Anabel should be more tired than she looks sitting in the former convent that houses the nonprofit Asylee Women Enterprise (AWE). She has not slept since working the night shift at a nearby fast-food restaurant, yet she is composed and pulled together, dressed in a crisp white blouse and black slacks.

She put off sleep this morning to talk about the critical help—“life changing” she has received from the organization. A trans woman in her 30s, she fled her Central American homeland for Mexico and then, in search of safety, health care, and economic opportunity, the United States. (Her legal name and country of origin have been withheld to protect her identity.)

With tías y primos (aunts and cousins) in Maryland, she made her way to Baltimore, which, she’d heard, “had a friendly culture and jobs,” and to AWE, which she’d learned about from a healthcare worker.

One of her primary needs was legal representation. Asylum applications must be submitted to court within the first year of arrival in the U.S. and typically require a lawyer and supporting evidence such as medical reports, which may indicate physical abuse or trauma, to be successful. Other immediate needs included the survival basics like food and housing. Asylum seekers are not eligible for SNAP benefits, public housing, or Medicaid. They also can’t apply for a work permit until six months after receipt of their asylum application. The Asylee Women Enterprise team helped arrange all this and more, including therapy.

“The staff helped me get the health care I needed, and professional psychological help, too,” Anabel says with a smile. “Being psychologically healthy, it’s important for a transgender woman if we are going to work and re-integrate into society.”

Her English is also coming along, with the help of twice-weekly English classes at AWE and the Google Translate app on her phone. With the help of an interpreter, she explains challenges remain, however. Like navigating the city’s disjointed public transportation system and the asylum process, which is becoming more problematic seemingly by the day.

Meanwhile, she closely follows the news around the Trump Administration’s controversial immigration policies and practices—the warrantless searches, the masked ICE street arrests, and the sudden revocations of legal status for asylum seekers like herself.

“The laws,” she says, “should be respected by immigrants, asylum seekers, and the federal government.”

Still, she is grateful for the assistance she has experienced over the past two years, and tries to take things one day at time.

“Baltimore is a welcoming city, and it has given me a life,” she says, welling up a bit while adding how much she enjoys Eastern Avenue’s restaurants and coffee shops, and the city’s parks and book kiosks. “I like to walk and to just sit in Patterson Park and read a free book. I love reading.”

As for long-term plans, those are on hold, she says. The future is too difficult to ponder, given the current level of chaos and uncertainty.

“We do bring goals and we do have big dreams when we come to this country,” Anabel says. “But thinking five years or 10 years ahead, it’s not possible to think like that anymore.”

The Asylee Women Enterprise in northeast Baltimore was founded 15 years ago to support people who have been forced to leave their countries—asylum seekers, foreign-born trafficking survivors, and other forced migrants—as they rebuild their lives in Maryland. The origin story of the nonprofit is almost biblical.

In 2011, just after Christmas, a young Afghan woman, who had been forced to flee her country, was eight months pregnant and homeless, in desperate need of a safe place to stay. Molly Corbett, then a consultant with the Benedictine Sisters of Baltimore County and later the founder of AWE, received a phone call about the situation and reached out to the sisters, who agreed to take the woman in temporarily at their Emmanuel Monastery on West Joppa Road. When she went into early labor on January 6—the traditional feast day of the Epiphany in the Catholic Church—Mercy Hospital took care of her and her baby, and the new family returned to the Benedictines, who re-welcomed the new mom and helped look after her son.

After learning there were more asylum seekers needing help, Corbett began coordinating with other religious communities to offer housing, medical resources, and support.

From that experience, AWE, which still has ties to the Catholic community but operates as a secular 501(c)3 and serves people of all faiths and genders, was born. By 2018, the nonprofit assisted 100 asylum seekers annually. In 2025, more than 325 asylum seekers and trafficking survivors from 40 different countries came through its doors and received intensive case management support.

Through AWE and its partners—including the Intercultural Counseling Connection and HEAL (the refugee health and asylum collaborative), based at Johns Hopkins University—individuals receive holistic services, including legal, medical, and mental health services, often on-site.  Many attend AWE language classes. Nearly 50 youth attend the organization’s peer support groups. AWE also provides transitional housing, a daily food bank, and hosts a Tuesday and Thursday hot lunch program with staff at the former St. Anthony’s Convent in Frankford.

Meanwhile, the organization is still in contact with the young mother and son who inspired its founding. (Note: AWE is searching for a new location. Earlier this year, the Archdiocese of Baltimore sold the former convent they lease to the Baltimore International Academy school.)

Even so, after 15 years, the need far outpaces AWE’s resources. In Maryland, tens of thousands of asylum applications are backlogged, with many Baltimore residents traversing the years-long process without legal representation—a process that has become increasingly fraught since Donald Trump returned to office.

“We have a client who ICE recently contacted and said, ‘We’re going to deport you to Uganda,’” says Laura Brown, AWE’s executive director since 2022. “Normally, you might receive a letter that gives you 30 days to respond [to a request or order]. But they said, ‘You have 10 days to explain why you shouldn’t be deported to Uganda, and then we’ll make a final decision.’ So, we prepared a detailed response explaining her children can’t receive the medical care they need in Uganda. That she’s a single woman. That she’s never been to Uganda, and she doesn’t know anyone in Uganda. Her deportation has since been upheld, which we’re appealing.”

“We have a client who ICE recently contacted and said, ‘We’re going to deport you to Uganda…You have 10 days to explain why you shouldn’t be deported, and then we’ll make a final decision.’

 

“So, we prepared a detailed response explaining her children can’t receive the medical care they need in Uganda. That she’s a single woman. That she’s never been to Uganda, and she doesn’t know anyone in Uganda. Her deportation has since been upheld, which we’re appealing.”

The aggressive expansion of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—now the highest-funded law-enforcement agency in the U.S. after a $75-billion supplement allocation in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—has been widely reported. So too has the surge in arrests, documented through cell-phone footage and nightly news coverage. Even with a recent slowdown in arrests since immigration agents shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January, the statistics remain staggering. According to Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by the Deportation Data Project, ICE averaged roughly 7,000 arrests a week in the six weeks following Pretti’s death. Roughly 5 to 7 percent have a violent criminal record.

After witnessing the ramped up racial profiling and street arrests in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities, the immigrant community and their supporters in Baltimore have been holding their breath in anticipation of an ICE build up here. Those concerns only grew after the Department of Homeland Security purchased an 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Hagerstown with plans to convert it into a detention facility capable of holding up to 1,500 people. It’s part of what acting ICE director Todd Lyons called an attempt to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.”

Shortly after the $102-million purchase and subsequent $113-million contract to build out and operate that facility, ICE opened a new Hunt Valley office for its attorneys. (The Hagerstown area project is currently on pause after a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Maryland.) Even without the warehouse, the city and state have already witnessed an exponential jump in immigration arrests. Federal immigration agents made more than 4,800 arrests in Maryland in the first year of Trump’s second term—more than triple the previous year.

Meanwhile, asylum seekers, like those supported by AWE, also face an extraordinary, if quieter, crackdown. The Trump Administration’s overhaul of the immigration courts has been far less public than the deportation raids. More than 100 immigration judges, many with higher asylum approval rates, have been dismissed, an unprecendented purge. Dozens more have retired or resigned. More than 140 new judges have been appointed, many with limited or no immigration law experience and less training than their predecessors. Under a new directive, judges are increasingly denying bond hearings and dismissing cases at the federal government’s request so that defendants can be arrested. Overall, the new judges are granting asylum much more sparingly—in just 6 percent of cases, according to a New York Times report. Even prior to the recent order, asylum rejections doubled from 2024 to 2025.

In other words, immigration courts are now ending some cases before asylum seekers receive a full hearing—as in the sudden deportation threat of the AWE client to Uganda—a policy change known as “pretermission.” Additionally, extended visas and immigration is on pause from nearly 40 countries deemed “high risk,” mostly South American, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and African nations.

Another new proposed rule would make it impossible for new asylum seekers to apply for a work permit and make work permit renewals more difficult.

“There have been a lot of changes to the asylum legal system and the deportations that go through that system in the last couple of months,” says Brown. “The increased ICE presence, what the country sees in the streets here and elsewhere, what we saw in Minneapolis, is the visible representation of what we are seeing behind the scenes, but the public doesn’t see.”

Acting ICE director Ted Lyons wants to run deportations like “Amazon Prime for human beings.”

For asylum seekers in Baltimore, the result is near-constant anxiety. Most are required to wear ankle monitors and many dread leaving their homes or missing a letter, email, or phone message from ICE, which could be recorded as noncompliance. Showing up for previously routine check-ins at the ICE field office at Hopkins Plaza has become particularly terrifying.

One AWE client, who attends college, says they carry their immigration, personal, and medical documents everywhere, fearing detention at any moment. If they are riding a bus and see someone with their face partially covered, they sometimes get off early, afraid the individual may work for ICE, and wait for the next bus.

Another AWE client describes the toll of lleaving her 5-year-old child behind when she reports to her ICE appointments. “She asks what will happen if I get detained,” the woman recently shared in an AWE blog post. “She asks if she will have to stay with her grandma and she says, ‘I don’t want that! I want to be with you, Mama!’ Five years old is too young. It is too hard for her to bear that she might lose me.”

In this volatile environment, AWE and its partners continue their work. The Intercultural Counseling Connection, for example, provides specialized mental health care to AWE and other Maryland asylum seekers—a significant number of whom have experienced sex and labor trafficking, political persecution, incarceration, torture, and gender-based violence, including genital mutilation.

Regardless of any desire of returning home, it is simply not an option for most, says Caitlin Tromiczak, the program director for the nonprofit. Many clients have left families behind who may be in hiding because the government or another party that was persecuting them may still be looking for the now-asylum seeker.

“We have journalists, religious leaders, and political activists who are clients and others who may be leaving an abusive situation, which could be in their own family, due to their sexual orientation or something else,” Tromiczak says. “Some people come on a temporary visa and maybe flew in a plane and were greeted by family or friends. But other people crossed borders on foot, and there’s trauma that can happen on that journey, including getting detained. Just going through the legal process and restarting your life, that can also bring up deep trauma.”

Individual and group therapy sessions often focus on immediate struggles, such as eating, anxiety, and sleeping issues, as well as man- aging emotions, nightmares, flashbacks, and memories. Often there is difficulty in building trust after experiencing something like torture.

“We do a lot of deep trauma processing, but then with other people, they’ll say, ‘I just want to talk about how I can sleep better,’” Tromiczak says. “Or, ‘I don’t have the capacity to go through all of my traumatic memories—what I need to be able to do is sit down with my lawyer and recount my story, or I need to focus at work without getting lost in my memories.’”

HEAL, meanwhile, provides primary care, mental health, women’s health, and pro bono forensic medical evaluations to AWE clients. Such evaluations, which include physical and psychological components, can objectively document a client’s torture, persecution, or other ill treatment and corroborate their claim for legal protection. Afterward, HEAL generates a legal affidavit, which outlines the findings from the interview and examination. Forensic reports hold great weight in court and clients who submit them are more likely to be granted asylum or other types of immigration relief. HEAL also works with interpreters, who provide additional cultural understanding around basic care and health norms, notes Dr. C. Nicholas Cuneo, HEAL’s executive director.

“The last thing you want is to do is pigeonhole clients or bring bias into the interaction, he says. “The adjudication process is more adversarial across all elements of the asylum process, and we’ve encountered that,” he adds. “The affidavits we produce employ international consensus guidelines and we know that they are still having an impact even as the legal process gets more challenging.”

Rasha Elmahdi (pictured in the opening photo above) serves as the Asylee Women Enterprise’s policy, advocacy, and health specialist. One of her roles is to coordinate between AWE clients and HEAL and their JHU-based medical staff and volunteer medical students. A former asylum seeker herself, originally from Sudan, and a naturalized citizen, she arrived in the U.S. with more than 15 years of experience in international development, including leading global initiatives around population and development with a focus on peace and democracy, public health, gender inequality, and migration.

“Coming to the U.S. was a difficult situation [in terms of work]—organizations here wouldn’t accept me,” Elmahdi says. “I was not getting offered entry-level positions because I was 40, and they were not offering more senior positions because they’re not recognizing my credentials. It is preconceptions you’re up against, sometimes because of your accent. I’d been to the U.S. many times previously, but then I was here 10 years [after seeking asylum] before I got anything in my field. I was substitute teaching.”

Though her background in Sudan was in policy, she has come to appreciate her more hands-on work with asylum seekers. As a Muslim and mother of a U.S.-born teenager, her own daily  experience can still be difficult even as a U.S. citizen. She and her son are often treated as outsiders, she says. Seven years after taking the oath of citizenship, and after earning two more degrees in the U.S., she still carries her naturalization certificate in her purse.

“I do see myself in our clients,” she says, adding that AWE feels more like a community than a job. “Just yesterday, I received a text message from my first client here, a Spanish-speaking woman, about getting something to eat together. We are just friends now.”

Elmahdi notes that her role has changed since she started at AWE, when she served in a more housing-focused capacity, but not her purpose.

“Whatever your role is here, a case manager or not,” she says, “if there is a need, you do whatever you can because we are working with human beings.”