When Ana first met Ruby, a sergeant in the Salvadoran Army, in the late nineteen-eighties, she liked him so much that she didn’t want to consider what his job would mean for her own safety. At twenty, Ana was small and soft-spoken. She had two young daughters whose fathers were so absent that their names weren’t even on the girls’ birth certificates, and she longed for a stable romance. Ruby visited Ana’s village, in rural El Salvador, while he was on military leave, and on his first day there he walked up to her in the crowded town square and asked for her name. They began dating, and he treated her daughters as if they were his own. The couple soon moved into a house near Ana’s mother; Ana wanted to be close to her family so that she wouldn’t feel lonely when Ruby was away on duty.

El Salvador was in the midst of a brutal civil war between the government, which was backed by the United States, and leftist guerrillas. Ruby was deployed for a month at a time. While he was gone, Ana tried to distract herself with chores and her children, but it wasn’t always possible to ignore the war. A group of guerrillas was camped out in the surrounding mountains, and, one day, they drove into town, took the mayor out of his office, and shot him in the street; soon after, they killed his son. During such raids, Ana hid with her mother and her children until the rebels left. When Ruby returned from duty, he approached their house, shouting, “My doll! My treasure!” and waited for Ana to come outside to greet him. Many people in town were as frightened of the Army as they were of the guerrillas—tens of thousands of people had been killed in the fighting, most by the military—but Ruby told Ana that he was trying to end the war. “He was a good man,” she said. “And a patriot.” After two years together, the couple had a baby boy, born on Christmas Eve.

A few months later, the guerrillas came for Ruby. Local men on guard duty flashed their truck lights as the fighters approached, warning townspeople to hide, but Ruby was arriving on a military bus. Ana watched from her window as the rebels surrounded the bus and took him away. A few days later, the rebels came back for her. They brought her to their mountain camp—a collection of large tents that housed weapons, stockpiles of canned food, and what looked to be hundreds of fighters. The rebels let Ana visit Ruby in his tent; he was bruised but looked strong, and she was, briefly, relieved. A few days later, they took her to see him again. This time, he was standing in a clearing, battered, surrounded by guerrillas with guns, and digging a large hole. “You are going to see him die,” a rebel told her. Then he offered her his gun and said, “If you shoot him, you can go home to your children.”

Ana refused. “I couldn’t speak,” she told me. “I shook my head.” The rebels shot Ruby, and his body fell sideways into the hole. Then they turned to her. She was sure that they were going to kill her, too, and tried to picture her children’s faces before she died. Instead, they told her that they were hungry. “Do you know how to make tortillas?” one asked.

That evening, she prepared food for the rebels with a group of other women. She was afraid that if she refused, they would murder her. At one point, they wanted to train her to shoot a gun, but she became so scared that she got sick and refused to touch the weapon, and they gave up. Several days later, a guerrilla fighter came across her as she was preparing to wash laundry in a river and noticed that her breasts were leaking milk. “Do you have a baby at home?” he asked, and, when she nodded, he took pity on her. He walked her to the river and told her to run north toward the nearest village; he would chop wood to cover the sound of her footsteps. “You have thirty minutes,” he told her. “Then we will have to come looking for you.”

She arrived at the village that night, and, for the next month, she trekked through El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. “I ran when it was dark and hid when it was light,” she told me. The guerrillas searched for her, broadcasting her name on the radio and threatening anyone who helped her escape. It was too dangerous for her to go back for her children, and she prayed that her mother would keep them safe. In the spring of 1991, she reached the southern border of the United States. She moved to Long Island, where she worked legally at a plastics-manufacturing plant and earned extra money cleaning houses while applying for asylum. Since then, she has told her story dozens of times, to judges, officers with the Department of Homeland Security, and other Salvadoran immigrants at her church. Sometimes her lawyers help to summarize the tale so that she doesn’t have to relive it; other times, she has to think back on her captivity to recall additional details, which still make her cry. Although the asylum-application process is long and arduous, it seemed straightforward to Ana: if she went back to El Salvador, the guerrillas, or whatever they had since become, would kill her.

But in June, 2018, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews rulings made in immigration court, issued a two-to-one decision denying Ana’s most recent request to stay in the U.S. The judges, considering Ana’s captivity, decided that, because she had worked for the guerrillas, even under duress, she was not their victim but functionally a member of their group. “While the respondent’s assistance may have been relatively minimal, if she had not provided the cooking and cleaning services she was forced to perform, another person would have needed to do so,” they wrote, in an opinion called Matter of A–C–M–. Ana was ineligible for asylum, under a law called the material-support statute, because she had aided terrorists.

The material-support statute makes it illegal to give assistance to any group that the U.S. government considers a foreign terrorist organization. The statute, which appears in the Patriot Act, from 2001, is purposefully broad: it does not define what “material” means; the person who has given support, citizen or noncitizen, does not need to have contributed to a violent act or, in many cases, to have known that the group she supported was a terrorist organization. Her support can even have come before the group was formally designated as a terrorist organization, and the group can at one time have been an ally of the U.S. military or supported by the U.S. government. (The law does not apply to domestic terrorist groups, such as white-supremacist organizations, despite data showing that these groups pose a greater threat of violence in the U.S.) Defenders of the statute argue that it allows prosecutors to adapt to changing threats and that it has the unique ability to catch would-be terrorists before they stage an attack.