Kcomt left her life as a judge in Peru when she was in danger. She has worked for the United Nations and is a Refugee Congress honorary delegate. She lives in San Diego.
Whichever side of the spectrum you're on, the topic of immigration has never been more political than it is today. I know because I had to speak in public about the migration crisis recently, and it was a real challenge to decide whether to speak about the disappointment and heartbreak in my heart or whether I should try to be more impartial to avoid offending people.
I work at a nonprofit by the name of Refugee Congress in San Diego, 20 minutes from the U.S. southern border. We help immigrants and refugees get access to services. Unfortunately, since recent changes in asylum law took effect, fewer people have been coming to my office seeking assistance. That's not to say that there aren't people coming to the U.S. seeking safety. They are. It more likely means people have lost trust in the system to take care of them and they are now seeking help underground. I worry that this creates more opportunities for exploitation by traffickers as seen by what happened to 41 migrants who are still missing after a recent kidnapping in Mexico. People are in real danger when they undertake these trips, and would not risk it if their lives were not at stake.
The challenge right now is that political strategy seems to be getting in the way of actually helping people. We need to do more to educate each other about why people would flee their homelands to come to the United States. And we need to remember that seeking asylum happens because people are in danger. Yet instead, we have reached the point where everybody seems to be thinking about the next election while people suffer in the ensuing confusion.
Congress has failed for more than a decade to pass meaningful immigration reform, and the resulting hash of band-aid "solutions" leaves many in shaky and unsafe circumstances. It increases the sense of worry and concern for vulnerable migrants as well as the danger they face in coming to America.
Last month, the Biden administration replaced a temporary order called Title 42 that was put in place by the Trump administration. Title 42 was a discriminatory and unnecessary policy that was put in place under the guise of a “temporary public health” measure to prevent the coronavirus from entering the U.S. But, was in actuality a de facto way of turning people away. People seeking safety were turned away without consideration of their claims.
According to U.S. and international law, individuals arriving in the U.S. can request asylum at our border. These individuals undergo a screening process to evaluate if they have a legitimate fear of persecution in their home country. Following this, their cases are directed to the immigration court system to decide if they can remain in the U.S., a process that may take years. Typically, they are allowed to stay in the U.S. while their cases are pending.
Now we have a new policy that has resulted in the U.S. deporting 11,000 migrants in the week after Title 42 ended. The Biden administration had recently begun denying asylum to those who did not initially seek protection in a country they passed through or if they did not apply online first. The Biden administration has also started to offer a phone app to help migrants by allowing them to secure appointments to enter the U.S. at border ports of entry. The goal is for them to be able to seek asylum in a more orderly fashion. However, in my experience, most migrants don't have smartphones. For unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, it is even more difficult to follow the new rules. Because of stronger consequences for illegal entry, border crossings have also plummeted. But the administration should not be proud of this. It just means that they turned away people who should have been able to legally seek safety and instead left them in harm’s way.
I don't doubt the good intentions of those behind the new policies given how difficult it is to do anything definitive when it comes to our immigration policy. I myself came here from Peru when my life was in danger and I filed for asylum. I know how important asylum is and I would like for our nation to be bolder in asserting ourselves as a beacon of fairness and humanity for people.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.