Abou Diop said he feels like a winner amid a sea of people struggling to get what he now has.
Diop was one of the roughly 70,000 people in the United States who the federal government agreed had a legitimate fear and reason to flee their home country earlier this year. Diop fled Mauritania and was granted legal status in the United States last year by being granted asylum. He now lives in Aurora.
“I feel a bit relieved. At least when I encounter an ICE officer, I have a paper to show that I’m here legally,” Diop said. “But I’m not very confident due to what I’ve seen around. They are targeting not only people who are in the country illegally, but it’s people who are trying to get to where I am.”
Immigration in America is as currently high profile as it is confounding. And one CPR listener asked the newsroom via Colorado Wonders to help break down the legal immigration process as it stands now. Is there legal immigration in this environment? How does one try to become a U.S. citizen the “right” way?
The answers aren’t entirely straightforward.
For one, it depends on how the person got to the United States — were they spirited here by parents as kids? Was that during a timeframe that would have qualified them for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, under the Obama administration? Are they married to a U.S. citizen? Do they come from a country where they fear persecution, like Diop? Do they have a criminal record, even a minor one?
“You can’t just walk into a post office, take an English test, prove you’re a good person and have a job and get citizenship,” said Laura Lichter, a Denver immigration attorney. “There are a ton of ways that the system that we have created with our own laws has made it absolutely impossible for people to get from point A to point B. If I laid out a fact pattern, you’d be shocked that many people just can’t get status.”
Congress has done little to make broad changes to immigration law in decades, despite various high-profile efforts to put in place the Dream Act or paths to citizenship for people who have both been in the United States for decades and for children brought here by their parents. Even DACA is, at best, an uneasy truce that is no guaranteed path to citizenship or lifelong status.
But the executive branch has large levers they can push and pull at their discretion, and how those levers are used can shift from one administration to the next.
One thing remains true through both Republican and Democratic administrations: The U.S. remains a highly desirable place for immigrants and more are willing to risk violating the law to live and work here than there are legal ways for them to get in.
The supply of legal pathways lags far behind the demand to live in the United States.
How to get in
There are a handful of frequently utilized ways to legally immigrate to the United States, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or CIS.
A U.S. citizen family member can file a petition for an “alien relative” to get the newcomer a green card. This path is most likely granted for immigrant spouses who marry U.S. citizens, but in some unique cases, people could apply to sponsor other family members. In fact, some immigration attorneys have seen recent successes in now-adult children petitioning for their foreign-born parents.
An employer could sponsor an immigrant to come work in the United States with legal authorization to live here. These are unique circumstances and the employer must have the job approved in advance by the federal government and it is usually a very specific skillset.
An immigrant could apply for humanitarian protection, including refugee or asylum status. An immigrant could also apply for a “diversity” visa, which are limited.
Or an immigrant could apply for an investment visa, which requires a sizable sum of foreign money to be invested in the American job market to stimulate the economy.
There are others, like a VISA lottery, where the federal government randomly selects 50,000 people from various countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Or getting admitted as a refugee, which has limitations that can change from administration to administration. But here are a couple of the pathways getting the most attention recently.
One path: Asylum
Like they did for Diop, the U.S. government continues to honor some asylum claims, according to recent numbers compiled by Syracuse University researchers.
In fact, in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration appeared to boost the percentage of asylum claims granted compared to the 2024 fiscal year. Researchers found that 68 percent of asylum claims were granted in July 2025.
But the overall numbers were significantly lowered because the administration has restricted access — mostly at the border.
“There is an intent and a plan to slow every type of immigration, including naturalization,” said Brian Green, an immigration attorney based in Denver. “Everything that doesn’t have a deadline, like green cards and visas, those can be slowed down bureaucratically and the goal is to just reduce immigration in the U.S.”
Though the actual decisions are made by judges, who are employed by the executive branch, presidential priorities and tone seem to have some sway, the Syracuse researchers found.
At the end of the Biden administration, when the former Democratic president was under intense criticism for southern border policies, the researchers reported that overall asylum grant rates declined to a low of 35.8 percent in October 2024.
The average number for the four years during Biden’s single term was around 45 percent.
And, the researchers found, people living south of the border had the lowest likelihood of receiving asylum, compared to Belarus or Afghanistan or a handful of countries in Africa. Five countries, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil had asylum grant rates of less than 20 percent in 2024.
In order to be granted asylum, people have to go through a credible or reasonable fear interview with government officials and furnish documentation that they are in danger or face persecution, death or immediate harm in their home countries.
How to get a VISA
The recent case of Utah violinist John Shin is illustrative of another way some people can still legally obtain status in the United States — and the perils that can befall a person if they don’t do everything right.
Shin was brought to America by his father when he was a child from South Korea. He qualified for DACA under the Obama administration and attended college in Utah. He received an impaired driving ticket in 2019, which caused him to lose his DACA status. He had since gotten married to a U.S. citizen, but the couple hadn’t taken the time to file for an I-130 visa — a well-worn path towards a green card.
Shin’s wife, Danae Snow, said it was because the couple was struggling to prove a high enough income for sponsorship for a family of four. She was laid off from a software company job.
But, while doing some contracting work for a telecommunications company, Shin was detained in late August while trying to do some maintenance work on a cell phone tower on Fort Carson Army base south of Colorado Springs.
He is out on bond and is fighting his deportation proceedings from Utah.
Violeta Chapin, a University of Colorado School of Law professor, said she runs a clinic and helps those with DACA status renew it on occasion, if they qualify.
“I get very nosy about their love lives,” Chapin said, with a laugh. “Because if they were to fall in love and get married to a U.S. citizen, they could adjust through a U.S. citizen spouse and do it that way.”
In fact, lawyers say that these cases used to be shoo-ins and almost never resulted in any days in detention, particularly among those. That has changed under the Trump administration.
The crackdown
Neither of those legal pathways are able to accommodate the millions who want to be in the U.S., so they run the risk of removal by crossing the border anyway.
Once here, they exist knowing that they could be picked up, detained and removed at a moment’s notice. Studies have shown that most are interested only in working for a living wage and living an American lifestyle while existing crime-free. The American economy has been humming along for so many years that conflicts over undocumented immigrants taking jobs from citizens have been rare. There has been plenty of work for all.
But some have committed horrific crimes while in the U.S. without authorization, and Trump seized upon those stories to fuel a run for re-election based partly on a promise to remove people here without authorization.
The result is a dramatic shift in how federal immigration authorities are currently doing their jobs, including picking up people in state courthouses, outside of schools and even at airports when someone is planning to self-deport anyway. Masking themselves and obscuring their identities and badges, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are conducting raids in apartment buildings and workforce sites and parking lots and picking up people — even if they’re not entirely sure of their legal status.
In addition, the Trump administration has deputized the entire federal law enforcement apparatus to be immigration enforcement officials, so the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Administration are now all involved in immigration arrests.
The most recent budget bill approved by Congress allocates more than $170 billion for ICE over the next four years, including $45 billion for building detention facilities and $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation operations.
From the perspective of ICE and the Trump administration, they are lawfully doing the job Congress has ordered and people elected Trump to do. But for immigrant advocates, it represents a cruel and unnecessary shift that has torn families apart and deprived hard-working people of a chance at a better life.
“The Trump administration is essentially rewriting the law without rewriting the law,” Lichter said. “They’re doing that by taking immigration cases and then they’ll review it and they’ll have a policy that they change uniformly in ways that make it more difficult or impossible for people to have any relief in this system.”
Lichter said in the last six months, even in the “very rare” circumstances that someone makes it in front of an immigration judge, the administration is making it difficult to prove someone should be able to stay in the United States.
That includes lengthy detentions for people with no criminal records and, if they do petition for release, the government has asked for increasingly high bonds, immigration attorneys said.
“There are people for whom there isn’t a way to get out of a limbo and into legal status based on our current laws,” Lichter said. “Our immigration laws need to be overhauled, but as someone who has been doing this for 30 years, at this point, it’s watching people use every weapon that’s available to them in the worst possible way and going beyond that and using strange and bizarre interpretations of the law by saying this case doesn’t exist anymore. It’s devastating for communities, for families and for the local economy.”
Colorado Wonders
This story is part of our Colorado Wonders series, where we answer your burning questions about Colorado. Curious about something? Go to our Colorado Wonders page to ask your question or view other questions we've answered.
