On Sunday, October 25, 2026, 60 Minutes aired a report on a Malian man whom the United States deported to Ghana and whom Ghana, he says, then sent on to Mali, the one country an immigration judge had ordered he could not be returned to. That night, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security posted on X that he had “pulled his file” and described the ground on which, he said, the claim rested. The next day, Fox News reported that it had “exclusively obtained” his asylum application, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reposted that report on its official X account with comments about what the application said.
Whatever one thinks of the underlying case, every person with an asylum application on file now has a fair question: can the government make my asylum application public? This page answers that question under the regulation that governs it, explains the argument the government is likely to make, and says what an asylum applicant can realistically do to protect themselves.
The short answer
The information in an asylum application is confidential by federal regulation, and that protection does not expire when the case is decided. It can be shared only with the applicant’s written consent, with U.S. officials and U.S. courts for the specific purposes the regulation lists, or “at the discretion of the Attorney General,” a phrase the Department of Homeland Security reads today as the Secretary of Homeland Security. Going on television to talk about your case is not written consent: DHS’s own guidance says it “generally” does not recognize implied waivers. The discretion clause is the government’s best argument, and no court has yet defined how far it reaches.
| Question | Answer (checked October 27, 2026) |
|---|---|
| Is my I-589 confidential? | Yes. 8 CFR 208.6 and its immigration-court twin 8 CFR 1208.6. |
| Does protection end after the judge rules? | No. The regulation has no end date. |
| Does talking to the press waive it? | Not under DHS’s own written guidance, which requires written consent. |
| Can the government still disclose? | Possibly, under the “discretion” clause. Its limits are untested. |
| Can I sue for damages if it leaks? | Usually not, for the reasons explained below. The breach can matter in your immigration case instead. |
What happened in the case that raised this question?
The facts below come from the published reporting and the parties’ public statements. None of them has been decided by a court, and the case is pending.
According to the CBS News report that accompanied the broadcast, Moussa Diawara came to the United States on a tourist visa at age 32 and stayed past its expiration. In 2012 an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal, which barred the government from sending him to Mali but left open removal to another country. He lived near Houston with his wife and their two U.S.-citizen children, held a work permit, and has no criminal record. ICE arrested him on July 11, 2026, and flew him to Ghana at the end of July. He says Ghanaian officials put him on a flight to Mali within days. His lawyer has asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., to order his return.
DHS disputes the account. Its general counsel told 60 Minutes that Mr. Diawara “was flown to Ghana”; DHS later called a medical form listing Mali as the destination a “clerical error,” said Ghana had given diplomatic assurances for his safety, and questioned the credibility of his persecution claim. CBS reported that its correspondent spoke with 19 people from the same flight, 17 of whom said Ghana sent them to countries where U.S. judges had ruled they should not be returned.
The 60 Minutes report described his fear of returning to Mali as based on his conversion to Christianity. DHS’s general counsel, and then Fox News from the application it had obtained, said the claim rested on a different ground. ICE’s post called the report “shockingly poorly researched” and said he now faces allegations of immigration fraud. We do not reproduce or quote his application here, because how its contents became public is the subject of this page. We also take no position on whether his claim was true. That question belongs to an immigration judge, under the procedure described below, and not to a news cycle.
Is my asylum application confidential?
Yes. The governing rule is 8 CFR 208.6(a), and the immigration court applies the same text at 8 CFR 1208.6(a). Put in plain terms, information “contained in or pertaining to” any asylum application, and the records of credible-fear and reasonable-fear screenings, may not be disclosed without the applicant’s written consent, except as the regulation allows or at the discretion of the Attorney General. A second paragraph protects other immigration-agency and immigration-court records that show a particular person applied for asylum or went through a fear screening.
Three points about scope matter most:
- Withholding and CAT claims are covered. Form I-589 is a single application for asylum, withholding of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture. A person who received only withholding of removal still filed an asylum application.
- The fact of applying is itself protected. Courts and DHS use the same test for a breach: a disclosure that lets a third party link the applicant’s identity to the fact that they applied, to specific facts or allegations in the claim, or to facts that support a reasonable inference that they applied. The Second Circuit adopted that test in Lin v. U.S. Department of Justice, 459 F.3d 255 (2d Cir. 2006), taking it from DHS’s own guidance.
- There is no end date. Nothing in the regulation limits it to pending cases, and nothing ends it when an immigration judge rules, when an appeal period runs, or when the person is removed. The dangers the rule guards against, retaliation against the applicant or family members abroad, do not end at those points either.
The rule exists because of what a leak can do. The USCIS Asylum Division’s fact sheet on the confidentiality regulation (October 18, 2012) explains that the information, if disclosed publicly, could expose the applicant to retaliation by a government or non-state actor if the applicant is sent back, or endanger family members still in the home country.
Who is allowed to see my asylum application?
The regulation lists who may see the file without the applicant’s consent, and it is a short list. Under 8 CFR 208.6(c), the confidentiality rule does not apply to disclosure to:
- U.S. government officials or contractors who need the information to adjudicate asylum applications or fear screenings, to defend lawsuits arising from those decisions, or for a U.S. government investigation of a criminal or civil matter; and
- federal, state or local courts in the United States considering a legal action that arises from the application or from the proceedings it was part of.
Every one of those exceptions is a disclosure inside government, to people with a job to do with the file. None of them is a disclosure to a news organization or to the public. The regulation also directs the government to coordinate with the State Department to keep these records confidential when they are sent to U.S. offices abroad.
Does confidentiality end when I talk to the press about my case?
Not under the government’s own guidance. The regulation requires written consent, and DHS has addressed the press situation directly. Question 17 of the USCIS Asylum Division’s 2012 confidentiality fact sheet asks what can be shared with the press when an applicant has gone public with the asylum claim. The answer reads: “Because the regulation currently requires the applicant’s written consent, we generally do not recognize implicit waivers of confidentiality, even when the asylum-related information is a matter of public record.”
Federal courts have read the rule the same way. In Lin, the government argued that Lin had waived any objection to its efforts to authenticate his document. The Second Circuit rejected the argument because the regulation explicitly requires a written waiver, and holding that he had waived it orally would contradict its plain language.
That said, the government’s likely argument here deserves to be taken seriously, and it is not a weak one. It runs like this: a person who goes on national television and describes his own persecution claim has put the content of that claim in public dispute, and when the public account differs from the sworn application, the government has a legitimate interest in correcting the record. The regulation’s text gives that argument a place to land. It does not depend on waiver at all. It depends on the clause that permits disclosure “at the discretion of the Attorney General.”
What is the “discretion” exception, and how far does it reach?
The phrase is in the operative text of 8 CFR 208.6(a), and DHS reads it as discretion now held by the Secretary of Homeland Security. DHS’s fact sheet explains that the Homeland Security Act transferred this authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and that outside the listed exceptions, disclosure requires either the applicant’s written consent or the Secretary’s specific authorization. No published court decision we have found defines what that discretion permits, who must exercise it, or whether it allows disclosure to the press. In Owino v. Holder, 771 F.3d 527 (9th Cir. 2014), the Ninth Circuit noted that the government did not argue the disclosure there had been made under that clause, so the court never had to decide its reach.
The same fact sheet shows how the discretion has been used in practice. It has been exercised by formal, written decisions at the top of the department: an October 2001 Attorney General decision giving the FBI access for counterterrorism purposes, a 2007 memorandum from Secretary Chertoff extending sharing to intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, a 2011 addendum signed by Secretary Napolitano, and standing arrangements with Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. The fact sheet also says the information may be shared inside DHS’s policy and legal chain of command, including the Office of General Counsel. So a DHS lawyer reviewing the file is not, by itself, a breach. Publication is a different question.
Two points frame how the argument would play out. First, the clause as written is a discretion of the department’s head, which raises a factual question in any given case: whether the Secretary actually authorized the disclosure, or whether a file reached the press some other way. In this case, a senior DHS official described the ground of the claim himself, in public, before any news outlet published the document, which puts the question of authorization squarely in view. Second, the government tried in 2020 to rewrite the confidentiality rule. The December 2020 asylum rule, 85 FR 80274, would have changed this section along with much of the asylum system, and a federal court enjoined the entire rule before it took effect in Pangea Legal Services v. DHS (N.D. Cal. Jan. 8, 2021). As of October 2026 that injunction remains in place, and the memorandum accompanying DHS’s ratification of the rule (published November 19, 2025, 90 FR 51989) acknowledges that the rule cannot be implemented while the injunction stands. The text that governs today is the version in effect on January 10, 2021.
Our judgment: the discretion argument is a serious one, and a court could accept it on facts where an applicant publicly told a story that contradicted the application. A court could equally hold that a targeted correction (that the application raised different grounds, or that a judge’s findings differed) would have answered the public account without publishing the document. Until a court rules, no one can say confidently which way this comes out.
Why can a leak of an asylum application make a person less safe?
Because a leak can create a danger that did not exist before it. DHS’s own fact sheet acknowledges that public disclosure might, in rare cases, give rise to a plausible protection claim where none existed, by bringing the applicant to the attention of the government or group the applicant accused of mistreatment.
Several federal courts of appeals have held that a breach of the regulation is more than a technical error. In Owino, State Department investigators showed a Kenyan applicant’s arrest documents to officers at the Kenyan police stations involved, and the Ninth Circuit held that this violated 8 CFR 208.6. The court sent the case back to the agency to decide whether the disclosure itself had created a new risk of harm, citing the Fifth Circuit’s statement in Dayo v. Holder, 687 F.3d 653 (5th Cir. 2012) that a violation “could subject the asylum-seeker and his family to additional risks,” and the Fourth Circuit’s similar holding in Anim v. Mukasey, 535 F.3d 243 (4th Cir. 2008).
The principle matters whether or not the original claim was true. Persecutors act on what they believe about a person, and U.S. asylum law recognizes that a characteristic someone is believed to have can expose them to harm just as an actual one can. A person who has been named worldwide as having claimed a particular status may face real risk in a country that punishes that status. Mali, for example, adopted a new penal code in late 2024 that criminalizes same-sex relations; it was published in the country’s Official Journal in December 2024. A disclosure made to discredit a claim can, in that setting, strengthen the case for protection.
If my asylum information is leaked, can I sue the government?
Usually not for money, and the reasons are more technical than most people expect.
- The Privacy Act does not cover most asylum applicants. The Privacy Act protects an “individual,” and the statute defines that term as “a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence” (5 U.S.C. § 552a(a)(2)). A person with a pending asylum case or a grant of withholding is neither.
- The Federal Tort Claims Act stops at the border. The FTCA lets people sue the United States for some wrongs by federal employees, but it excludes claims “arising in a foreign country” (28 U.S.C. § 2680(k)). The Supreme Court held in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U.S. 692, 712 (2004) that this exception “bars all claims based on any injury suffered in a foreign country, regardless of where the tortious act or omission occurred.” For a person who has been removed, the injury from a leak is usually suffered abroad.
- The regulation itself names no remedy. The Ninth Circuit said so in Owino, and the courts have filled the gap inside immigration proceedings rather than through damages suits.
So the practical remedy for a breach is in the immigration case. A breach can support a request to present a new claim for protection based on the danger the disclosure created, including through a motion to reopen where the case has ended. It can also be part of the record in a federal-court challenge to a removal. Evidence of the breach should be preserved as soon as it is discovered: screenshots with dates, links, and the names of the outlets that published it.
If the government believes an asylum claim was false, what is the lawful process?
There is one, and it runs through an immigration judge. Under 8 CFR 1208.24, a grant of withholding of removal can be terminated on a showing of fraud in the application such that the person was not eligible when it was granted. When the grant came from an immigration judge, the judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals may reopen the case to consider termination, and DHS must prove the ground for termination by a preponderance of the evidence. The person gets a hearing and the chance to answer.
A few things follow. A grant of withholding means a judge already found, after a hearing, that the person met a demanding standard: that persecution was more likely than not. A mismatch between a television segment and a sworn application is a reason to look more closely. It is not a finding of fraud. And a person can have more than one basis for fear. The CBS and Fox accounts can both be accurate about what each source said without either establishing what the judge relied on in 2012. If DHS believes a grant was obtained by fraud, the place to prove it is a reopened proceeding.
Why did his wife and children not have the same protection?
Because withholding of removal protects only the person who wins it. Asylum allows a spouse and children to be included as derivatives (INA § 208(b)(3)). Withholding has no derivative provision, so each family member must qualify on their own claim or have status some other way. In this case the children are U.S. citizens, so the derivative rule was not what separated the family. It does explain why a withholding grant, unlike asylum, gives a family no shared protection and no path to a green card. Our withholding of removal guide covers the other limits of the status.
Can a person with withholding of removal be sent to a third country?
Yes, and that is the policy the 60 Minutes report was about. Withholding bars removal only to the country where the judge found the person would face persecution; the government may remove the person to another country willing to accept them, and since 2025 it has done so actively. The class-action challenge to the policy is DHS v. D.V.D.. On September 18, 2026, the First Circuit largely upheld the district court’s February 2026 ruling that the policy denies due process. On September 29, 2026, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s judgment and agreed to hear the case; argument is set for December 9, 2026. As of October 2026, removals continue while the case is pending. People with a grant of withholding or protection under the Convention Against Torture should have a plan with counsel for asserting fear of a proposed third country quickly.
What should asylum applicants do now to protect their information?
- Keep your own complete copy of everything you filed. If your account is ever questioned, you want to answer from the document, not from memory. If you no longer have your copy, our guides explain how to get your file from USCIS and get your immigration court record.
- Do not post your application or declaration online, and think before describing your claim in public. Your own disclosure is not a waiver under DHS’s written guidance, but anything you say publicly can be compared with what you swore to. A public account that differs from the asylum declaration invites exactly the kind of attack this case shows.
- Before speaking to the media about a pending or decided case, talk to your lawyer. Know which parts of your story are in the record, and make sure what you say is consistent with them.
- Do not sign a written consent to disclosure unless you understand what it covers. Written consent is the one thing that clearly ends the protection.
- If you believe your information has been disclosed, document it and tell your lawyer quickly. A breach can support a new claim, and timing matters in motions to reopen.
The rule protecting asylum files is strong on paper and thin on remedies, and the government now has a live argument for an exception that courts have never defined. For an applicant, the safest course is to keep what is said in public consistent with what is in the record, and to treat the file as something to protect. If you have an asylum, withholding or CAT case and questions about your record or your options, our asylum guide is a good place to start, and you can contact our office to schedule a consultation.
