Until this week, every affirmative asylum applicant got an interview first. Now USCIS can skip it entirely for a third of the backlog. Here's what that actually means. Until this week, if you applied for asylum in the U.S. on your own — not because you'd been caught crossing a border, not because you were already fighting deportation, but because you walked into the system voluntarily and asked for protection — there was one thing you could count on. Someone would sit down wi