Three Hours in Immigration Court
I hope you have a wonderful birthday, Jaime, the judge says.
Her words zip into the headset of the interpreter, out of the interpreter’s mouth, back into the headset, and finally, into Jaime’s headphones. Its wide, adult-sized headband slides slowly off the back of his head until it rests clunkily on his upper back.
From the back of the courtroom, all I can see is the young boy’s dark, spiky hair and his narrow shoulders.
The judge shuffles the papers in front of her, glances up at Jaime, and explains to him that she’ll see him back in this same room for his next hearing. I hear the low murmur of the interpreter trail from the left side of the room.
The next case is up: A woman calls out a three-digit number. Agnes?
Jaime and Agnes belong to the docket for detained juveniles in the Phoenix Immigration Court. Today is a Master Calendar Hearing, one of the first hearings for those seeking legal relief from “removal proceedings,” meaning deportation. After arriving in the United States, these children must successfully make a case to remain in the country — one considered valid under the law.
Prepare
Ever since March, I knew that I would be in Arizona for the summer, working on a journalism project centered around immigration. So when the time came to buckle down and think seriously about what I wanted to produce, I did what any good, barely-missed-the-millennial-age-cutoff type would do: I went to the websites of big-name media outlets and opened around 25 tabs of immigration coverage from the past six years, spreading it across three different windows.
Based on what I had read inside air-conditioned coffee shops in my hometown of Chicago, I thought that the scene of immigration court would be more chaotic, more fanatical, the material manifestation of some fated, theorized battle between immigration and anti-immigration forces in a capital-B, Border state: Immigration lawyer versus the system.
Maybe I just expected it to be a little bit louder.
Entry
I’m not sure how you’re supposed to mentally prepare to see children in a courtroom. So, I focus on the low growl of the air conditioning, the click of car doors opening, the surprising silence of the packed parking lot.
Phoenix summer air carries its own weight, one that muffles the morning activity both around and within it. Even the throngs of people that circle the building — many in line for the Social Security Administration office — appear hushed, their idle chatter made wispy by the dry desert heat.
We pull open a side door and take the elevator up. The majesty of a federal building, the courthouse as a prominent place of American law that I had expected, is nonexistent. No seals, gold-cast bald eagle silhouettes, or intricately carved panels of mahogany. Instead, it looks like any other drab office building.
A security officer asks us why we are there. Observation, we respond.
The courtroom’s door is a light-colored wood, one in a row of similarly unremarkable doors. As I approach, I train my eyes on its standard-issue metal handle, straining my ears for sounds that I would normally associate with a courtroom: the pounding of a gavel, maybe mumbling among the attorneys. Nothing.
For a split second, my hand hesitates as if I expect fire on the other side of the door. I push the handle down.
Backlog
The door is open now, the seal broken. In a wave, heads turn toward us, curious. Here is the frontline of what national news coverage has called an immigration crisis, a broken system, an irreversible backlog.
Three pews. One judge. The single halo of a gold Department of Justice seal resting behind her.
In the first two pews sit boys and girls — but mostly boys — wearing alternating blue and white dress shirts. The fabric of too-long ties and too-spacious shirts bunch awkwardly around the small frames of some, engulfing them.
This judge is one of approximately 350, all appointed by the Attorney General and tasked with administering the proceedings of 58 immigration courts across the country.
We spot a single opening in the last pew and quickly shuffle to our seats.
May I Approach
As each child makes their way to the seat at the table opposite the government lawyer, they step across the blue carpet and open the wooden gate separating the pews from the two desks placed in front of the judge. Some of the children gingerly close the gate, others let it fall shut with a soft clang.
This, along with the occasional whirring of the printer, is the only sound aside from the voices of the children, the lawyers, the judge, or the interpreter.
Each child sits down in the high-backed office chair and places the headphones over their ears.
As proceedings begin, individual voices popcorn around the room, speeding through a Rolodex of phrases and words that are indecipherable to me.
I-770
I-213
I-360
For every child, the judge repeats the same opening spiel for the record: the date, the presiding judge’s name (her own), the docket type (juvenile), the respondent’s name, A-number (“alien registration number,” given to noncitizens), the status of the respondent’s presence, acknowledgment of a Friend of the Court or counsel and a government attorney, the presence of a translator.
A brown-haired woman with a practical grey blazer sits next to León, a boy who had been waiting in the row in front of me. She occasionally turns to whisper quietly to him and nods her head to his replies, but she is not his lawyer. She’s a Friend of the Court, defined by case law as “a bystander whose mission is to aid the court, to act only for the personal benefit of the court.”
For León, who does not have a lawyer, this limited advocacy is his best option. In immigration court, children are not granted representation at the government’s expense. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, children seeking asylum in the United States are allowed to remain in less than 10 percent of cases. Children with attorneys, however, are five times more likely to obtain legal relief.
In 2014, groups including the American Immigration Council and the ACLU filed J.E.F.M. v. Lynch, a class-action suit arguing that children have a right to counsel in removal proceedings. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the lawsuit in 2016.
This past May, the Ninth Circuit refused to rule on whether an appointed counsel for minors in removal proceedings is required by the Constitution. The ACLU has stated that the lack of protection for children is inconsistent with previous rulings on the application of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment for juvenile defendants, as decided by In re Gault (1967).
A reproduction of the Constitution in a rigid black frame hangs on the wall above León’s seat.
Questioning
What is your name? Can you hear clearly over those headphones? What language do you speak and understand best? When is your birthday? How are you feeling this morning?
So the rapid-fire questions go, gliding from the judge’s mouth, slippery with the repetition of every new case.
Occasionally, a child responds to the judge in English, stating their age — Sixteen — or, Thank you for your time.
Keep working on it, the judge encourages.
As I glance around, I see bouncing knees, clasped hands, crossed arms, gelled hair, lips pressed into lines. Some of the children shift in their seats, turning to each other with reassuring smiles and occasionally laughing in confidence to one another.
Reunification
Even though a Master Calendar Hearing is supposed to be preliminary, and eventually followed by the Merits Hearing, the Friend of the Court frequently asks for three-month-long continuances — more time — to assess the case of the child, or to identify a sponsor with whom to reunite them.
These children were designated as unaccompanied when they encountered Border Patrol. After they crossed, they spent time first in the custody of the Department of Homeland Security. Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, they were required to be transferred to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, the department tasked with caring for detained children, within 72 hours.
Sponsors are often family members, but they might be adults designated by family or approved by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
I was struck by the abundance of unknowns. When Diego’s age was in question, neither the government lawyers nor the Friend of the Court was able to locate a birth certificate. Another continuance was granted.
In case after case, the judge grants the continuance, often scheduling the next hearing for September to reassess. Each child spends no more than 10 minutes in front of the judge.
The Friend of the Court or counsel repeats pending reunification again and again, expressing the persistent uncertainty of finding sponsors for the detained children.
Sometimes, when a child’s name is called, they are not present in the courtroom. The Friend of the Court informs the judge that one child was just reunited with their family the previous night — another recently reunited child is now three thousand miles away in Plainfield, N.J.
In one case, the Friend of the Court informs the judge that Samuel will head to Pennsylvania to be reunited with a sponsor. He would be released from detention in Arizona as a result, but his case to remain in the United States would continue in a Pennsylvania immigration court, under another gold Department of Justice seal. This is the case for all children, even after reunification.
I wish the best to you in Pennsylvania, says the judge, smiling and shifting her gaze from the Friend of the Court to Samuel.
In another case, the Friend of the Court explains that José hadn’t understood what “torture” or “persecution” meant during his interview with Department of Homeland Security officers. As such, the record of José’s encounter with the officers did not indicate the fear of returning to his home country that he had struggled to relay. His expression of fear was lost, possibly jeopardizing his case to remain in the United States. Depending on the kind of legal relief José seeks in his Merits Hearing, this initial moment of confusion might continue to influence his case.
Docket
Asylum, while a common catch-all term, is only one form of legal relief that noncitizen minors can seek. If a child has been abused, neglected, or abandoned by one or both of their parents, they may qualify for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. Children who have been victims of certain crimes or victims of trafficking may qualify for U or T visas, respectively. These are the most common forms of relief.
Alejandro is about to turn 18. The judge wishes him a happy birthday, one of many she repeats over the course of the day, before moving his case to another docket.
Toward the end of the docket, an attorney with an unbalanced stack of multi-colored papers — presumably files on the child respondent — makes repeated trips back and forth between her desk and the Judge to hand off documents. She seems to realize that she needs another document with every trip back to her desk. In response, the judge comments that she would like to have all the necessary documents brought together in one pile.
I only have four more, the judge refers tersely to the number of cases left on the docket, appearing dissatisfied with the attorney’s pace.
Two Weeks
Another child respondent is absent when I observe the same docket two weeks later. A moment of dead air. Then, the judge locates his address: he was reunited with a sponsor near San Francisco in late May.
The Office of Refugee Resettlement should have sent documents of reunification, an action it had not yet taken. As the Judge notes that there has been sufficient time for those documents to have been sent, she issues a change of venue for the child to the San Francisco Immigration Court.
In case after case, the judge repeats, What’s going on, where are we in that process?
Questions from the judge bounce back and forth between the Friend of the Court or counsel’s side of the room to the government lawyer’s side, scraps of information flying, all sides searching for any updates on the status of a given reunification, the life of another child.
Translation
Another child on the docket, Nicolás, is a boy who looks no older than seven years old, suited in a blue button up. His full cheeks and wide-set almond eyes remind me of my youngest brother.
His lawyer indicates that he speaks Chuj, a Mayan language spoken mostly in Guatemala, and needs a translator from the country’s San Mateo municipality. Through hidden speakers, the room suddenly fills with the dialing noise of an outgoing call.
Please hold for an operator, drones the automated voice from Lionbridge Technologies, a translation service whose website claims: “We’re bridge-builders. Barrier-breakers. Linguistic experts and cultural translators.”
Thank you so much for holding! chirps a shockingly bright customer service voice, radiating from the ceiling.
The judge requests a Chuj interpreter. The bodiless, saccharine voice announces that their interpreter is on another assignment. And when will that interpreter be available? asks the judge. For eight seconds, the room remains still and soundless, until:
The operator has disconnected.
The room fragments into awkward, disconcerted chuckles at the call’s abrupt end, and the judge notes aloud for the record that a scheduled interpreter is necessary, since the unscheduled call to Lionsbridge was unsuccessful. Another continuance is issued.
Separation
The last case is that of a four-year-old girl in detention, a case of family separation. She isn’t in the courtroom; her lawyer and child advocate speak on her behalf.
Her father was told that his daughter would follow once he was deported. It has been over a month. Her repatriation, her return to her home country, has yet to occur. Video calls are the only contact the child has with her family in Honduras.
They just want her back, the child advocate says quickly. The words tumble out in a rush, as if someone might cut her off mid-sentence.
Is there a fear of return? Does she have any claim to citizenship? asks the judge.
None, replies the lawyer.
The judge sets the date of her departure. I count the months. Two more months before she will see her father again.
Most of the children have left the courtroom by now, some escorted out by adults wearing shirts that read “Southwest Key,” one of the shelter providers contracted by the federal government to house unaccompanied or separated immigrant children. This past December, a video of staff abusing children in a Phoenix Southwest Key facility emerged. The center had closed in October.
Many of the children will be back in the same room in September, when their continuance is up.
I’m one of five people still left sitting in the pews. As I open the door to leave the courtroom, I scan the lobby: The same security guards sit by the metal detector, the same clerk behind the glass window. The same empty halls and familiar faces of an hour and a half earlier. There’s no sign that children were ever here.
Outside, the temperature creeps toward 100 degrees. The blacktop is scorching. Cars race down Seventh Avenue, undisturbed.
*Note: Names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of those who are currently in immigration proceedings.
