which were not closed, just fenced with a wall about a meter high. You are, roughly speaking, always in plain sight. At first it was a shock. Food, to put it mildly, is so that a person does not die. However, there is a shop there, the so-called “Commissary”, if you have money, you can buy something there. After the release, many, probably everyone, have mental difficulties, PTSD,” says Andrey.
There, Andrei was interviewed for fear — this is when they check the reliability of fears of persecution upon return to his homeland. “They immediately told us: you have a Russian barrack, you will sit here indefinitely, because you are Russians, we have a war with you. We don’t care what’s going on in your homeland. That is, it was said right out in the open. It was not just the guards who said this, but the officers,” says Andrey.
Roman Pereverzev, a former Sotnik-TV journalist, also recalls the obvious neglect due to Russian citizenship in a conversation with ASTRA. He crossed the US-Mexico border in October 2023 and spent 4 months in immigration prisons.
“There were regular funny jokes from the guards, something like: “when the war in Ukraine ends, we will send you to clear it all.” Or “the best Russian is the one who flies back to his Putin.” And when the door [of the cell with the Russians] opens, if suddenly, God forbid, you didn’t have time to move away from the door, you can get a cheerful hit with a shoe, in fact, to make it clear that you are not very welcome here,” Roman recalls.
“Of course, I understand everything. It seems that there is a reason [for them to behave like this] if you think about it. But if a person is here, perhaps he does not support Putin? As a matter of fact, I am a person who has always tried with all my might somehow… If not to stop the war, at least helpp Ukraine win it, I can say so. In 2015, by decree of the President of Ukraine Petro Alekseevich Poroshenko, our channel was awarded the status of “Friends of Ukraine”. And then they tell me to go back to Putin.”
Security risk
For the first time, ASTRA was informed about the alleged tacit ban on the entry of Russians in the winter of 2024 by an immigration lawyer from the United States, Raisa Stepanova. “Unfortunately, Russian citizens are now designated as a “Security risk,” she told ASTRA in September 2024. The ICE say that there is an indication that people will be held in an immigration prison for a long time — until trial. Starting somewhere from August 4-8, 2023, the detentions of Russian citizens began. And they sat for 5-6 months, until February 2024, then they began to release everyone en masse. There were no decrees. And now there are detentions again.”
Stepanova suggests that one of the reasons is the presence of a large number of former war veterans in the new wave of migration. “Sooner or later they realize what they have done and realize that no one needs them in Russia – the maimed and wounded. There are a lot of such appeals now, I have had them, and the law community is talking about it. And because of these people, Russians are suffering, who are really being persecuted by the Russian authorities,” she says.
“People crossing the border from Mexico to the United States with Russian passports are no longer released from U.S. immigration prisons. This information is not officially confirmed, since it is illegal to publicly announce that such a ban exists officially, it will be a big violation of US laws <…> This is due, oddly enough, not to the war in Ukraine, but to the fact that several weeks ago several people, citizens of the Russian Federation of Tajik origin, were detained They are suspected of having links with ISIS,” Yulia Nikolaeva, a U.S. immigration lawyer, said in July this year. According to the lawyer, immigration officers themselves say that there is an instruction to keep Russians in migration prisons until the asylum trial. Migrants usually have the opportunity to get out on bail or bail.
In the summer of 2024, US President Joe Biden signed a decree on temporary restrictions on entry across the southern border. It is claimed that it did not affect those asylum seekers who used CBP-one.
“After Biden signed the decree on the closure of the border, it came into force on June 5 this year. After that, information appeared in the media about some kind of internal memo, which no one officially talked about. And the media said that it was on this sector of the border — San Isidro, residents of certain countries (besides the Russian Federation, there are other former CIS countries — Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) They should not be allowed into the country, they should be deported. This is how journalists interpreted the contents of the note. But in fact, its essence is simple: if a person crossed the border, requested political asylum, then regardless of whether he did it within the framework of CBP-one or climbed over a hole in the fence, he should have been placed in a detention center until the final trial. In fact, this is what the federal law says. <…> Many journalists interpreted this to mean that everyone was simply being sent home. No, this is a violation of the law, which is federal. You can’t just send everyone back. Anyone who sets foot on American soil has the right to request political asylum. And no one has taken away this right from these people,” says Marina Sokolovskaya, a journalist and expert on immigration to the United States.
“Every day in detention is like a torture”
40 Russian female citizens who are currently in the South Lousiana ICE Processing Center of the US Migration and Customs Police have written a collective appeal to human rights defenders and the media, demanding help to protect their rights in a US immigration prison. (The document is available to ASTRA)
“At the moment, about 200 women with Russian citizenship have already been detained in this institution alone, who crossed the Mexico-USA border from April 2024 to the present in order to request political asylum. <…> We fled Russia, finding ourselves in a difficult situation, having lost our homeland, connection with our loved ones, financial independence, and lost our jobs. Many of us have health problems that worsen day by day, and mental problems and injuries that are completely ignored. <…> Every day in detention (we have been in prison for more than 3 months) is like a torture, seeing how we are discriminated because of our passports. We opposed the war in Ukraine, many of us were persecuted for our political opinions, and now we have become hostages of political games and are collectively responsible for the aggressive policy of the Russian government,” the women’s collective appeal says.
A similar collective appeal was signed by 30 men detained at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in California.
In addition, on September 9, 2024, 30 Russians filed a lawsuit against US President Biden for “discrimination against Russian citizens.” In addition to Biden, the defendants in the lawsuit are U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), its acting director and Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection Troy Miller.
“The plaintiffs in this lawsuit are thirty Russian citizens who are currently being held in various immigration detention centers in the United States. All of them are asylum seekers who came to the United States and were found to have a reasonable fear of persecution,” reads the text of the lawsuit, which was reviewed by Astra.
“Our 6-year-old child was placed in a shelter”
“Even before the war, I organized rallies, was a member of the Civil Solidarity organization, and after February 24, when I openly expressed my anti-war position, my colleagues and I were detained,” says 38-year-old Denis Rudakov from Chita. According to Denis, the staff of the Center for countering extremism of the Ministry of Internal Affairs who detained him tried to recruit him.
“Everything was unofficial, no protocols were drawn up against us. There was a conversation at first, an attempt to recruit me, then an attempt for me to inform on someone from the staff of our protest media, “Protest Transbaikalia”, for example. They were trying to find out who owns the resource. Well, when I didn’t tell them anything, the head of the “E Center” told me so: “if you don’t close the channel now and continue your activities, our task is to prosecute all of you.” That was the first call. But it was after the start of the mobilization that I left,” Denis says.
He fled Russia with his 15-year-old daughter. They crossed the border between Mexico and the United States without any problems in 2023, without registering in the CBP-one application, and within a few days they were free in the United States. A year and a half later, his wife and son went to the United States.
“They were traveling literally the same way as my daughter and I. But she was stopped, detained. And she was immediately disconnected from our son. Our 6-year-old child was placed in a shelter at that time,” says Denis.
There were no Russian-speaking staff at the shelter. The nannies communicated with Denis’s son through a translator on the phone.
“The first time they let him call me, my son was confused, asking, Dad, when will you pick me up, when will you arrive. Where he was, where his parents were, he didn’t understand, of course. A week later, I was allowed to see him somewhere,” Denis recalls. To pick up his son from the orphanage, the man collected a package of documents and proved for several weeks that he was the father of his child. Denis believes that such separation of young children and parents traumatizes the psyche of minors.
Irina (name changed), the mother of two children, agrees with Denis. At home, in Russia, she was persecuted for organizing an anti-war community, which is why the woman had to leave the country. And in the United States, the activist was put in an immigration prison and her children were taken away.
“I also have two children, 9 and 5 years old. I was separated from them, I spent a month in the Otay Mesa detention. Taking young children away from their mother is an extreme measure, for which there must be a good reason. I still don’t know this reason. The children now have a serious injury that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. After I got out of the cubs, I couldn’t pick up the kids for almost a month. You can’t just take them away, you have to go through a million interrogations and interviews to see if they can be left with me at all, to take fingerprints for the hundredth time. All this is terribly humiliating and again terribly traumatic for the children, because they have already known for almost a month that I was released, but they are not being released. “Why has Mom already been released, but we are still being held as criminals?” After the children were returned to me, the very next day they called from a new “helping” organization and again interrogated the children about what they eat in this house, where they sleep, etc. After that, the children cried for three hours because they did not understand why they were being asked all this and whether someone wanted to take them away again,” Irina, an organizer of the anti-war community, which is officially recognized as “undesirable” in the Russian Federation, tells about her experience.
Migrants and their children were actively separated during the administration of Donald Trump. In 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeking an injunction against the separation of migrant children from their parents at the Mexico-U.S. border. On October 16, 2023, a settlement agreement was published in this case. According to the document, the United States cannot resume such a policy of separation of children in the next 8 years. But the decision has not yet entered into force.
“This settlement agreement must now be finally approved by the district court this autumn,” explains immigration lawyer Raisa Stepanova in a conversation with ASTRA.
“This is a prison for criminals, not for migrants”
In total, a journalist from Russia, Ivan (name changed), spent more than 11 months in American immigration prisons. He left Russia after being detained at an anti-war rally (links to publications about the detention of Ivan with his photo are at the disposal of the editorial office) in Moscow and an administrative case of “discrediting” the army.
In September 2023, Ivan crossed the border between Mexico and the United States at the San Ysidro checkpoint. Before that, he requested asylum through the CBP-one app. They didn’t let him go any further — they left him at a temporary accommodation point right on the border (the so—called “border”, – ed.)
“For 10 days I laid on the cold floor in a cell with 25 other people. In this cell, the place is designed for five people, not 25. — says Ivan. — We covered ourselves with foil blankets. The medical worker was not there, when a person was ill in our cell, they were advised to “drink six glasses of water and everything will pass.” There is no normal food there — crackers, water, burritos, marmalade. Everything is designed to ensure that a person does not die in these 10 days.”
After the border, Ivan was in three American migration prisons. The conditions there, according to the journalist, were “terrible.”
Perhaps the worst of them is the Winn Prison, owned by LaSalle Corrections. For many years, federal investigators, human rights activists, journalists and migrant advocates have been calling for Winn to be closed, but despite all this, the Biden administration extended the contract with this prison in the summer.
“I couldn’t believe that I asked for help from the most democratic country in the world. There was a lot of humidity and wet floors in our department. Sometimes, for some reason, the officers brought a large fan and turned it on – because of this it became very cold, we slept in sweaters, pants and hats. When the lights are on 24 hours a day, it’s torture. When breakfast is at 5 a.m, and at 3 a.m. you are called to eat with the light turned on and you wait two hours for breakfast — it’s also torture,” Ivan argues.
He recalls that prison staff “allowed themselves to shout obscenities at us and push us. One of them directly told me “fucking Russian”.”
Ivan described the conditions of detention in migration prisons in detail in his complaint to the UN (available to the editorial board). In it, Ivan complains that, among other things, he was not allowed to download evidence of persecution at home from a laptop — personal belongings of migrants are taken away almost immediately after crossing the border. Ivan managed to gain access to the equipment with great difficulty — for a total of about 20 minutes. It was not enough to download all the evidence, as a result, he lost the refugee courts.
Ivan was waiting for deportation to Russia in the Pike County Correctional Facility prison. There he was placed in the same cell with two Americans. One of them was in prison for drunk driving, the other — 42-year—old Kenneth Smith from Pennsylvania – for distributing fentanyl. Smith was detained in 2020. Police found more than 2,300 bags of a mixture of heroin and fentanyl in his rented car.
According to Ivan’s memories, it was “scary to put it mildly” for him to sit in the same cell with Smith. The man behaved extremely emotionally, Ivan says, and sometimes even broke down into a scream. Then Smith was sentenced — he was given several decades in prison. “It’s not clear what was in his head. After all, when you are given such a term, your life is already over.” They spent 44 days in the same cell.
“I was afraid to live in the same cell with him, because a person who gets such a long sentence can do anything. I was afraid to tell the staff about it. I had to live in fear. I believe that the conditions in this prison are not designed to hold migrants. This is a prison for criminals, not for migrants,” says Ivan.
In January 2024, the journalist was deported to Russia on a flight from New York. “All my documents, not only my passport, were handed over to FSB officers in a yellow folder with my A-number on it. Why ICE [The US Immigration and Customs Police] said they were not transferring anything to Russia, but they gave them my documents with my A-number?” Ivan laments. Now he remains in Russia and fears persecution for his anti-war activities. On July 26, 2024, the Tverskoy Court fined Ivan for “discrediting the army”, then the journalist appealed the court’s decision, but lost the appeal, and on May 7 the court decision came into force. Ivan paid a fine of 50 thousand rubles. The number of Ivan’s administrative file and other information on it are available to ASTRA.
Earlier, the police informed the journalist informally about the alleged initiation of a criminal case on “discrediting the army,” but neither Ivan nor ASTRA have any confirmation of this information. That is why the allegedly initiated case of the journalist has not yet been called to court, he noted earlier in an interview with ASTRA.
UPD: clarification has been made about the case of “discrediting” by journalist Ivan, the identity of the hero has been fully confirmed by ASTRA journalists.
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At the time of publication, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) have not responded to the ASTRA editorial board’s request for comment on the situation.
Authors: Anastasia Chumakova and Andrey K.
