Americans take pride in our tradition of accepting those fleeing persecution. Recent changes in the law, though – upheld by Congress last spring – slam a door in the face of many legitimate refugees and asylum seekers.

Take, for example, the Liberian family kidnapped in 1993 by rebels working for former dictator Charles Taylor. Taylor's troops raped the wife and daughter, and forced the entire family into slave labor for several weeks.

An interviewer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security found that the family met the test for gaining refugee status: they had a "credible and well-founded fear of persecution" in their native country.

But for now the family remains in a West African refugee camp. Why? Under sweeping definitions laid out in the Real ID act, passed last year, and the Patriot Act, passed in 2001, the family provided material support to a terrorist group – the cooking and water-carrying they did while held captive by Charles Taylor's thugs.

Their story is far from unique. As Legal Times reported, in June an immigration appeals panel denied the asylum claim of a Burmese woman, Ma San Kywe. She had given about $695 to the Chin National Front, a group fighting on behalf of the Chin Christian minority against one of the most brutally repressive governments in the world. Thus under U.S. law, she too had provided "material support" to a "terrorist organization."

Getting asylum or refugee status in the United States has never been easy. Applicants face a lengthy and rigorous screening process, and those who pass muster only  account for a trickle in the flow of U.S. immigration. Once resettled, refugees have formed thriving communities, from the Vietnamese in California to Ethiopians in Washington, D.C.

After 9/11, lawmakers passed the Patriot Act and later the Real ID act, both intended to fight terrorism. But the new laws ensnare plenty of innocent victims.

The Patriot Act defines "terrorist activity" as using a dangerous weapon to commit "any activity which is unlawful under the laws of the place where it is committed." This leads to absurd results: Though our own government encourages regime opponents in North Korea and Iran, we would reject members of any group fighting those countries' governments. A person who fought Afghanistan's Taliban rulers as a member of the Northern Alliance could, under the Patriot Act, now be considered a terrorist in the United States. So could former members of the African National Congress who fought South Africa's apartheid regime.

The Real ID act compounded the absurdity by allowing courts to reject refugee and asylum seekers who had provided "material support" to a terrorist group. "Material support" is not defined, so it could mean as little as providing a glass of water. More worrisome, the law makes no exception for support provided under coercion, a fact of life in many war-torn areas.

So in Colombia, where paramilitary organizations run amok, if one of them seized a farmer's livestock and threatened his life, the farmer could later have a U.S. asylum request turned down on the grounds that he provided "material support." The UN High Commissioner for Refugees stopped referring Colombian refugees to the United States for resettlement, because it estimated that in a country largely ruled by a rebel army, the “material support” clause excludes some 70 percent of applicants.

According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, this clause has stalled the claims of at least 500 asylum seekers in the United States, not including an unknown number rejected in immigration courts.

Recognizing the unintended consequences of our new laws, a bipartisan group of senators this year offered a solution: An amendment that would have required the Secretary of State to determine that a group poses a threat to the United States before it be labeled a "terrorist organization." This would have kept national security safeguards in place while going a long way toward correcting the problem.

Legislators defeated the amendment, probably reflecting cynicism about being painted as "soft on terrorism" in an election year. This is a great shame. In the name of fighting terrorism, we have shut out the victims of terrorism too.

Philip Peters was a State Department official during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. He is now vice president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.