President Donald Trump's asylum pause will hit Long Island hard, immigration attorneys say

President Donald Trump’s order to pause all asylum applications will hit Long Island especially hard because the region has among the largest number of applicants nationwide, immigration attorneys told Newsday on Monday, calling the move an attack on a fundamental American tradition of welcoming the persecuted.

Trump ordered the pause after the shooting of two National Guard troops — including one who died — on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national who received asylum in April. The president also said he would permanently pause immigration from certain countries.

"I’m tremendously disturbed by what’s going on," Patrick Young, an immigration law professor at Hofstra Law School, said of Trump’s asylum order.

While acknowledging the shooting of the National Guard troops was "horrible," Young said there are "hundreds of thousands of people in the New York area who have asylum who've not engaged in this type of abuse, have not engaged in murder or assassination. To simply tie all of them together and to prevent them from pursuing their rights under both U.S. law and also international law is very, very concerning."

'Heart-wrenching' pause

Trump made the asylum announcement on Thursday, a day after the shootings. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the United States in September 2021 under a program to help Afghans who assisted the United States in its two-decade war against the Taliban.

On Friday, Joseph Edlow, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a statement that his agency had "halted all asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible."

All immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications from Afghanistan also were put on hold by the administration.

Lauris Wren, head of the Asylum Clinic at Hofstra Law School, said Trump’s pause is "heart-wrenching" for her clients, who were already facing delays in their cases of as many as eight years.

"The vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding people desperately trying to find safety," Wren said. "It’s not right for the actions of one man to stop the entire asylum process."

Long Island is among the top 10 areas in the country for asylum applicants, Young and Wren said. The highest numbers come from El Salvador and Honduras, but there are others from Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela in Latin America alone, Wren said. Her clinic also has clients from Angola, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Mali and other countries.

Recognizing failure

The U.S. asylum system was created after the failure during World War II to help Jewish people escape the Nazis and the Holocaust, Wren added.

"We recognized based on our own failure that we should not be returning people to be persecuted or killed," she said.

While there are no hard numbers, there are probably tens of thousands of current asylum applicants on Long Island, according to Wren and Ala Amoachi, an immigration attorney based in East Islip. Many migrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization apply for asylum, Amoachi said.

Trump’s order is "preventing people from availing themselves of their due process right to have their claim heard," she said.

The order was among a swath of actions Trump announced after the shooting that intensified his immigration crackdown. He also pledged to have the federal government review previously approved asylum applications, green cards granted to natives of certain countries, and even "naturalization" or permanent U.S. citizenship granted to green-card holders. He suggested the approvals could be revoked.

In a Truth Social post Thursday, Trump wrote: "I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover." It was not clear what he meant by "permanently pause."

Escaping violence

Jessica Greenberg, director of legal services at the Central American Refugee Center in Hempstead, said many of the administration’s pronouncements were contradictory so it remained unclear what is happening.

"There’s a system in place," she said. "To disrupt it without having a meaningful alternative that affords the same full and fair protections, it’s ludicrous."

People who apply for asylum are generally fleeing persecution in their homelands based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. In Central America, many have fled gangs or other types of violence, Wren said.

Trump has contended many asylum seekers instead come to the United States because they are fleeing poverty.

Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of Manhattan-based New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement that Trump’s "cruel actions reflect a strategy to put increasing numbers of people on a direct path toward deportation, no matter the cost to our families, communities, or economy."