I hate going to immigration court. I drag myself out of bed and half hope something will happen on the turnpike to prevent me from making it to Newark today.

In the waiting room, I approach a short man in a suit and tie, holding a boxy, lightly tattered, briefcase. Telltale signs of an attorney. While proceedings in immigration court are open to the public, for “merits” hearings it’s important to get permission from the respondent, as the person in removal proceedings is called. Every time I do this, I feel nervous, invasive, but I start: I’m a professor, here to observe court today. I was wondering if you and your client… 

“YES!” he interjects, “YES!”

He tries to bridle his enthusiasm and turns to his client, asking if she would be okay with an observer. He tells her it’s a good idea; she agrees.

Their hearing today is a continuation of earlier proceedings. They launch into telling me how hostile this judge has been. The attorney says the judge won’t even allow basic evidence into the record. He hopes that an observer might temper the atmosphere; at the very least, someone will see what they’re up against.

His client is a woman originally from West Africa, with two U.S.-born sons. She’s seeking cancellation of removal, based on her children’s medical conditions. Although we don’t have much time to interact before we enter the courtroom, she greets me warmly, welcomes me into the process, introduces me to her son. I get the impression that she would have welcomed my presence, regardless of the attorney’s nudge. But that is not always the case, and the underlying power dynamics at play always make me question what permission from a respondent can really mean.

After a few minutes, the armed security guard ushers us into the tiny courtroom. Immediately, the judge is combative, dismissive, and shockingly rude to the respondent’s lawyer. Before any testimony is heard, before we go on the record, the judge is shouting at him. He wants to add evidence to rebut an article that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had submitted; she denies the motion. Exasperated, he almost yells, “I have a right to speak and get stuff on the record.” She shouts over him, saying “The court does not have the time to indulge an attorney’s desire.” In my notes, I scribble: “Whoa, this is tense,” and “I have never seen anything like this.”

The testimony begins with the respondent’s cross-examination by DHS. She answers most questions with a pleading, respectful but timid, “yes, please, your honor.” DHS focuses on her record of paying taxes, her employment history, why she might have sent her son to visit family in Africa once when he was a child if his illness was so bad. DHS suggests that either she’s lying or she’s a bad mother. Now the attorneys are shouting at each other; the woman is quietly crying.

After a recess, during which the judge attends to a different case, her teenage son testifies regarding his medical condition, sickle cell anemia—the grounds for his mother’s claim for relief from deportation.

The hearing ends, incredibly, rather amicably—both parties are asked to brief the judge on whether the woman’s older son’s condition should also be considered. DHS says it is immaterial since he’s over 21; the attorney says that, since he was under 21 when the petition was first filed, it should be taken into account. They will meet for closing arguments in about two months.

After leaving the courtroom, I turn to the client and her attorney, ready to express my shock at the judge’s behavior.

Before I can, though, they both start talking about how much better the judge was today. What a difference my presence made. The respondent says, “she was much nicer.” The attorney asks, “Can you come to all my hearings?”

The second Trump administration’s focus on immigration court is both novel and cruel: in the first year they fired more than 100 immigration judges (out of about 700); brought in under-trained military judges; instituted steep new fees ($100 USD to file for asylum and $1,000 USD to file an appeal); and pioneered procedural maneuvers to short circuit hearings, directing judges to “pretermit” cases early in the process.

Immigration court has long been a shadowy realm of the U.S. legal landscape. Though it has recently received heightened attention, resulting in dramatic confrontations and heartbreaking images, most days in most courts follow mundane scripts. People are devastated, their hopes for protection shattered, with all the drama of the DMV. Even before the second Trump administration, most people in removal proceedings were unlikely to be granted relief. But the quiet violence of a system tilted heavily towards unfavorable outcomes and deportation orders is masked by the slow process of hearings and motions and mountains of paperwork.

This was a typical day. There were no arrests by masked federal agents, no journalists documenting the fallout, no local activists providing accompaniment or protesting. This woman, her son, and her lawyer were going through the routine bureaucratic violence of immigration court—braving abuse, recounting trauma on demand, following a disjointed, unpredictable, and drawn-out timeline—without any fanfare, far from the spotlight.

 After I leave court, I check the judge’s “stats.” This Immigration Judge has an 86.2 percent denial rate, the third highest among the twenty-two judges hearing cases in Newark in 2025. Her final decision in this case will make it into this public data. But the available statistics say nothing about the respondent’s zealous and combative representation or DHS’s belittling tone when saying, “why don’t you know the answer, it’s not a hard question.” If her case is denied and she appeals the ruling, a transcript of what went on the record in court that day will be produced for the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). But what happened off the record—the shouting matches between the judge and the attorney about what kind of evidence she would even allow him to present, or the respondent’s clasped hands and downturned head and quiet tears while saying “yes, please, your honor” —will not be in that transcript. The BIA will never know.

My long-term ethnographic work has been in migrant shelters and along train lines in Mexico, walking with migrant caravans, hanging out in communities on the urban margins of Honduras. I’ve sat on street corners with gang members, visited people in overcrowded jails, and held my breath as armed police officers searched my bags and questioned my presence. That research—though hard in many ways and scary at times—is also deeply enriching, full of opportunities for meaningful connection. Being immersed in worlds relegated to society’s margins, even ones full of fear and violence, is also an act of community building, full of shared moments of irreverent, unabashed joy.

Observing in immigration court has little of that. We are all flattened and atomized, reduced to being an attorney, a respondent, a judge, an observer, brought together momentarily, in this arrangement, in these roles. The benches are hard, the rooms kept far too cold. My hand cramps as I take notes—no electronics allowed. Much worse than the physical discomfort is the sustained moral pain of sitting there while people’s lives are upended—in the name of the law. And in the moment, all I can do is keep taking notes.

My presence that day probably did not change the outcome for this woman. But I saw—and now write about—what she was made to endure. Ethnographic witnessing helps to build a counter-record of a legal process that mutes its own violence through the mundane cruelty of routine proceedings and aggregate statistics. At a moment when immigrants are targeted and due process itself is being eroded, this is more urgent than ever. So, as much as I hate going to immigration court, I keep going back.