Protection law & process
Asylum and refugee law—from the one-year filing deadline and third-country removals to non-refoulement—explained through the people, evidence, interviews, and decisions that give the rules their meaning.
Writing & Public Commentary
Law and policy, traced to their human consequences.
Essays on asylum, refugee protection, democracy, Ukraine, public institutions, the federal workforce, and immigration policy, grounded in firsthand experience and focused on how institutions translate law and policy into decisions that deeply affect people’s lives.
Selected essays
Refugee protection · Substack
What It Takes to Become a Refugee
The legal standard is exacting. The process is brutal. And the system America built to resettle refugees has closed its gates to the world’s most vulnerable.
Read the essay →Refugee vetting · Substack
Vetting as Pretense
Drawing on asylum and refugee cases he adjudicated from Dilley to Nauru—and his work reviewing Afghan evacuation cases—Marks dismantles the myth of “no vetting” and shows how that fiction is being used to justify refugee re-vetting, denaturalization, and removal.
Read the essay →Refugee protection · Substack
What Happened to “Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor”?
The United States has accelerated refugee resettlement for Afrikaners from South Africa while most other refugee applicants around the world have been left behind.
Read the essay →Six-part series
The Project 2025 Chronicles
A continuing investigation of how an ideological blueprint becomes operational reality inside federal institutions—and what those changes mean for law, expertise, public service, and democratic government.
Vol. I
The Refugee Officer Was on the List
The blueprint, the people carrying it out, and its transformation of the federal workforce, refugee program, asylum system, and immigration policy.
Read →Vol. II
Warning: Do Not Travel
One strand of the blueprint, traced from first-term asylum policy to a deportation flight bound for one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
Read →Vol. III
The Country I Taught Rule of Law In — Ukraine
Ukraine, American power, and a policy agenda that reduces the survival of a democracy to presidential discretion.
Read →Vol. IV
The Court Clears the Path
How the federal courts—and the Supreme Court in particular—became central to the project’s exercise of executive power.
Read →Vol. V
To Support, Defend, & Work Around
Constitutional limits, executive ambition, and the assumption that every guardrail can become an inconvenience to route around.
Read →Vol. VI
The Hostile Takeover
The concluding installment: the dismantling and remaking of the federal government after the chainsaw was put away.
Read →Across the work
Institutions under pressure
How sweeping policy changes move from political ambition into institutional practice, remaking agencies, constraining expertise, and affecting everyone involved—from the public servants charged with carrying them out to the people who must live with their consequences.
Ukraine, democracy & power
Writing informed by Peace Corps service and legal teaching in Ukraine, examining war, democratic aspiration, American power, and the obligations that remain after service abroad.
Displacement & America’s role
Refugees, asylum seekers, Afghan allies, and the changing place of protection in American policy—tracing what institutional delay, withdrawal, or radical change means for people seeking safety.
Read & subscribe
Essays, commentary, and continuing series.
The full archive appears on Substack under the byline J.D. Marks.