In April, hoping to learn something about the nature of asylum in a world that has grown increasingly hostile to people fleeing persecution, I went in search of a group of fifty-one Liberians who had resettled as refugees in the United States almost a quarter of a century ago. I had first met them in the spring of 2001 in an office at Cairo’s American University, where I had gone to visit a friend.* For some years Cairo had been the clearinghouse for African refugees fleeing civil war and seeking asylum in the West.
The Liberians, most of them teenagers, were survivors of massacres that had killed their parents, brothers, and sisters, often before their eyes. Some had been saved by family friends and put onto planes to Egypt; others had escaped east and eventually found trucks to take them across Sudan. They had already been in Cairo for many months, existing on the margins of the city’s vast urban sprawl. They were uncertain, watchful, apprehensive—but they were also resilient, for otherwise they could not have survived.
There was Mamadu, so thin he seemed ethereal; Ibrahim, ironic and alert; and Bah, frail, small, wearing a woman’s pink jacket with a pair of absurd pink earmuffs. What they needed was official status from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as bona fide refugees, unable to return to Liberia because it would not be safe for them to do so. Without this recognition they could not apply for the one thing they all dreamed of: resettlement in the US, and with it safety, an education, a home, work, and a future they had almost given up believing in.
Over the weeks that followed I helped take their testimonies. They described how Charles Taylor, with his National Patriotic Front, had fought his way to power in Liberia in 1997 after years of civil war and how, as members of the rival Mandingo, Vai, Mende, and Krahn ethnic groups, their families had become targets for his marauding soldiers. Ibrahim, then seventeen, had been standing next to his father, a senior civil servant, when soldiers slowly hacked him to pieces. The men drove his mother and sister into the bush; they had since disappeared. Mohamed was eleven when he watched as his four siblings were murdered and he was taken away to become a child soldier. Mateny, who was in his early twenties and whose family owned land and farms, lost his father, eldest brother, grandfather, and several uncles and cousins before escaping; his young wife was raped. She found a way to join him in Cairo but was forced to leave their two small children behind.
These stories formed the basis of their applications to UNHCR, proof that with Taylor as president Liberia was now closed to them. But by 2001 Cairo held one of the largest concentrations of asylum seekers and refugees in the world, and their claims were moving with agonizing slowness. It was said that there were some 40,000 waiting to be assessed and that “LOC”—“lack of credibility”—was being stamped on 80 percent of the files, which would condemn them to an indefinite stateless limbo. To the wary young Liberians, UNHCR’s officers seemed dismissive, and when those officers were women, none could face telling them that they, as boys, had been raped.
For refugees Cairo was a terrible place to be: overcrowded, filthy, violent, and racist, with streets full of rubble. The Egyptian police showed little interest when young black men were taunted and beaten up. UNHCR was also failing in the other part of its mandate, which was to protect those seeking asylum. The Liberians, who were not allowed to work, were permanently, painfully hungry.
With a group of friends, I helped start a legal advice office, funded by Norwegian and British charities and staffed by legal volunteers from all over the world, to work on their claims. We then set up a small center specifically for the Liberian boys, where they could be together and volunteers could teach, for they all longed to learn. We expected them to ask for English lessons, computer studies, and perhaps history classes; on the bits of paper we handed out they requested philosophy, neurology, political science. We bought shirts and cleats for them to start a soccer team. As the weeks passed, they became more cheerful and assertive. Mateny, serious and wise, became a mentor to the younger boys. Ibrahim was the joker of the group, handling Cairo with inexhaustible, frenetic energy. They called us “the mothers,” in tones that were both teasing and grateful.
It was not long before the Egyptian security services grew suspicious. They imagined the Liberian center to be full of spies for Israel—a charge constantly leveled against the refugees—and accused it of taking illicit foreign funding. A boy called Abdulai was picked up and taken to a police lockup. When we tracked him down, his face was covered in bruises, and he whispered that he had been given electric shocks. Another boy, Mustafa, reported being held in a freezer for days on end and given only salt water to drink. Even though Egypt was a signatory to international covenants against torture, brutality was deeply ingrained in its system of detention. When the cousin of one of the Liberians died in custody, the others spoke of him as having been “killed in action.”
Three months later I was back in England when I heard that eleven of the fifty-one Liberians had lost their nerve. Too frightened of arrest and torture, exhausted by the endless waiting, and convinced that their claims with UNHCR stood little chance of success, they had fled across the Sinai desert with Bedouin smugglers to Israel. Among them were Mohamed, the skinny, bookish boy for whom I had bought glasses when I discovered that he was so myopic he was nearly blind; Ismael, a soccer player who had come to our apartment for his testimony and insisted on staying to clean the kitchen; and Alieu, along whose cheeks Taylor’s men had carved deep scars. For those still in Cairo the dangers had increased. The flight to Israel had seemed proof that the remaining Liberians were indeed spies. They stopped going out. When I got back to Cairo, their faces were pinched and frightened. From Israel came word that those who had escaped were paying back their smugglers as slave laborers, laying pipes along the edges of the desert.
And then, in the autumn of 2003, the unimaginable happened. In spite of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which had cast a shadow over all legal migration to the West, all but two of the remaining forty Liberians were offered resettlement in the US. Bah, now sixteen, was turned down for having been a child soldier. Despite international commitments to the rehabilitation of child soldiers, in practice no Western country seemed willing to take them. Ansu, who as a boy had briefly worked for an organization with ties to Taylor and who was therefore deemed a collaborator, was also rejected.
Late in November, excited, relieved, a little fearful, the others flew to the US. Since few had money for a bus to the airport, which lay thirty kilometers outside the city, they walked.
The early 2000s were a more generous age in refugee matters. In the US the post–World War II international agreements on human rights and asylum had culminated under President Jimmy Carter in the Refugee Act of 1980, which raised the cap on the number of people to be resettled every year. The US became, for a time, the most welcoming nation in the world.
The president has wide latitude to decide not just how many refugees will be admitted but where they will be admitted from. As successive presidents recognized, giving sanctuary to people fleeing persecution lent the US moral standing. It also brought considerable financial benefits. Between 2005 and 2019, according to a 2024 report by the US Department of Health and Human Resources, refugees and asylees contributed $581 billion in tax revenues, far exceeding the $457 billion spent on them by federal, state, and local governments.
Mateny, Ibrahim, Mamadu, and the others arrived in the US to a friendly reception. Met off their planes by members of church groups and human rights organizations, they were housed, fed, and steered through the novelty and complexity of US life. They found the bustle of big city culture perplexing and young American women threatening, and all regretted not being resettled together as a group, but none doubted their good fortune.
This April, at the beginning of my trip, I find Ibrahim in New York City. I remember him as a boy, lithe and quick. He is now a stocky middle-aged man with a shaved head and a jaunty cap. Ibrahim keeps in touch with the other Liberians, and he takes me on a road trip down the Eastern Seaboard, where many have settled. As we drive, he tells me, “I have had too much fear in my life. I cannot have any more.” He still has flashbacks to his father’s barbaric killing, though these dreams, he says, don’t come as often as they once did. The US has made him feel safe. I ask him whether the Liberians talk to one another about what happened in the civil war. No, he replies, “we have closed that chapter in our lives.”
Even in Cairo, Ibrahim was entrepreneurial. He taught himself Arabic and a little Egyptology, hired a camel, and took foreigners to the pyramids. Now he uses his car as his office, making deals, buying used tractors from Japan on TikTok and selling them in Guinea. Not long ago he heard that a company making mattresses in California was going into liquidation; he bought the mattresses and sold them in West Africa. As we cross the Delaware River he takes a call from a client in Abidjan and, speaking a mixture of Arabic, French, and Mandingo, asks when his goods will arrive. Then he takes another call from his partner in Shanghai, discussing whether, given the Houthis’ shelling of container vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, it might be wiser to send everything the longer route via the Cape of Good Hope. “I am a hungry hyena,” he says.
Ibrahim wants to pay back some of what he sees as his immense good fortune. He has been putting money into farms in Guinea and the Ivory Coast, where, as he discovered not long ago, his mother had survived. He was able to see her and build her a house before she died. He also found a brother he had believed to be dead, and together they have bought some land in Guinea. Every summer he brings together as many of the group of resettled Liberians as he can to eat African food and dance in a park in Philadelphia. “Remember,” he tells them, “when you want to eat chicken now, you can eat the whole chicken.” In Cairo they had collected discarded bones from the dustbins left out by restaurants. Ibrahim plans to send his three teenage children on a long visit to Liberia. “I want them to see how fortunate they are,” he says.
As we drive, Ibrahim calls the others on his cell phone. “One of the mothers is here,” he tells them, and I can hear the surprise and affection in their voices. Those we cannot meet I chat with over his phone. I had hoped to see Saeed, who drives a long-distance truck, but in the end our paths cannot be made to intersect. He has married a cousin whose father helped him to escape from Liberia. They live in Arizona and have four children, who are, he says with pride, growing up American. “I do not want them ever to go through what I went through,” he tells me.
In Baltimore we meet Alpha. He belonged to a large family almost entirely massacred by Taylor’s soldiers. He too has become middle-aged, with white flecks in his beard. His first home was in Dallas, where he became a janitor in a hotel, but he felt ill at ease among the conservative Texans and one day took a Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C., to join another Liberian from Cairo. He enrolled in courses at a community college and, chancing on a psychology class, recognized a possible future path. Through loans and grants, he finished a master’s degree, and today he works for the probation service, evaluating prisoners before their release. Before leaving Cairo, he had met a young woman from Sierra Leone. He waited three years for his full US citizenship to come through, then went back to Egypt, married her, and brought her to Washington. They have a teenage daughter.
In North Carolina, over Ibrahim’s phone, I track down Mamadu, the ethereally thin young man I had first met in the offices of American University. Mamadu had seen his father tortured to death. He tells me that he never intends to return to Liberia and that flashbacks to the murder still torment his nights. In the US he earned degrees in business and accounting and married a Guinean woman who was already settled here. Their son wants to be a firefighter, their daughter an astronaut. “The US,” Mamadu says, “has been good to me.”
The need to prove themselves—to make up for lost time and make sense of what happened to them—is a theme that runs through their lives, as it does for refugees the world over. In North Dakota, Youssouf, who lost two sisters and two brothers in the civil war, has a master’s degree in organization and leadership and holds a good job with a large international company. Over the phone I ask him what has been best about being in the US. “Safety,” he says. “Not being a target.” Safety is mentioned by every Liberian I speak to.
Most of the resettled Liberians have families of four or even five children. Some feel disappointed with their own education, saying that in order to send money back to surviving relations in Liberia, they had to take multiple manual jobs that left them no time to get better qualifications. But they like to talk about how well their children have prospered and what the US has done for them. Sidike, a taxi driver in Baltimore, has a daughter who graduated this spring from medical school. Mateny’s adult children both have university degrees; his son has found a job with a multinational company in Sri Lanka. Musa’s eldest daughter is a social worker. “We have come a long way,” he says. “You never know how strong you are until you have no options.”
As parents, the Liberians are strict. In Delaware we visit Musa in a neat small house in the suburbs. His four children return from school, eat, then settle into an hour’s study of the Quran. At home they speak only Mandingo. Though the other Liberians envy Musa’s particular firmness, they all try to get their children to understand the languages of their own boyhoods, and very few allow them cell phones.
Only a few have paid visits to Liberia, though Taylor has long since been imprisoned, convicted in The Hague of war crimes committed between 1996 and 2002 in Sierra Leone’s civil war. But several talk of retiring to Liberia one day, where their US savings will buy them a more affluent life than they would have in America. “We are social people,” Mateny says. “We fear the isolation of the elderly in the US.” It’s Bah, the former child soldier, now living in Europe, who voices something that overshadows all refugees: having been through so much, having witnessed and experienced so much loss and trauma, they are no longer the people they once were. They have become strangers both to themselves and to the families they left behind.
There have, of course, been casualties. In Phoenix, Sherif, who had been tortured in Cairo and fled to Israel before he managed to reach the US, ran into trouble with social services, who decided that his behavior toward his children was unacceptably harsh and for a while removed them from his care. Sherif still has no proper papers, but he is the only one without them. In Ohio, Omaru is content with his life as a tailor, though it took him seven years to bring his Guinean wife to join him, and they are now raising four young children. Ismael, the soccer player, takes great pride in being able to give his own four children the things he never even dreamed of as a boy: access to television, outings to basketball games, the chance to pursue hobbies and sports. In his car a small US flag hangs from the rearview mirror. Ansu, so skinny and childlike during the Cairo days that the others treated him as their mascot, is pleased with his life as a construction worker in Rochester. His brother, who has also been resettled in the US, works as a nurse with disabled people.
I ask those scattered around the US whether they know what happened to the others, both those who escaped Cairo for Israel and those who have since moved on. What they tell me says much about the patterns of modern migration: the distances people cover, the lengths they go to in order to escape intolerable situations, their perseverance and courage. One is in Belgium, a second in Hong Kong, a third serving with the US Army in Germany. A fourth is somewhere in Asia, but no one knows where. Five are back in West Africa.
During Donald Trump’s first presidency, Mamadu, driving a car from California back to New Jersey, was pulled over by a group of vigilantes in Oklahoma. They had guns, and they were looking for illegal immigrants. He was wearing a Yankees cap and a military jacket, and he told them that he was a war veteran, on his way home. They saluted and waved him on. The memory of that day has not left him. Even those without flashbacks know what it is to feel precarious.
A few months before President Obama left office he set the limit for resettlement for 2017 at 110,000. After his first inauguration President Trump immediately suspended refugee resettlement to the US for several months, and though he later reinstated it, in 2021 the US admitted only 11,400 people—a historic low. Admissions from predominantly Muslim countries were virtually closed. “Extreme vettings”—more and longer security checks—were put in place, and a number of the human rights groups that had been helping refugees, as they had helped the Liberians, lost federal funding and had to close.
Under President Biden, in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shut down government offices for many months, resettlement again grew steadily. Funding for refugee and resettlement networks tripled, from $932 million in 2020 to nearly $2.8 billion in 2024. Experiments were launched, such as allowing groups of individuals to sponsor refugees (more than 160,000 Americans signed up). When he stepped down, Biden left a target figure of 125,000 admissions for 2025; had Kamala Harris won the presidency, it is widely thought that she would have honored this.
Trump campaigned for his second term on promises to curb immigration of every kind. Within hours of taking office he signed an executive order banning all refugee resettlement. Two days later 10,000 refugees who had completed their security screenings and were booked to travel to the US had their flights canceled. Contracts with resettlement agencies were suspended. “One of my most important obligations,” the new president announced, “is to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement.” Biden, he declared, had allowed a “large-scale invasion” of “millions of illegal aliens…including potential terrorists, foreign spies, members of cartels, gangs…and other hostile actors with malicious intent.”
The Liberians who arrived in the autumn of 2003 and have worked and paid their taxes consistently ever since are now lawful citizens of the US, and this is how they see themselves. Some acquired green cards and citizenship very quickly; others followed tortuous bureaucratic routes. Ibrahim battled for fifteen years trying to prove he was who he said he was after his surname was discovered on a list of terrorists.
They feel a particular affiliation with the US. Liberia, Africa’s oldest republic, was set up as a home for freed slaves from the US and is sometimes known as “Little America.” Its capital, Monrovia, is named after President James Monroe. The US has the largest diaspora of Liberians in the world. Those I spoke to in April take deep exception to Trump’s characterization of African countries as “shitholes” and of people like themselves as “Murderers and Criminals of the Highest Order.” They feel profound gratitude, not “malicious intent.” To regard asylum seekers as predators is to forget one crucial truth: no one wants to be a refugee. Only persecution and despair create refugees. Today a new sense of unease has settled on people for whom their years as US citizens have been their only time of freedom and safety.
When Ibrahim and I embarked on our road trip, he told me that early that morning officers from ICE had been seen around his largely black neighborhood, asking people for their IDs. The Liberians tell one another that having now been citizens for many years, they should be safe. But when they say it, they sound anxious. And what about Sherif, who has no legal status and whose children, born in the US to an illegal immigrant, now face the loss of their rights as birthright citizens? And Mateny, who wants to bring his new bride to join him from Liberia? Those with imperfect papers and uncertain claims wonder whether they should go into hiding. Safety has again become elusive.
On December 2, 1783, George Washington wrote that the “bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent & respectable Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations…if by decency & propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment” of it. A country built by immigrants and refugees, who have contributed not just their labor but the richness of their cultures, is abandoning that tradition under Trump’s spirit of xenophobia and racism. There will be no more Ibrahims or Matenys or Musas who embody the great American dream—at least not for the foreseeable future.
The glorious era that began eighty years ago, when the US helped draft international agreements designed to thwart the powerful and help the weak, has effectively closed. With it has gone the spirit of welcome toward strangers most in need of help. For the young men who arrived in 2003, with passionate gratitude for US generosity, this brings not just fear but also disbelief.