When Guatemalan asylum seeker Yojana and DC attorney Amy meet through a pro bono program at the US’s largest immigration detention center, their encounter becomes a lifelong friendship. Filmed over seven years, this intimate documentary reveals the asylum system’s complexities through one case, countering politicized narratives with human truth.
Our film is currently in late production. You can make a tax-deductible donation to help this story be told.
Would you like to see our work sample? Email crediblefeardoc [at] gmail.com.
Credible Fear demystifies the asylum process while humanizing an issue often reduced to political rhetoric.
Our film illuminates the human cost of immigration policy through an intimate lens, examining how bureaucratic systems affect real families. It questions what constitutes credible fear and who determines the validity of someone's suffering. The film challenges audiences to consider the gap between legal asylum definitions and human experience while exploring themes of motherhood, sacrifice, friendship across cultural divides, and the moral obligations related to privilege.
By weaving together Yojana's journey with Amy's education on immigration law, the film serves as both an emotional narrative and an educational tool. It demystifies the asylum process while humanizing an issue often reduced to political rhetoric. The friendship between the two women becomes a bridge between different American experiences—the immigrant seeking safety and the citizen learning to advocate.
Credible Fear ultimately asks whether America's asylum system can fulfill its promise of protection for those fleeing persecution and what happens to families caught in the intersection of policy and human need. The film's power lies in its refusal to provide easy answers, instead documenting the ongoing uncertainty that defines the asylum experience and demanding that audiences grapple with the complexity of immigration in contemporary America.
Our film's power lies in its refusal to provide easy answers, instead documenting the ongoing uncertainty that defines the asylum experience and demanding that audiences grapple with the complexity of immigration in contemporary America.
Characters
“Leaving my daughter behind is the biggest regret of my life. I worry for her life every day.”
Yojana is a young mother from rural Guatemala whose promising life pursuing a degree and working at a local bank was shattered by sexual assault and abduction by a gang member. After refusing to sell drugs and prostitute herself, she was repeatedly beaten and raped, becoming pregnant from the assault. When the gang leader discovered her pregnancy, he violently beat her, forcing premature labor. During a hospital visit, Yojana saw her only chance to escape with her newborn daughter, Andrea. Despite attempts to return to normal life, the gang threatened her older daughter, Fernanda, at school, forcing Yojana to flee to the United States seeking asylum, leaving the pneumonia-stricken Andrea behind, a decision that haunts her daily.
“As lawyers, we really like to focus on following the rule of law. It’s to protect people and to ensure that there’s consistency in how people are treated across the board. And we weren’t seeing that happening.”
Amy is a successful attorney and mother of two in Washington, DC, who was compelled to volunteer at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley during the 2018 family separation crisis. Previously ignorant of immigration law, Amy receives crash-course training to help asylum seekers pass their critical "credible fear" interviews—fifteen-minute sessions that determine whether someone can pursue asylum or face deportation. When Amy meets Yojana during her interview, she's moved to intervene, giving Yojana her card and beginning an unlikely friendship that bridges class, culture, and circumstance.
Why Now?
At the heart of American immigration policy lies a fundamental promise: that those fleeing persecution can find safety within our borders.
However, this promise has been dismantled.
The Trump administration weaponized asylum as part of a broader anti-immigrant campaign, with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions declaring that "the asylum system is being abused to the detriment of U.S. law”, while President Trump dismissed asylum entirely as a "scam." According to the Migration Policy Institute, the administration enacted 472 administrative changes over four years that "dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system," accomplished "nearly exclusively by the executive branch, with sweeping presidential proclamations and executive orders, departmental policy guidance, and hundreds of small, technical adjustments."
These changes brought the system to its knees, denying asylum—a legal right under both U.S. and international law—to thousands of people. Today, over 1.6 million cases languish in immigration court backlogs, with asylum seekers waiting an average of 4.5 years for resolution. This bureaucratic purgatory leaves families separated, lives suspended, and vulnerable people trapped between safety and deportation.
In grant supported focus groups conducted in 2023, not one person was able to correctly define asylum.
This knowledge gap creates an opportunity for mis- and disinformation, xenophobia, and bad policy. A key goal of the film is to demystify the current state of the asylum process in order to prevent this and disrupt other conspiracy theories surrounding asylum seekers. The stakes could not be higher. For Yojana, the outcome determines whether she can safely reunite with her daughter Andrea, left behind in Guatemala, or whether she faces deportation back to the gang violence that forced her to flee. For Amy, the relationship challenges her understanding of American justice and her obligations as a citizen with privilege and legal expertise. Their story illuminates the human cost of policy decisions made in Washington boardrooms and felt in detention centers, courtrooms, and separated families worldwide.
Supported by:
Retro Report
The Stay Indie Project
DocShop
Hogan Lovells
The Surdna Foundation
Logan Nonfiction Program
Hot Docs Deal Maker
Ji.Hlava US Docs New Visions Forum
DC Arts & Humanities Fellowship
202Creates
Docs In Progress
Yale Law School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic
The Center for Independent Documentary (fiscal sponsor)
The Outrage
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