An unprecedented inside look at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), award-winning filmmakers Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini take their cameras behind locked doors where bureaucrats decide the fates of thousands of asylum-seekers each year. To be granted asylum applicants must demonstrate a "well-founded fear" that their lives would be endangered were they to be deported. The asylum-seekers are at once hopeful and heartbreaking at times too slick and polished and in other cases painfully timid. All have the same desire--freedom to stay in America. As asylum officers struggle to determine credibility balancing sympathy with good sense and tough-mindedness their hard-made decisions ultimately hold a mirror to the broader quickly changing and controversial role of the United States in the world at large.