In a controversial ruling that was nevertheless widely expected, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said most victims of domestic abuse should not be granted asylum. He said risk of domestic abuse is unlikely to meet the government's threshold for proving persecution.

"The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes - such as domestic violence or gang violence - or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim," said Sessions.

Sessions reviewed a case involving a women from El Salvador who was raped and beaten by her husband, and sought asylum because the Salvadoran government refused to protect her. She was recently interviewed by NPR. The Board of Immigration Appeals found her deserving of asylum after her claim was rejected by an immigration judge in North Carolina.

The Attorney General said the Board of Immigration Appeals relied on a 2014 precedent-setting ruling that was flawed when it found that married women in Guatemala are unable to leave their relationships constitute a "particular social group," worthy of asylum. He called such a group "ambiguous."

Heather Axford, supervising attorney with Central American Legal Assistance in Brooklyn, estimated about 30 percent of her cases are women fleeing domestic abuse. She says most of them will be affected by the ruling.

"Many, many of these women have children abroad who they're desperate to get here, so any delay in their case is really very difficult for them," she said.

Axford's office represents a woman interviewed by WNYC last month, who asked that we call her Naomi instead of her real name because she was still waiting for her court hearing. 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it "unthinkable that the Trump administration wants to shut the door on victims of domestic violence."

New York immigration judges are historically more likely than judges in other parts of the country to grant asylum, partly because immigrants in the state are more likely to have legal representation than in other jurisdictions. However, all immigration judges now have to follow Sessions' ruling because they work for the Attorney General. 

Axford said lawyers may now try different strategies, like arguing that women who report their abusers deserve asylum because they're expressing a political opinion. 

"We need to come up with new ways to define particular social group, we need to explore the possibility of when the facts lend themselves to a political opinion claim, and we need to make claims under the convention against torture," she said, citing an international agreement.

Sessions argued that private criminals who engage in domestic violence "are motivated more often by greed or vendettas" and that a husband who abuses his wife is targeting her as his wife, not as a member of a broader group of women. 

But Kathryn Cimone, an immigration lawyer on Long Island, said these women are targeted not because they are wives but "because these men are attempting to maintain a power structure that has long existed and resulted in inequality in the relationship. It's a well entrenched, patriarchal and machismo culture and this is a construct that is in the interest of these persecutors to maintain." 

In arguing future cases, Cimone said she would use this line of reasoning to propose a different "particular social group" worthy of asylum: that women are "commodified by virtue of their relative status in a domestic relationship." She said the government had proposed this once before the 2014 precedent that Sessions upended on Monday.

More than 100,000 asylum cases were filed nationally in the last fiscal year, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the DOJ. There is no breakdown for how many cases involved domestic violence. Immigration lawyers also said the AG's opinion will make it harder for those coerced into joining gangs to get asylum, because their cases also involve private criminals.