Malick, a pseudonym, is facing an immigration judge who is over 1,000 miles away and is presiding via WebEx video conference. Malick is being detained in GEO Group detention facility after living and working in the community for two years while he pursued his asylum case before he was arrested and detained as part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiative to drastically expand detention. Unbeknownst to Malick, his immigration judge is also a Judge Advocate General (JAG) military lawyer who was brought in as part of a plan to increase the rate and speed of deportations in immigration court. After being detained Malick lost his job and his ability to pay for his immigration lawyer so he is unrepresented when the judge tells him his asylum claim is being pretermitted by the government’s Asylum Cooperative Agreement with Uganda. While Malick may understand that he is being treated unfairly, he does not know that his experience is dictated by a transformation of the immigration court system from a bureaucratic administrative tribunal into an overt extension of the government’s deportation and detention policy.

The second Trump administration’s overt politicization of the immigration courts in service of its anti-immigrant agenda has changed the stakes for immigrants and advocates and has increased the need for objective knowledge about the immigration enforcement process and its consequences. The administration has expanded immigration enforcement in unprecedented ways by reshaping immigration courts through the firing and replacing of judges, by dramatically increasing the use of detention against noncitizens, and by transforming immigration policy and practice in ways that violate precedent, laws, and human rights obligations. The violence to human bodies and due process carried out on U.S. streets by ICE agents has brazenly signaled that the administration intends to engage in a sweeping assault on noncitizens and the few rules and procedures that previously existed to protect their rights and dignity.

As shocking and widespread as the administration’s policies and actions have been, they have been enacted in the context of a preexistent system defined by social and legal disparagement of rights for noncitizens. Immigration laws governing who could immigrate to the United States and who should be expelled have often incorporated social, economic, and political concerns that were based on xenophobia, racism, and fear. In this context, immigration courts have long operated in a manner that is vastly different from “a concept of law that embraces principles of equality, due process, judicial independence, proportionality, and democratic belonging” (Salyer 2020, 16) and the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld applying laws to noncitizens that it admits “would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.” Given this history and structure, it is reasonable to ask if the actions and policies of the Trump administration are truly a difference in kind as opposed to a difference in degree from earlier anti-immigration policies. To answer this question, it is necessary to consider the substance and nature of the changes implemented by the Trump administration.

The second term of the Trump administration has been defined by a steady stream of unorthodox immigration policies that have been put in place with little concern for their legality or fairness. For instance, the administration has flouted human rights obligations by placing new barriers and limits in the way of asylum seekers and refugees, including initially suspending all refugee admissions and then accepting the lowest number of refugees in U.S. history (and then primarily admitting only white South Africans); attempting to reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy for asylum seekers; and implementing “Asylum Cooperation Agreements” that purport to allow the United States to send asylum seekers to third countries, such as Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Uganda. ICE enforcement activity within the interior of the United States has resulted in the quadrupling of the number of people being arrested with an eightfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions. Since Trump took office, there has been a 70 percent increase in immigrant detention with 46 people dying in detention by March 18, 2026. In part this increase has been because of a convoluted claim by ICE that anyone who entered the United States without inspection is subject to mandatory detention without access to a bond hearing in front of an immigration judge. This expansion of detention without due process has resulted in tens of thousands of federal habeas corpus claims being filed with the vast majority of judges ruling that such detention is unlawful.

Nowhere, however, is the administration’s willingness to ignore law and due process to achieve its anti-immigrant goals more apparent than in its reshaping of the immigration courts themselves. Since taking office the administration has fired over 100 immigration judges who were considered insufficiently aligned with the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and has replaced them with judges considered more sympathetic to the administration’s position, including military JAG lawyers. Indeed, in April 2026, the administration fired two immigration judges that had held that students’ protest activity was not a basis to deport them. It has also manipulated the composition of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews immigration court decisions and issues binding precedent.

These examples—and many more—demonstrate that the Trump agenda is distinguishable from previous anti-immigrant actions and that it is animated by what Hannah Arendt termed “totalitarian lawfulness.” According to Arendt, totalitarian lawfulness sanctions the violation of existing positive law, which constrains radical transformation, and “claims to be a higher form of legitimacy which . . . can do away with petty legality” (Arendt 1958, 462). Under totalitarian lawfulness, the meaning of “law” changes from being the stable framework within which human and political actions occur to law itself becoming the ideological movement (Arendt 1958, 464). As such, totalitarian lawfulness seeks to replace the application of laws on the individual human level with the use of law to transform society on the species level, with no concern for the individual human consequences.

In the face of this totalitarian lawfulness, using ethnography to observe, analyze, and report on the immigration enforcement system is about more than evaluating the procedural due process of immigration courts, it is about elucidating the lived experience of the people involved and outlining the structural determinants at play in the phenomena of immigration and the operation of enforcement policy. Immigration law differentiates between authorized and unauthorized, citizen and alien, us and them, but ignores the connections to individuals, families, communities, and political and economic systems, which anthropologists know are embedded in the creation of those categories. In individual immigration cases those human particularities and connections are apparent and the law’s blindness to them is revealed. The project of ethnographic court watching is all the more important given the Trump administration’s epistemic transformation of immigration law and its gleeful indifference to the suffering its actions are causing.