When a young mother fleeing violence in El Salvador faces long odds for asylum, it raises a crucial question: Who deserves sanctuary in America?

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One day last July, Rosi, a twenty-three-year-old fry cook with a high-school diploma, no English-language skills, and a partially completed Salvadoran accounting degree, sat at a low table in a small, carpeted immigration courtroom in El Paso, Texas, and prepared to argue her asylum case before one of the toughest immigration judges in the nation, in arguably the most conservative circuit in the country. But even setting those challenges aside, she didn't have a good case.

Rosi (who asked that her real name be withheld) had crossed the Rio Grande into Texas in April 2014, a month after setting out from her home in San Salvador, El Salvador. Just a month before that, she'd been selling empanadas on the street when she accidentally wandered into a colonia run by the Barrio 18 gang. Rosi lived in a nearby colonia run by their rivals, MS-13—a fact that came to light when the gangsters surrounded her, groped her, and pulled her ID, which listed her address. They put a gun to her stomach, threatened to rape her and murder her family if they ever saw her again, and promised to track her down if she went to the police. They took a photo of her ID, then grabbed the last of her empanadas and day's earnings before sending her on her way.

For the next month, Rosi didn't leave the house—not for classes, not for church. When she was eight years old, her uncle had been murdered because he, too, had crossed gang lines while selling food. She remembered how a neighbor had come to the door with the news, and how her mother ran through the colonia to find her brother dying on a nearby sidewalk. And while the men who'd threatened Rosi never came for her, she still couldn't shake the sense that she was in imminent danger. It didn't take long before she decided to leave the country.

Up until then, Rosi had never traveled farther than a nearby village, where her cousins lived, but with the help of a coyote, she made her way to the US—in buses, cars, and on foot. She was arrested, finally, by US Border Patrol agents, while trying to sneak past a checkpoint in the Rio Grande Valley, then taken to a detention facility in McAllen, Texas.

While detained, Rosi made a compelling claim for the need for protection, but due to the immigration-court backlog, her hearing was set for three years down the line—in July 2017. After three months, she was released on parole. If an asylum seeker's case isn't heard within six months, that person is given a work permit, in order to make a living while awaiting the court date. Permit in hand, Rosi got a job as a burrito- and burger-maker at a fast-food joint in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She got married, had a daughter, named Ana, and purchased a modest two-bedroom home on the southside. From the time she was pregnant, Rosi had dreamily planned her little girl's life, which she imagined would bloom from the family's small house in a working-class neighborhood into a grand career as a human-rights lawyer. She wanted Ana to realize all the opportunity America afforded. More than that, she wanted Ana to be safe, which made the matter of asylum all the more urgent.

It was this urgency, perhaps, that convinced Rosi of her chances of being granted asylum, that, despite all the evidence that suggested otherwise, things would go her way. Larger forces would work in her favor. God would intervene. The judge, Thomas C. Roepke, who in his twelve years on the bench had denied roughly 98 percent of the asylum cases that had come before him, would somehow sense that...