“Por miedo,” the asylum-seeking respondent admitted over video when the immigration judge demanded to know why she had not shown up to court in person. “Because I’m scared.” The judge shook her head dismissively. “Please, you have to come in person. I can guarantee that you’ll be safe here.”

It was March 4th, 2026 at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, and the judge’s reassurances rang hollow against the backdrop of the building’s hostile reputation. As in other courthouses nationwide, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents prowl the hallways, targeting individuals attending legally mandated immigration hearings. Here, however, it is a spectacle like no other—NYC has earned the dubious distinction of being the “Nation’s Capital of Immigration Courthouse Arrests.” Respondents are stuck in what the New York City Bar describes as “a perverse legal Catch-22”: appear before the judge and risk ICE detention or fail to appear and receive a deportation order in absentia.

Against this backdrop, I have guided a class of undergraduate students through an inter-university, ethnographic witnessing project Justice in View (Frank-Vitale et al. 2026). Students have had to learn to navigate the treacherous and unpredictable environment of Federal Plaza, and in doing so, have learned to engage in practices of collective care. This piece is written in that same spirit, a product of collective ideation that weaves my authorship with analytical insights and ethnographic narratives of four students. They have attended court weekly and the ethnographic narratives here are theirs.

The judge then heard the asylum cases of the only two respondents who appeared in person that morning. She told them each to return to court at a later date, and they wordlessly left the room. Everything seemed to be following standard, cold bureaucratic procedure, until a blood-curdling shriek pierced the air. The walls of the courtroom began to shake as heavy footsteps thundered down the hallway right outside. “Señorita!” someone screamed amid confusing commotion. Even amidst the chorus of unintelligible screams, the grating sound of metal handcuffs was unmistakable. The hair on my arms prickled in response. 

The yelling continued. I felt paralyzed sitting on the wooden pew but was jolted back to my senses when I felt a loud thud on the wall next to me: someone was being forcibly shoved against the partition that separated the hallway from the courtroom. ICE agents are the ones who enact physical violence here; it had to be them.

ICE courthouse detentions are a deliberate spectacle of state power. Unlike the routine, invisible detentions behind closed doors—or “disappearances”—that have long occurred during mandatory ICE check-ins in these same federal buildings (Castañeda 2023), courthouse arrests are hypervisible by design. The state exerts power not only over the detained individual but reproduces that power by spreading fear more broadly. Scare tactics have worked: in absentia deportation orders have more than tripled.

This spectacle of ICE detentions does not go uncontested at Federal Plaza. Accompaniers—including court watchers and faith leaders—plus legal aid attorneys and even politicians show up in record numbers to stand in solidarity with respondents, insisting on occupying spaces that security guards, ICE, and some clerks would prefer to keep them out of (Abrego 2024; Castañeda 2023; Yarris 2021). Even immigration judges’ courtroom walls are physically encroached upon, reflecting the shrinking legal protections of the asylum system more broadly.

“Jesus,” the judge said as everyone turned to get a glimpse of the hallway. She desperately told the clerk to shut the courtroom door, but the illusion of control had already been shattered. It became abundantly clear that despite earlier promises of judicial order and safety, the judge had little control over what transpired beyond the confines of the courtroom. 

Even with the door shut, the sounds of deportation penetrated the room. The walls reverberated on the left side of my body as the person being detained was mercilessly—and repeatedly—slammed against the wall. I instinctively reached for my friend and classmate’s hand, and squeezed my eyes tight, fighting back tears.

Student ethnographers have now become additional actors at Federal Plaza, where access to courtrooms, dockets, and other purportedly public domains is rapidly shrinking. They are frequently granted access to courtrooms from which other observers are excluded. Some immigration judges even seem to welcome them. “They think we want to be like them,” students say laughingly, even as they view most judges as complicit in a system they find ethically untenable. Many students, primarily young women, note that their presence reads as non-threatening, and that smiling, friendliness, and performed cluelessness can facilitate entry.

Yet access students are granted is deeply conditioned. They comply with rules, perform affect, and feign tolerance for the ways others gender and racialize them. Gender is especially salient given that Barnard is a women’s and gender nonconforming college. Citizenship also affords entry, a privilege unavailable to asylum seekers. This comes at a cost, however, as several have been yelled at by ICE agents and repeatedly hit on by security guards. One told a student that he wanted to “marry her on the spot.” Racialization compounds these dynamics. At least three Latine students have been denied entry at Federal Plaza’s security checkpoint, a pattern that led several to prefer observing in other federal court buildings. Inside, BIPOC students have repeatedly been mistaken for respondents, addressed in Spanish even after indicating a preference for English, and treated with a dismissiveness not directed at their white classmates.

Students navigate the spectacle collectively, as a methodological and ethical necessity. They learn to walk the building’s windowless, labyrinthine corridors lined with ICE agents, share strategies for gaining access, and accompany one another through proceedings that are by turns numbingly bureaucratic and viscerally violent. Most observe courtrooms in pairs and take the subway back to campus in groups. This collective care extends into our classroom during our weekly debriefs, where what might otherwise appear as isolated, individualized aggressions become legible as patterns.

We make sense of these experiences together, which in turn, sharpens students’ attunement to courtroom dynamics from one week to the next. Collective care and collective sense-making are thus intertwined and ethnographically productive. In NYC immigration courts, students have become independent actors, documenting the hollow theater of justice—sometimes, quite literally, holding onto one another as they do.