The New Yorker:

Eighteen months after an activist fled Russia to avoid persecution, an appeals court found that he lacked a “well-founded fear or clear probability of future persecution.”

By Joshua Yaffa

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.”

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