On the afternoon of August 15, 2024, Leonid Melekhin, a thirty-three-year-old small-business owner from Perm, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, approached the U.S. border in Calexico, California. The previous winter, he had flown to Mexico, leaving behind his wife and their two small children. He spent the next eight months waiting for a notification in CBP One, an app that the Biden Administration launched in 2023 as an authorized portal to file asylum claims. Now, the app told Melekhin, he had an appointment to present himself to U.S. immigration officers. Wearing a backpack and a black baseball cap, he took a selfie in front of a sign that read “Entrada USA.”
Melekhin sent the photo to Yury Bobrov, an activist and political refugee who was also from Perm, on the messaging app Telegram. The two men had been in regular contact. Earlier, Melekhin had sent Bobrov another photo, of a small yellow poster hanging from a concrete bridge. Putin, the poster’s text reads, is a “killer, fascist, usurper.” Melekhin said that, on his last night in Russia, he had gone to Perm’s Kommunalny Bridge and attached the poster to the railing. “I couldn’t resist,” he told Bobrov. He had asked Bobrov to “post it somewhere,” because “it would be a shame if no one sees it.”
Bobrov shared it on Telegram alongside the photo of Melekhin crossing the border. “I felt that he might have wanted to strengthen his asylum case but also that he genuinely didn’t want to leave Russia in total silence,” Bobrov told me. “Was it a strategic move or an impulse of the soul? I don’t know, but I have no reason to doubt his motives.”
Less than a year later, a journalist in Perm published a story about a local court hearing: Melekhin had been arrested in Russia and charged with justifying terrorism, a crime that carries a potential five-year prison sentence. It was a rare instance of such a case being publicized, in which a Russian was deported from the U.S. to face a prison sentence back home. But little else was known of how he’d ended up there.
From the border, Melekhin was brought to the Imperial Regional Detention Facility, a holding center in Calexico run by a private company called the Management and Training Corporation. He was placed in a housing unit with dozens of other asylum seekers, including a number of Russians, and waited for his hearing with a judge. Melekhin thought he had a fairly strong case: for years, he had attended protests and volunteered with the Perm field office of Alexei Navalny’s political organization, which is now banned in Russia. “Everyone knows Russia’s problems,” a relative of Melekhin’s, who is still in Russia, told me. “Corruption is rampant. Fair elections are nonexistent.” The relative said, of Melekhin, “If he wasn’t happy about something, he always stood his ground.”
Even in a midsize city such as Perm, Melekhin wasn’t a recognizable activist. Bobrov called him an “ordinary, average, homespun guy who took an interest in the fate of his country.” When I reached Sergei Ukhov, the former head of the Navalny field office in Perm, who now lives abroad, he didn’t remember Melekhin. But, when he searched his photo archive, he found a picture of Melekhin at a protest in Perm, in 2017. Natalia Vavilova, another former coördinator for the field office, said, of Melekhin, “I can’t say he was a particularly active volunteer or regular presence in our headquarters.” But she, too, had found traces of him: a text exchange from 2018, in which he discussed his plans to volunteer as an independent election monitor during that year’s Presidential race. “That’s definitely civic activism,” Vavilova said. “No doubt about it.”
In 2021, Melekhin was arrested at a pro-Navalny protest in Perm. Investigators attempted to pressure him to give testimony against others in Navalny’s political organization, but he refused. In 2023, the year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when nearly all protest activity was banned, he went to the center of Perm holding a sign that read “Freedom to Navalny.” He was almost immediately detained. At the station, one officer held his hands behind his back while another punched him in the stomach. Later, the police threatened him with forced conscription into the Russian Army. “He became seized by the idea of moving to the U.S.,” Melekhin’s relative said.
Melekhin started to study English and to follow the stories of other Russians who had made the journey, including Bobrov. He decided to travel alone. His youngest child was only a year old at the time. “No one knew how long it would take or what conditions he’d be living in along the way,” the relative said. The plan was that Melekhin would secure legal status for himself and then find a way to reunite with his family in the U.S.
I spoke with a number of Russians who had met Melekhin in the Imperial detention center, none of whom are named out of concerns for their safety. “He was in a positive mood,” one of them, a citizen journalist from central Russia, said. He had launched self-funded investigations into malfeasance by local police and municipal officials, and was detained and questioned multiple times before he decided to seek asylum in the U.S. He and Melekhin met in the exercise yard. They were both optimistic about their cases. “We finally made it, at least this far,” the other asylum seeker recalled them saying. “Surely, they will listen to us, and at the end we will be offered help. All we have to do is wait.”
Melekhin’s hearing was in December, 2024, four months into his detention at Imperial, and a year after he left his family in Russia. His case was assigned to a judge named Anne Kristina Perry, who was appointed as an immigration judge in 2018. “She is very kind, calm, professional, diligent,” Raisa Stepanova, an immigration attorney in California who has represented several Russian asylum seekers, but not Melekhin, told me. “But her judicial reasoning doesn’t always display a knowledge of how Russian police and law enforcement actually function.” The citizen journalist from central Russia, whose case was also adjudicated by Perry, said, “She acts like a prosecutor more than a judge. She questioned me for three hours; it was a real interrogation.” (I wrote to Perry to ask about Melekhin’s case but received only a general reply from the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Department of Justice.)
Melekhin presented his case pro se—that is, without a lawyer. He spoke of his past participation in protests and how, after Bobrov posted the image of his Putin poster, police in Perm had searched his family’s apartment. I obtained a transcript of Perry’s oral decision. She considered Melekhin a “credible witness” and called the evidence that he had managed to gather “plausible, consistent, and detailed.” But she decided that his case did not meet a long-established legal standard, that there was at least a ten-per-cent chance he would face persecution in his country of origin—a benchmark for determining “objectively reasonable well-founded fear.” Melekhin’s previous activism, Perry said, was “quite limited,” and the “description of his participation is vague and lacks specifics.” Melekhin was “not entitled to relief,” Perry ruled. “The Respondent is ordered removed to Russia.”
“Leonid was angry and frustrated,” another Russian asylum seeker at Imperial said. “In detention, you constantly see people with far less serious cases being granted asylum.” But Melekhin planned to appeal and was confident in his chances. “I tried to offer moral support,” Bobrov told me. He suggested that Melekhin hire a lawyer and launched a fund-raising drive on his Telegram channel to help Melekhin pay for one.
Early this year, Melekhin learned that criminal charges had been filed against him back in Russia. Word had travelled from Perm to Imperial about the case, and, though there were few specifics, it seemed likely linked to the poster on the bridge. “He was worried, but you’d never guess from how he carried himself,” Bobrov told me. Melekhin was, he went on, “a rather dry biscuit, emotionally speaking—impassive, reserved, extremely calm.”
While Melekhin waited for his appeal decision, he was transferred to another privately run immigrant-detention center in San Luis, Arizona, which was known to have comparatively harsher conditions. “His life became significantly worse,” Melekhin’s relative told me. He grew thinner and quieter. Because appeal decisions in asylum cases are often made by an outside board without an additional hearing, Melekhin’s appeal was considered without him ever appearing in court. The decision came in mid-June: “We affirm the Immigration Judge’s decision denying the respondent’s applications for asylum.” The appeals court agreed with Perry that Melekhin lacked a “well-founded fear or clear probability of future persecution.” The evidence he provided was “insufficient to show that the authorities or anyone else would seek out the respondent for political persecution in Russia.” The judgment made no mention of the criminal charges in Russia, which Melekhin had learned of after his initial hearing. It’s unclear whether the judge was aware of them at all.
Melekhin was transferred back to Imperial to await deportation. “He was in shock,” the Russian journalist said. Another detainee said he seemed “depressed.” As the days passed, Melekhin told him, “ ‘I see no point to continue, and no chance of a just outcome.’ ” The other detainee added, “He thought he would find refuge for himself and his family here, but things turned out otherwise.” Now he needed to find a way to avoid being sent to Russia. “ ‘God forbid I end up back there,’ ” Melekhin told his fellow-inmates, “ ‘because there’s no way I can avoid prison if I do.’ ”
Russian deportees are not sent directly back to Russia from the U.S. They are flown on commercial airlines, with stops in any number of transit countries, such as Egypt and Morocco. Melekhin seemed to believe that his only hope was to buy a ticket elsewhere once he landed at a stopover; inmates at Imperial had heard that at least one Russian deportee had accomplished this while in transit in Morocco. (Bobrov suspects, however, that deportees to Russia do not have access to their passports when they board these flights.)
His friends at Imperial implored him to keep trying to pursue his case in the U.S. He could file a final appeal, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. That would require finding a new lawyer and, in the best-case scenario, enduring more months in detention. “You have to try,” one of his friends told him. But Melekhin was resigned. “I’ve waited enough,” he said. The lawyer whom Bobrov hired had said that she urgently needed to speak with Melekhin, but she was unable to reach him; she asked Bobrov to tell Melekhin to call her. When Bobrov relayed the message, Melekhin said, “I already know I lost the appeal. What’s the point?”
After that, around July 23rd, Melekhin disappeared from detention. According to his relative, police came to the family’s apartment around that time for another search. But the family didn’t know what it was about, or that Melekhin was even back in Russia, until they saw the news of his arrest. “Then things clicked into place,” the relative told me. A judge has ordered Melekhin held in jail while he awaits sentencing.
Not long ago, I reached Valery Kuznetsov, Melekhin’s state-appointed lawyer in Perm. (In Russia, such lawyers are generally considered close to the police and prosecutors.) He insisted that Melekhin returned to Russia voluntarily. “He decided it’s better at home,” Kuznetsov said. “He knew that a criminal case had been opened against him, and that he might be arrested upon arrival, which is indeed what happened.” His client, he said, has pleaded guilty; he is aware that he “did something stupid and is now paying the price.” Kuznetsov confirmed the basis for the indictment is the poster from the bridge that Melekhin asked Bobrov to post to his channel.
In the end, Melekhin’s deportation was less a reflection of Trump’s warming stance toward Russia or of the Administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown. Instead, he appears to have been swept up in an overwhelmed immigration system making snap judgments without time or capacity to fully consider the dangers that asylum seekers may face back at home. One of Melekhin’s friends in Imperial told me that, in the days before his deportation, “he was questioning himself, feeling anxious, not sleeping.” Melekhin had told the friend, “ ‘If I have to sit in prison, I might as well do it at home, where my wife and family can visit me.’ ” Another, whose legal saga has dragged on for over a year, said, “When you break the law, you are given a certain sentence, and that makes things easier, in a way.” But in immigration detention, the friend added, “You didn’t break any laws, yet end up in prison seemingly indefinitely. That’s what breaks a person.” ♦
