For nearly 150 years, Pillsbury United Communities has worked across Minneapolis to provide everything from youth programs and employment services to food assistance and a world class theater.

Its work is rooted in a simple idea: The people who live in the neighborhood are the ones who know how to make their lives there better.

MPR News host Angela Davis talks with the new president and CEO of Pillsbury United Communities about taking the helm at a time when local communities are facing so many challenges, and how the arts and connection can help people heal.

Guests:

• Signe Harriday is the new president and CEO of Pillsbury United Communities, one of the Twin Cities’ oldest and largest nonprofits. The organization runs several community centers in Minneapolis and programs aimed at uplifting communities. She previously acted, directed and taught with Pillsbury House + Theatre before becoming the organization’s artistic producing director in 2021.

• Antonio Cardona is director of advancement at Pillsbury United Communities. He was previously the vice president of career readiness at Project for Pride in Living. Before that, he worked at Pillsbury for 15 years, primarily overseeing workforce development and charter schools.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.    

By Shubhanjana Das and Cynthia Tu | Sahan Journal

Legal experts in Minnesota say a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule will put more asylum seekers into deportation proceedings without an interview.

The rule adopted this past week will allow U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to forward certain asylum applications directly to federal immigration courts. The change impacts affirmative asylum seekers, who have applied for asylum with USCIS, compared to defensive asylum seekers who are already facing removal proceedings in court.

The ruling comes at a time when thousands of immigrants in Minnesota have either lost or are set to lose Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and when asylum approvals are at a record low.

While the rule went into effect on July 28, USCIS is accepting public comments till the end of September before a final decision is made.

Lawsuits are likely to follow, but thousands of asylum seekers will be impacted in the meantime, legal experts say.

There were more than 365,000 affirmative asylum applications from Jan 1, 2025, to March 31 of this year, according to USCIS. There were 40,000 cases in 2025 and 31,000 so far this year that have been referred to immigration court, according to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR).

While it is not clear how many live in Minnesota, the state is home to at least 18,000 asylum applicant workers according to a recent study by workpermits.us, a Washington, D.C. organization that researches federal work permit policy. An estimated 35,000 asylum seekers were awaiting a decision on their claim in Minnesota in 2024, according to Fwd.us, a policy organization aimed at advancing criminal and immigration justice. This year, Fort Snelling Immigration Court has adjudicated 2,100 asylum cases, up from a total of 1,700 last year.

“In order to reduce the affirmative asylum backlog, improve efficiency of operations, safeguard national security and public safety, and ensure consistency with agency priorities, USCIS will no longer offer interviews to all affirmative applicants prior to referral to EOIR,” the rule read.

This rule change is the latest that the Trump administration has made in the past year making it harder and more expensive for those applying for asylum to obtain work permits and earn a living in the U.S. while awaiting their decisions, their advocates say.

“The administration would like to abolish asylum, but they don’t want to have to go through Congress and actually change the law, and so they’re taking everything that is in the law and they’re finding all the places where they think they can erode it,” Madeline Lohman, advocacy director at The Advocates for Human Rights told Sahan Journal.

The rule change removes references to a “right to” an interview and reframes it as optional. It also will also remove the opportunity for the applicant to explain any filing problems, removes the requirement for a credibility assessment in the referral letter to the court, and lets an asylum officer decide an applicant’s asylum merit as a matter of discretion without assessment.

DHS also acknowledged that this rule could mean that cases that could’ve been granted by USCIS may now be referred to the court. “This could cause some aliens to experience increased wait times and slower case resolution, and DOJ could incur new costs processing these claims.”

USCIS did not answer Sahan Journal’s questions on which kind of affirmative asylum cases this would impact and if this rule — intended to clear the affirmative asylum backlog at USCIS — would lead to faster decisions for those granted an interview.

“America’s asylum system exists to protect individuals who genuinely fear persecution and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed to the timely adjudication of those claims instead of to those seeking to use the system as a loophole,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a press release.

‘Now it’s adversarial’

Legal experts say USCIS interviews have been a bedrock for the asylum process. These interviews, which require a lot of preparation and gathering evidence, allows applicants a fair chance to present their case to a USCIS officer.

Veronica Thronson, a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who recently prepared an 8-year-old client for an asylum interview, said the process is long, and often traumatic and harrowing for applicants. But it is important for establishing one’s fear of persecution, she added.

U.S. asylum is granted to people who have faced persecution or have a well-founded fear of future persecution based on five protected grounds: race, religion and nationality, alongside membership in a particular social group or political opinion.

“The beauty of the affirmative application process is that it’s non-adversarial,” Thronson said. “You are sitting there, you are telling them your story. You are not being subject to cross-examination, you are not in a trial.”

Thronson, who leads the Immigration & Human Rights Clinic, part of the Law School’s James H. Binger Center for New Americans, said that with this rule adjustment, that posture changes. “Now, even though you file affirmatively and the government wasn’t trying to deport you, you are being put in deportation proceedings. Now it’s adversarial.”

‘More efficient to issue orders of removal’

Cassondre Buteyn, lead attorney at Wilson Law Group, said that she is concerned about the discretionary power this rule puts on asylum officers and the ability to review the law and policy behind a discretionary decision.

“We have seen this abuse of discretion as a way to disqualify applicants from all types of benefits under this administration,” Buteyn said.

While Thronson and Buteyn suggest that this rule change puts a lot of discretionary power on asylum officers, Lohman argues that it is in fact taking away their discretionary power.

“If this tracks how they implemented very similar rules in immigration court about making decisions on cases without hearing testimony from the individual, without requesting additional evidence, that was a power granted to immigration judges,” Lohman said.

“But that grant of power to dismiss cases was actually a directive [and] pressure on the judges to dismiss the cases. So instead of saying, ‘Oh, we’re giving you another tool in the toolbox; use it how you see fit,’ they said, ‘We’re giving you another tool in the toolbox, and we want you to use it on every possible case you can.’”

In theory, defensive asylum cases argued in court would have to meet the same criteria to be granted asylum and would have equal opportunity as an affirmative applicant to present their case, but the reality has veered far from it.

“The [immigration] court has become so weaponized, and grant rates are so low and due processes just consistently undermined in immigration court that the option is not as good as it was in the past,” Hanne Sandison, immigration legal services director at The Advocates for Human Rights said.

Ryan Wood, a former assistant chief immigration judge at Fort Snelling Immigration Court who has trained hundreds of immigration judges, agreed.

Of the 2,100 cases adjudicated in Fort Snelling Immigration Court this fiscal year so far, only 116 cases were approved, according to data from The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

“Judges are moving very, very quickly to enter removal orders,” Wood said. “So, in some ways, it is more efficient to just issue orders of removal. But we’re not putting the due process into the effort in adjudicating. There are going to be very strong asylum applications where their life or freedom is going to be threatened on account of their political opinion, their religious beliefs… Those are now going to be orders of removal.”

While it is unclear which kind of cases are likely to be referred to the court without an interview, Wood said there are patterns in the kind of affirmative cases he reviewed as an immigration judge: from people who have applied for asylum one year after arriving in the U.S to those with a criminal background or who have a trial removal order.

“There’s all kinds of technical reasons that an asylum officer can’t get around that need to be reviewed in court in an adversarial posture,” he said.

The backlog continues

More than 1.4 million asylum applications received by USCIS are still awaiting a decision as of March 31, 2026. DHS cites USCIS affirmative asylum backlog as one of the reasons behind the rule change, but advocates say that directing more cases to immigration court will in turn suffocate an already overburdened and under-resourced system.

Immigration-related cases processed at Fort Snelling Immigration Court between October 2025 and June 2026 took 27.5 months on average from beginning to end, according to a TRAC analysis.