In 1951, world leaders came together to sign the Refugee Convention, making a promise that people fleeing persecution would have the right to seek safety. On the 75th anniversary of the Convention, CGRS is publishing a series of interviews with CGRS team members on the landscape of the global asylum system today and their work with CGRS to defend the principles enshrined in the Convention.

CGRS interns are conducting, transcribing, and publishing these interviews. To learn more about working with CGRS, see our Career Opportunities page.

Interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.

This interview is with one of our inaugural Refugee Leadership Fellows, A.R. A.R.’s family fled Iran when she was a teenager, after her father was targeted by the government as a political opponent.

Refugee Leadership Fellows are advocates and leaders in the refugee rights field, who have themselves experienced forced displacement. Learn more about the Refugee Leadership Program here.

Q: Can you share a little about your journey and the circumstances that led you to seek asylum?

A: I was born and raised in Iran in the Middle East. I grew up in a very political environment, aware of the fact that people surrounding me and my family members were very much against this brutal regime, which turned into a theocratic dictatorship. From the dawn of the morning to the night, our experiences were impacted by the regime that we were living under. For example, multiple members of my family and family friends were detained or even killed by the Iranian government in 1999 during the student movement at the University of Tehran, and then later in 2008 with the Green Movement in Iran. Those protests, those moments of political activism were moments that my family were involved in and persecuted for. 

I lived in the United States as an asylum seeker for eight years. The process was mainly a bureaucratic process of just cases upon cases piling up, and every two years, we could get our work authorization updated. We had Social Security, we had tools necessary to be able to live with dignity in the United States. Tools which this current administration is time and time again trying to get rid of for asylum seekers.

The only reason we were able to get an interview and be granted asylum when we did was through a writ of mandamus to sue the government for not taking care of our case in a timely manner. Ten years later, I'm a permanent resident, but I carry those experiences with me and I see them more vividly, more violently, beyond imagination, with the Iranians that I work with who are in detention for 17, 18, 19, or more months [after coming in] with a CBP One appointment or through the border. They did everything they're supposed to. They presented themselves to the authorities. And in return, they've been in detention for months on end. 

Q: Displacement often affects every part of a person’s life. How did being displaced affect you emotionally and personally throughout your journey? 

A: My displacement is the most violent thing that has happened to myself, to my body, to my understanding of myself and my Iranian-ness, and what it means to be a displaced individual. But when I also think of displacement, in my case, it's bound to politics, bound to the situation that Iran also feels like exile. I came to the U.S. with my parents and the rest of my family. My parents were some of the first people in generations of my family to step foot in the United States. In a sense, I feel like I'm kind of exporting a small part of Iran with myself to the U.S. 

Displacement impacts me every day in every form, shape, and way imaginable. I think of my family back home. I haven't seen them in 10 years due to my legal status. In order to travel, I would need a travel document, which I have applied for. It takes 18 months and under this administration, they have put a pause on anything that has to do with 39 nationalities, Iran being one of them. I haven't seen my family members, my closest family members, my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents in a decade. Those are things that I do think about every day as I grow up and I establish myself in this new country. 

I came here as a 16-year-old child, lost and confused, barely speaking English. And 10 years later, I've graduated undergrad, I've graduated my master's program, and I'm starting law school, doing exactly the kind of work that I would have needed as a 16-year-old asylum seeker. On a personal level, I feel like I made the best and most useful version of myself given my situation, given my displacement, but I do sometimes think about what life would have been like had I not been forced to flee or if I had been born in a country where I would have never had to move and where those material conditions didn't exist. 

If I were to sum it up emotionally or mentally what immigration and displacement has meant to me, it is as if I die in my mother tongue every day, but no one knows because they don't speak it. That’s very unique to the Iranian experience. 

As we're sitting here, in January 2026, the Iranian government massacred upwards of 20,000 Iranians. I know some people that were killed in that mass uprising. So, to continuously be impacted by what's happening, to continuously lose friends and family members to a government that you have escaped from, that's an experience that unfortunately a lot of us Iranians share. There is this sense of mourning and connection that exists on my Iranian side – one that simply doesn’t exist for the outside world or the United States that I interact with every day. 

Q: As we reflect on the 75 years of refugee protection, what do you hope people understand about the experiences of refugees beyond what they see in the news? 

A: That it can happen to anyone. Your country can go through war, a natural disaster, a danger to you and your family right at your doorstep. Whether it's gang violence, tsunamis, or other dangers that force people from their homes. To be displaced, at least the first years of resettlement, feels like homelessness to me. The way we treat displaced people, refugees, and asylum seekers, mirrors how we treat unhoused people – as if they don’t exist, shouldn’t exist, and need to be kept out of sight, out of mind, viewed as a burden on the country, when that isn’t the case at all. 

As the 75th anniversary of the Refugee Convention comes, all I can think of is that being a refugee can happen to anyone. If it does or doesn't happen, it's on the basis of luck. Growing up in Iran as a 10-year-old, I never thought my family and I would be displaced or that we would be asylum seekers in the U.S. However, life did things to my family that we had to flee and we had to come to the U.S. At the time, there was a pathway that existed for people like me seeking asylum. Now, as I look around and I work with the Iranians that are in detention, it's more terrifying than ever. It's been 75 years, yet we are putting people in cages, people who come and ask for asylum, who come and seek help, either through our border or other ways. They're seeking safety and in return, they've been put into the worst human conditions in these private detention facilities with no government oversight. 

While I appreciate the celebration of it and what it means to celebrate refugees around the world, I feel like it is also very disappointing because of where we are in terms of our treatment of displaced people, our treatment of refugees, not just in the United States, but in the broader world as well. In Europe and the rest of the world too. After 75 years of commemorating something as a lived, valid, true experience that happens to millions of people every year, you would think that there would be enough protections. However, there is still so much work to be done. I am beyond thrilled to be contributing to that work at CGRS, as I have over the past seven months. 

Q: What was one thing that helped you navigate the asylum process?

A: My high school counselor really tried her best. I lived as an asylum seeker for roughly seven years. But the biggest challenge that I had as a high school student applying to schools and applying to different programs is that I realized I didn't qualify for anything. I can't get a federal loan. I can't do FAFSA. I can't do private loans. I can't do anything. Then I need a cosigner for everything, and you can't do that when you are an asylum seeker and you don't have any extended family in America. 

My high school counselor told me about this program called TASFA. At the time I lived in Texas. TASFA is basically a form of financial aid for Texas residents that did not care about citizenship status. I never had a box to check. I wasn't undocumented, I wasn't an admitted refugee yet, I wasn't on an F-1 visa, I wasn't on a J-1 visa, and I didn't have a green card. I always had to select a box called “other” and explain that I am an asylum seeker. TASFA was the only financial aid I could apply for, and that is the only reason I was able to attend my undergraduate institution in Texas, because it gave me full tuition funding, regardless of my citizenship status. 

The asylum process itself for me as a child, as a 16-year-old, wasn't so much the legal side of it because I came here as a minor. My parents, with me as their translator, tried their best to go through with the process. For me, the asylum process was, “What does it mean to live with an unconventional status?” And one of the ways that it impacted me the most, as a teenager and later on as a young adult, was that I didn't qualify for a lot of educational opportunities. Like I said, FAFSA being the big one, but Fulbright, Carnegie Mellon, so many things I wanted to do as someone who’s academically driven. I was a quadruple major and triple minor in undergrad. I really wanted to do so much research, to pursue so many funding opportunities and I couldn’t qualify for them on the basis that I just had a very unconventional, even unknown, status at the time in 2016. 

When I was applying to colleges, I had to clarify the difference between an asylum seeker, asylee, and a refugee. I think people are more aware now. It's been a decade since I've been living here and things have changed so much in the U.S. and the world of immigration. But at the time, people didn't even know what it meant to be an asylum seeker. So for me, it was more of like a theoretical framework of, okay, I have this title, but how does it define me? And how do I define myself if no one even knows what this means? I'm outside of all these boxes. How do I keep going forward? How do I find a way for myself in this world, in this country, where things are not necessarily designed for asylum seekers?

Q: If you could change one aspect of the U.S. asylum system to better support people seeking asylum, from the moment they arrive through their long-term integration, what would it be, and why?

A: My family and I never used any benefits, especially because in 2016, that was punishable. It could potentially create issues for you when you apply for your green card or when you apply for your citizenship. When my family and I moved here, starting from zero, my mom had to go back to school. My dad was an engineer in Iran, but could not find a job that was suitable to the kind of work that he was doing prior. It was sometimes very hard to financially survive, especially the first three years. 

I think that there shouldn't be a penalty or some sort of punishment for asylum seekers and refugees using the sorts of benefits that exist either with reduced-price school lunches or SNAP benefits, and similar programs. I think those are things that I do know asylum seekers shy away from and don't use because they believe it will impact their immigration case. When I was an asylum seeker, it did impact how your immigration case was perceived and impacted your pathway to citizenship. 

Beyond that, I think there needs to be a timely system of getting to these cases. Like I said, had we not sued, had we not done a mandamus, who knows, maybe I would still be waiting. 

I know there are people who are waiting. One of our family friends who also came to the U.S. as an asylum seeker [about a decade ago] is still in the asylum process, and there’s a pause right now. They did their interview, but there is a pause on Iranian nationals, so they don't know what the result of their case is going to be.

Q: What words of hope or encouragement would you share with people around the world who are currently experiencing displacement or seeking safety? 

A: My message of hope is that as long as there are organizations that exist like CGRS that do this kind of outreach and teaching, and that there are people advocating for and fighting to protect the rights of refugees, there is hope. That's why I think the Technical Assistance and Training program is so important, maybe one of the most important aspects of CGRS, because there needs to be a form of well-established public education to educate people on the situations of refugees, asylum seekers, asylees, and all displaced people, not just in the United States and not just Iranian, but around the world. 

No one should be penalized for fleeing their country. The quote that I keep going back to time after time is that no one would put their child on a boat. In my case, people that I talk to are traveling  all the way through South America, no one walks on foot for 30 or 40 days straight, had it not been because they had to. I think to humanize those experiences, to put faces and names to stories of displacement are the only way we can educate the public and make sure that people, citizens and noncitizens alike, are aware of what displaced people go through every day.