Earlier this month, in the city center of Manhattan, on the second floor of a delicatessen near Federal Plaza, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Mercedes waited with anxiety while she was preparing for the possibility of her arrest. She was with her eleven-year-old daughter, Jhuliana, who had just finished the sixth year of the Bronx, and her toddler, who was born in New York shortly after Mercedes and Jhuliana crossed the American-Mexican border in the summer of 2023. Classified for coffee and breakfast. “I saw on Tiktok the other day that some guys from ICE came to a restaurant and sent everyone to run, but they were just doing something to eat, “said Mercedes, laughing nervously. His toddler, who was almost two years old, looked at the balustrade and called baby butterfly agents, but the agents did not recognize him. “Come here!” Said Mercedes, and the child is returned in his arms.
It was just before eight in the morning. At nine, Mercedes was to appear for a “mastery” in his immigration case. A master’s degree is generally the first hearing of the court in such a case, during which the judge explains the rights and responsibilities of the respondents, takes procedural acts and defines a date for a future hearing, to what extent respondents with asylum allegations can present any proof. But, since the spring, federal agents have lined the corridors and lobbies of government buildings at 26 Federal Plaza, 290 Broadway and 201 Varick Street, waiting to stop migrants as soon as they leave the courtroom. Initially, in what was perhaps the most commonly observed configuration, DHS lawyers would ask that respondents’ immigration cases be rejected; The Ministry of Justice encouraged its judges to immigration to quickly grant these requests, allowing rapid detention and expulsion of migrants by immigration and customs agents waiting outside. Now, many migrants are detained regardless of the status of their case. “I just can’t advise someone to go to Federal Plaza,” said Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo, an immigration lawyer based in New York who is also a well-known community organizer in Queens, told me only a few days before Mercedes. “Two weeks ago, I would have said maybe. But now? No way.”
After the Trump administration began to arrest the courthouses a few months ago, a defense group of anti-porters called New Sanctuary Coalition began to send observers to accompany migrants to their federal audiences. “We do not think that anyone is expelled,” has a doctorate. The student and the new Voltuaire of the sanctuary named Brian told me when he arrived at the charcuterie, a little before 8:30 am AM. Brian, who did not speak Spanish, gave Mercedes a leaflet of your rights. I translated because he asked him to sign a renunciation of privacy authorizing a new sanctuary to access his information and recordings in the event of detention by detention by ICE. Two other new sanctuary volunteers would accompany Mercedes that morning – Jessica, a teacher from ESL, and Amelia, a chief editor, who both arrived shortly after Brian. I asked the three if they had spoken on behalf of the migrants during the process. They said no. “It would actually do more harm than good,” said Amelia. Their support was largely moral, for the company and the comfort. There was not much more than they could help.
I also planned to observe the hearing. Earlier this year, I wrote on Mercedes and his family for an article in this magazine on the way Tiktok has changed the way the potential migrants in rural areas in South America think of life in the United States, and how they stay in touch with their families once they arrived here. I have stayed in touch with Mercedes since the publication of history and I helped her connect with certain local community organizations that offer free social services to migrants recently arrived in the city. In the weeks preceding its planned audience, I joined Mercedes for two visits to a free legal clinic in the Queens which takes place every Tuesday in the basement of one of these non-profit organizations, Latinas. There, Nuala O’Doherty-Naranjo takes consultations without appointment with migrants who are unable to afford their own legal representation. During his first visit, in mid-June, Mercedes was one of the dozens of migrants who patiently waited for their turn. A few months earlier, ICE had entered the organization’s basement, he apparently was looking for someone, so now the windows of the waiting room were glued with cardboard paper and the door locked automatically from the inside.
After almost three hours, Mercedes entered the small office of O’Doherty-Naranjo. In American accentuated Spaniard, O’Doherty-Naranjo told Mercedes that the judge who had been affected in his case was “difficult”, but that his request for asylum-which was based on affirmations of sexual violence, hunting and death and police indifference in Ecuador because of his forces and his Kichwa-Puruhá and the ethnicity of the equator. Mercedes, whose first language was Kichwa, only learned Spanish when she was about ten years old and had trouble understanding the lawyer. “She spoke so quickly,” said Mercedes, leaving the consultation, a little perplexed; Later, the Latinas vocational staff helped her to file a request to attend his master’s degree practically, rather than in person, which would have enabled him to continue his case without potential confrontations with ICE. A few days later, the court refused its request. Unless a medical emergency or a movement outside the state, Mercedes should arise. “Bring your children,” O’Doherty-Naranjo told Mercedes during his second visit to the clinic, three weeks later. She hoped that ICE Agents could be more reluctant to have a mother with her children, due to limitations against the holding of children in detention alongside adults. “So the ground where many migrants sleep right now, they will not put a child there,” she continued. “They will literally have to get him a hotel room and put a ICE agent at the door. And no one has time or money to do it. However, O’Doherty-Naranjo admitted with a sigh: “These days, you really never know.”
We were all worried when we left the charcuterie for the federal courthouse, in the quarter to nine. We were delayed for a few minutes because Jhuliana wanted to buy a pack of Welch fruit snacks for her sister with a five -dollars note that she had caught with her yellow backpack. “I’m very nervous,” Mercedes told me.
Together, she and Jhuliana pushed the baby’s stroller into the street to the courthouse, passing by metal detectors and placing their personal effects in an X -ray machine at the bottom, before mounting the elevator in a room where men dressed in casual business outfit seemed to us. We entered a long corridor in which several pink paper sheets were glued to the wall, listing the names of the respondents and the hearing times under their assigned judge and the corresponding hearing number. The new sanctuary volunteers, eager to help, began to carefully examine the lists. Meanwhile, Jhuliana, who had memorized the name of the judge, almost immediately found the file with their names towards the end of the corridor.
“Here it is,” she said quietly, in Spanish. “The twentieth floor.”
Two masked federal agents stood at the entrance to the waiting room while we got off the elevator. The two wore Gaiter masks that covered their faces to their eyes. The two had “New York” baseball caps, and on one of the letters were written in frightening Gothic police. Mercedes and Jhuliana held their breath as they entered inside. Mercedes registered with an employee of the court at a small table at the front, who told him to sit down and wait for his hearing to be called. Already, several dozen people were seated in the rows of blue chairs. A significant number of them seemed to be observers or voluntary companions. Most of them were older, and one wore a Kamala Harris 2024 tote bag. The others were immigrant respondents and their families, while waiting for their own audiences, dressed as they could. A family had two children from the age of Jhuliana, a boy and a girl, dressed in Shalwar Kameez. A short and thin young man in a collar t-shirt, whose accent sounded the Venezuelan, was present with his wife and little child. Mercedes wore a light blue short -sleeved shirt, with a gold colored necklace.
THE ICE The agents wore armed green t-shirts under tactical vests, their large arms covered with visible tattoos and belts equipped with a flashlight, handcuffs and a pistol. They walked from top to bottom of the length of the room, stopping from time to time to look at people waiting in their seats. They watched Jhuliana for a while, before Jessica sat down next to her and started to engage a conversation. One had a packet of stapled paper, presumably with the names, photos and other information of the respondents, which he seemed to study when he questioned the crowd.
At one point, they stood near the security officer of the courtroom, a black man with an allied universal security badge, and the three began to make jokes and laughter. I wanted to hear what they said, so I got closer.
“Deger the example”, one of the ICE Said agents.
“I am waiting to stop one of these ass fucked up to retreat,” said the other.
It was not quite clear from whom they were talking about, but I could only imagine that they meant the observers. The immigration court is a public space, open to everyone. A few minutes later, the hearing was called. The respondents entered the courtroom first, followed by observers, some of whom were refused for lack of space. The security officer made an announcement before closing the door: if one of the observers “hindered” the legal proceedings in any way, he would have us withdrawn and accused of intrusion. “More games,” he said. He looked very serious. In addition to migrants, several observers have already been detained in the New York courthouses; In what was undoubtedly the most prominent arrest, Brad Lander, the city controller and candidate for the Democrat mayor, was detained at 26 Federal Plaza for several hours after accompanying a migrant of his hearing.
