This Russian Dissident Won Political Asylum. ICE Refuses To Release Him.

Two months ago, 25-year-old Ilia Chernov beat long odds and convinced an immigration judge to grant him political asylum in the U.S. 

Normally, that finding would have been enough for Chernov to obtain legal status and live freely in the U.S. Chernov’s judge told him that he would soon be released.

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has refused to free Chernov, stranding him in detention. 

Immigration law experts that TPM spoke with could not recall another case that matches this set of facts. ICE will, on rare occasions, keep people who have received asylum detained during appeal if they have a criminal record or present an alleged threat to public safety. But ICE isn’t claiming that here. The only suggestion that Chernov has a criminal record comes not from the United States, but from Russia, his home country: there, Russian cops raided his apartment as part of an investigation relating to Chernov’s support for the now-dead opposition leader Alexei Navalny and opposition to the war in Ukraine. 

“Keeping him detained is extremely unusual,” Maryellen Fullerton, a professor of immigration law at Brooklyn Law School, told TPM. 

Chernov’s background is what you might expect from a political asylum seeker. In Russia, he says that he staged a series of demonstrations that put him on the radar of local law enforcement. 

What prompted him to flee was a 2023 incident that Chernov recounted to immigration officials and to TPM: he placed anti-war flyers at a military recruitment office, attracting the attention of Russian prosecutors.

He’s buttressed his asylum claim with other episodes: traffic police once threatened him with prosecution for “extremism” over a pro-Navalny sticker on his car. Chernov is resourceful and a quick learner: he applied for asylum himself while he was being held in immigration detention in the U.S. and commissioned translations to bolster his case; when a national immigration nonprofit took up his case, its lawyers declined to amend his asylum petition because they found the work he did on his own sufficient. 

All this helped persuade an immigration judge, in March, to buck the Trump II trend of declining asylum grants and approve Chernov’s claim. But ICE soon appealed his case — and, unusually, kept him in detention while it did it. It’s emblematic of the new, hardline approach that the Trump administration is bringing to cases it loses, and to high-profile detentions: in cases like the Alien Enemies Act removals and green card revocations over political beliefs, government officials have pushed as hard as possible against the line set by the courts and administrative law judges, making an example both of the people affected and of their unwillingness to help migrants enter the U.S. 

To understand Chernov’s case — and his continued detention despite a successful asylum claim — TPM reviewed Russian and American court records, spoke with immigration attorneys and former ICE officials, and interviewed Chernov over hours of phone calls placed from the privately run detention center where he is being held. 

An ICE spokesman declined to comment. 

Road to America

Chernov arrived at the San Ysidro border crossing — located along the highway between Tijuana, Mexico, and San Diego, California — for his pre-scheduled CBP One appointment with U.S. immigration authorities in May 2024.

It was a long journey to get there.

Though he fled Russia when he was 22 years old, Chernov told TPM he had first run afoul of the Russian state while he was in high school. He posted a video made by Navalny’s team criticizing corruption in the Russian government; school officials reported him to law enforcement, Chernov said. After that, he was required to check in regularly with a local police officer. 

Chernov grew up in the south Russian city of Krasnodar. It’s balmy, by Russian standards: home to some resorts, the city sits around 150 miles from the bridge connecting Russia to the illegally annexed Ukrainian region of Crimea and, beyond that, to Ukraine. 

For Chernov, opposition to the government wasn’t entirely a choice. The way he tells it, the government came to oppose him: Chernov identifies as non-binary. That put his gender expression in conflict with Russian society, including a Kremlin set on prosecuting members of LGBT organizations as “extremists.” 

“Because of the fear that all these laws would be used against me, at first I didn’t go out of my way to reveal myself,” Chernov said. “But some friends were still able to guess about me.”

In 2020, Chernov visited the headquarters of an organization run by Navalny in Moscow and joined. He later attended protests organized to support the opposition politician.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the political atmosphere in the country became more tense. Chernov opposed the war, and stuck “Free Navalny” and “No Mobilization” stickers on his car. Traffic police eventually pulled him over and demanded that he remove them, while threatening him with “extremism” charges; he did. He appeared alone in the city center carrying anti-war and pro-Navalny signs for “solitary protests,” a means of evading the government’s near-impossible-to-meet permitting requirements for mass demonstrations. 

The next year, Chernov received a draft notice for the country’s mandatory military service. He was ordered to appear at a military recruiting center for a fitness check. 

Instead, Chernov told TPM, he decided to stage a mini-protest in the recruitment office. He printed out flyers that read, “Let’s think before signing a contract with the Russian Army. You’ll kill or be killed.” 

“I decided to put up an alternative so that people might think about what they were about to go do,” he said. 

At the same time, friends of Chernov’s were coming under increasing pressure from law enforcement. One friend, Chernov said, was hauled in for questioning over a tattoo of a dog with a pride flag labeled “gay dog.” 

Weeks after his recruitment center protest, Russian police raided Chernov’s home and seized his laptop. 

A Russian search warrant reviewed by TPM said that investigators were searching for records that would confirm Chernov’s “involvement in an extremist organization, namely ‘Navalny’s Headquarters,’ and discrediting the activities of the Russian Armed Forces.” Charges stemming from those accusations could yield a 15-year prison sentence. Chernov was asked to appear before investigators: there, Chernov said, he was fingerprinted and told that if law enforcement could prove that he was the one who placed the flyers, he would be charged with “discrediting the Russian armed forces.” 

For Chernov, that was the sign that it was time to leave. Fearing that his fingerprints on the flyers would match those that investigators took, he hid out for a month in a hotel and sold as many of his belongings as he could to raise money for the trip to come. After a few weeks, he and a friend traveled by train to Belarus, a neighboring country that has limited border controls with Russia but which is governed separately, making it easier to leave without detection. From there, he flew to Dubai, and then to Mexico. In May 2024, after eight months in Tijuana, he arrived for a CPB One appointment at the U.S. border.

Indefinite Detention

Chernov was immediately detained. 

Which asylum-seekers ICE detains at entry remains a mystery. Chernov traveled with a friend whose CBP One appointment was a few months earlier; that friend was not detained. The government had, for a time, been letting many Russian asylum seekers through without detaining them. ICE statistics show that detentions spiked in summer 2024. 

Since then, the Trump administration has also pressured immigration judges, administrative magistrates who work for DOJ, to approve fewer asylum applications. The administration entered office by firing dozens of the judges. In April, after Chernov’s petition was granted, the DOJ directed immigration judges to fast-track dismissals of asylum cases. According to TRAC reports, an immigration monitoring website, less than one quarter of asylum claims heard in March 2025 were granted. Data from the same source shows that immigration judges granted around half of asylum claims heard in March 2024. 

Nevertheless, Chernov won his asylum case in March. ICE signaled that it would appeal. 

“I just want to tell you good luck and that I hope that you do take the opportunity that’s been given to you and use it wisely,” the judge told him at the hearing, reminding him that the decision was not final as ICE was appealing, and that he needed to check in with the government after his release until the case concluded. 

But then something happened that surprised Chernov, his lawyers, and independent experts TPM spoke with: Chernov was never released, stranding him in detention in Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Facility. 

His continued detention raises a simple question: Why? Chernov has legal status per the judge’s ruling. The Board of Immigration Appeals can take months to hear a case; why keep him inside? 

Some immigration law practitioners said that DHS had been known to detain people who won asylum cases — but only if they had a criminal record or were otherwise deemed a threat to public safety. If someone is let go and commits a crime, lawyers explained, DHS wouldn’t want to be on the hook for having released them.  

But there isn’t anything like that in Chernov’s case. The only accusations of criminality are those coming from the Russian government: a search warrant saying he’s being investigated for supporting Navalny and discrediting the Russian armed forces. 

“I can’t see any possible justification to keep holding this guy,” David Leopold, an immigration attorney and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told TPM. 

Staying Captive

Chernov told TPM that he tries to stop the days from blurring into one by studying English in the detention center’s library, and by following whatever news he can get. The facility shows CNN and Fox News. 

The conditions are poor. Privately operated, Winn is one of ICE’s largest detention facilities —– and among its most notorious. A series of exposés, including one in 2016 by a Mother Jones reporter who went undercover as a guard at the facility, documented systemic abuse and failures to provide basic hygiene, clean water, and unspoiled food to inmates. 

Chernov described leaving his belongings on the floor in his first week at Winn, and noticing that, within days, black mold had begun to spread across books and clothing. Water flows yellow from the taps, he said; food sometimes appears spoiled. He described worsening, increasingly crowded conditions as the government detained more people while releasing and deporting fewer than previous administrations. 

“After a long time, people start to go crazy here,” Chernov said. 

The immigration judge did not find that Chernov had been persecuted during the portion of his life that he spent in Russia. Rather, she ruled that he faced a credible risk of future persecution if he returned. 

ICE has tried to undermine that conclusion in its appeal by arguing that Chernov wasn’t credible for two reasons: he allegedly omitted key evidence, and his testimony allegedly conflicted with evidence in his file.

The omission argument focuses on Chernov purportedly failing to disclose a second raid that Russian law enforcement conducted on his home after Chernov had fled, and a supposed omission that he feared persecution based on his non-binary orientation. Chernov mentioned his fear of gender-based persecution in his asylum application.

Some other claims by ICE here are similar in scope: they accuse Chernov of failing to mark the hotel he hid out in for one month before fleeing as a place of residence, for example.

ICE also alleges that Chernov has told one critical part of his story inconsistently, to different people.

That claim goes to the core of his petition: whether he was charged, and whether he placed anti-war flyers in the military recruitment office. Chernov provided his attorneys with a Russian search warrant for “discrediting the armed forces”; the document does not provide details about what event prosecutors were investigating. 

Interview transcripts in Chernov’s case indicate that he told DHS officials during a credible fear interview that he was charged over the incident. Chernov blames this on a translation error, and a transcript shows other communication issues between Chernov and the translator; early on in the interview, Chernov told his translator that he “was feeling a little uncomfortable because you were saying you couldn’t hear me.”

Later, he told the immigration judge in his case that Russian authorities did not reach the point of charging him. He was only investigated, he told the judge. 

ICE has seized on this difference in the record.

The question of whether Chernov was or wasn’t charged aside, what helped persuade the immigration judge was that Chernov made a key admission about the facts Russian prosecutors had been interested in: while Chernov denied to Russian law enforcement that he placed the fliers, he admitted to U.S. immigration officials that he had. He would later, also, admit it to TPM. 

The immigration judge cited Chernov’s admission in her decision granting him asylum.

“They have threatened him specifically with prosecution,” the judge wrote. “And in fact, he himself admits that he has taken steps that would be a violation of these laws, and that he has distributed pamphlets.”

In some ways, these admissions are an act of desperation, given what the future may hold for Chernov: He fears that the U.S. government will, eventually, deport him to Russia. If it does, all of his efforts to secure asylum in the U.S. by telling his own story would then backfire: his admission to spreading the flyers, his open support of Navalny — Russian authorities could use it all against him upon return. 

TPM asked Chernov why he was taking such a big risk. 

He had no choice, he replied: “There’s no way back at this point.”