This Salvadoran Woman Is At The Center Of The Attorney General's Asylum Crackdown

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is stirring panic in immigrant communities by moving to limit who can get asylum in the United States. Perhaps no one is more alarmed than one Salvadoran woman living in the Carolinas.

She is known only by her initials in immigration court papers, so her lawyers call her Ms. A.B. She fled to the U.S. four years ago, after enduring more than a decade of domestic abuse in her home country, and requested asylum here.

Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship. The attorney general has been highly critical of the asylum system in recent months.

"I have no doubt that many of those crossing our border illegally are leaving behind difficult situations," Sessions said at a news conference in San Diego earlier this month. "But we cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation."

Immigration attorneys across the country are watching Ms. A.B.'s case closely. They worry that Sessions is trying to roll back years of case law that expanded who gets asylum in the U.S. — and