If you are afraid to go back to your country, asylum may be a way to stay. But there is a deadline, and many people do not learn about it until it has passed.
The one-year rule
In most cases you must ask for asylum within one year of the last time you entered the United States.
One year. From your last arrival. That is the rule to remember.
This catches many people. They are busy surviving. They are working, raising children, waiting to feel safe enough to talk about what happened. By the time they are ready, the year has gone.
If your year has already passed
Do not decide on your own that it is too late. There are exceptions.
- If something changed in your country, or in your own situation, after you arrived.
- If something made it very hard for you to file in time — serious illness, a disability, being a child alone, or being badly advised by someone you trusted.
- There are also other kinds of protection that do not have the same one-year deadline. They are harder to win, but they exist.
Whether any of these fits you depends on your facts and your dates. That is a conversation, not something you can decide from a website.
Bring every date you can remember or prove: when you last entered, when things changed at home, when you first tried to get help. Dates decide this question.
If you already have a case, do not let it go quiet
If you have asked for asylum and then stop responding, miss appointments, or do not send what is asked for, your case can be treated as abandoned.
This is important: abandoning the case does not only lose asylum. It can also lose the other kinds of protection you asked for at the same time. One silence can close several doors.
If you are struggling to get a document, or you are frightened, or you simply do not understand what was asked — tell us. That is fixable. Silence is not.
Telling your story
Asylum rests on what happened to you. We will ask you about painful things, and we will go at your pace.
We will never tell you what to say. Your story has to be yours, in your words, true. A story that has been shaped to sound better is the fastest way to lose a case, and it can cause serious problems beyond that.
If you are not sure whether you have a case, start with a free 15-minute screening call. It costs nothing to find out.