The violence of the U.S. immigration regime has come into sharp focus for broad publics in recent months—from courthouse arrests of immigrants seeking relief “the legal way”; to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in cities far from the U.S.-Mexico border; to federal agents killing community members who document their presence. Yet the cruelty of the current administration’s war on immigrants also plays out in less spectacular, though no less violent, ways through the everyday operations of immigration court. These off-the-record interactions often shape the aspects of immigration court that do break through into public view: the size of the backlog, the rates of denial, and the firing of immigration judges.

This collection brings together ethnographers engaged in court-watching, accompaniment in and beyond detained settings, expert witnessing, and collaborative documentation projects with attorneys, students, and community partners. These contributions show what sustained presence makes legible but official records often omit. Together, they contribute to building an archive of the present, filling in the gap that lies between what appears on the record—procedural language, legal categories, judicial decisions—and what unfolds off the record: confusion, waiting, coercion, dread, and the slow violence embedded in the bewildering churn of new legal guidelines. Unlike the physical border, immigration court does not simply block or channel movement at entry; it remakes the boundary through legal classification, evidentiary judgment, and precedent. In doing so, courts produce records and decisions that extend beyond any individual migrant, shaping how future claims will be heard, what forms of suffering become legible, and whose presence can be authorized or refused.

These essays begin with the law, examining how much has changed and how much remains the same, and then move to accompany people as they are made to stumble through incomprehensible hearings; wait for what feels like forever for news of detained loved ones; make impossible choices between terrible, legally constricted “options”; navigate gnawing fear and the dread of uncertainty; explain personal trauma to a judge who will adjudicate whether that trauma and its retelling “rise to the level of persecution”; and grapple with repeated detention, balancing the suffering of imprisonment against the purported “freedom” of deportation.

Together, this collection illuminates how ethnographic witnessing generates urgently needed evidence about opacity and power. The essays clarify how due process is narrowed in practice not only through formal rulings but likewise through the off-the-record conditions that shape what can be said, heard, and decided. At the same time, they confront the responsibilities and limits of research amid intensifying state violence. While everyone who appears before an immigration judge has a particular story and a unique set of circumstances that brought them to that moment and informs their request for relief from deportation, the rejection that most will confront takes little of that specificity into account. Even before the second Trump administration, U.S. law had already narrowed the possibility of legal relief for most immigrants considerably. Under current conditions, it has become almost non-existent.

Across different courts and contexts, this collection reveals that what appears on the record as individual tragedy is, off the record, patterned legal violence. The authors assembled here bear witness to that violence in building this archive of the present, showing that the harms produced in court are neither an aberration nor merely the result of individual bias. These harms are routinized and reproducible, at once embedded in and hidden by the ordinary functioning of the court itself.