On a snowy morning in Ohio, a man sits alone before an immigration judge for his master calendar hearing. Without legal representation, he listens as the lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announces the government’s motion to pretermit his asylum case. Pretermission is a procedure that allows an asylum claim to be dismissed without hearing testimony or full considering its merits—often foreclosing what is, for many applicants, their only formal avenue for protection. The judge repeats this via telephonic Spanish interpretation: the man has ten days to submit—in English—his response. The hearing is about to conclude when the man politely interjects: “I’m sorry your honor, I’m trying to understand this, but I really do not understand.” The judge does not shift registers or offer an alternative explanation. The word is simply repeated once more—“pretermission”—and the hearing concludes. Within minutes, it is over.

On paper, this exchange is unremarkable. A motion is issued and noted. A deadline is given. Yet in the room it unfolds much differently. The man hesitates before leaving the table, looking around as if waiting for further clarification, but none comes. He gathers up his folder and exits the court slowly, without a clear sense of what has occurred or what is now required of him.

At another hearing the following week, a man from Guinea, detained at a county jail that contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appears by Webex, speaking through an interpreter. He is told that he will be removed not to his country of origin but to Uganda under an asylum cooperative agreement (ACA). With obvious distress, he asks what he is supposed to do there. “I don’t know anyone in Uganda,” he implores. “I don’t speak the language. How will I live?” The judge responds that the absence of social ties suggests he is unlikely to be targeted as he would in Guinea, framing this move as one of safety. In doing so, the judge abandons neutrality to make the government’s case—precisely what pretermission under ACAs is designed to accomplish: the state claiming adherence to human rights while pursuing mass deportation. Again, within minutes, the judge concludes the hearing, cutting off the repeated protests of the Guinean man.

Scenes like this accumulate over months of ethnographic court observation and community-based accompaniment within my research. Master calendar hearings are brief; what transpires is marked by specialized legal language that is repeated rather than explained. Legalese acts as a form of opacity, a technology of power that alienates migrants from their rights, their dignity, and their sense of justice. These dynamics are especially visible in cases involving motions to pretermit asylum applications, where decisions may proceed without applicants’ testimony.

Where my earlier work traced the slow violence of protracted waiting—cases suspended for years, lives organized around indefinite delay and the threat of deportation—what emerges here is a different temporal register. Decisions unfold rapidly. Claims are narrowed or ended before they can be fully articulated. Time, rather than stretching out, is compressed. The speed of these proceedings does not reflect administrative efficiency, but rather the deliberate removal of individualized consideration—of the specific facts, circumstances, and humanity of those involved. Speed forecloses the testimony and deliberation asylum law formally requires. Here, acceleration serves as a form of legal violence, denying migrants the time needed to explain, contest, and defend their claims.

Away from immigration court, I often find myself among local migrant communities in Ohio, including with Haitian immigrants facing the anticipated end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Ethnographic work across these two sites—court and community—reveals how legal processes are lived in migrants’ everyday spaces and routines. Under the second Trump administration, denial of asylum cases has increased dramatically, detention has reached unprecedented levels, and bond has been denied to many if not most detained migrants. Cases are also being administratively closed if an applicant fails to pay newly imposed filing fees—a move that effectively prices people out of protection. For Haitian migrants facing the potential termination of TPS, this convergence of narrowing options is not abstract. It is one more door closing.

Before the second Trump administration, legal advocates had encouraged eligible migrants, including Haitians, to apply for asylum. That landscape has shifted. On a recent afternoon, I sat with Rose-Merline, a Haitian migrant in her forties, in her small bright kitchen. She described the toll that a constant state of fear and uncertainty was taking. She spoke to a legal advocate who confirmed her eligibility for asylum. But Rose-Merline has also heard what happens after people come forward; a friend of a friend was taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and detained when they showed up for their fingerprinting appointment, required for an asylum application. “I know what the papers [law] say,” she tells me. “But I know what I have heard and seen, too.” This calculation echoes across migrant communities.

At a community meeting weeks later, a legal advocate stood before a small group of Haitian families and outlined available legal options. The room was quiet. When the question of asylum came up, she paused, her tone shifting. “It’s complicated right now,” she said. “You need to be very careful.” Filing an application, she explained, can bring someone into closer contact with the immigration system—more visibility, more scrutiny. “There’s the possibility that you will be detained until your case is decided.” In this context, seeking asylum no longer represents potential protection; it is risk. This reconfiguration of protection as danger in turn reshapes migrants’ calculations about whether to seek asylum at all. If raids and mass arrests constitute the visible face of the immigration crackdown, these bureaucratic and courtroom practices expose a quieter form of deterrence, one that operates through administrative mechanisms that render legal protection increasingly inaccessible.

Following these dynamics across courtrooms and community spaces underscores the limits of understanding immigration courts only through their formal outputs. Court transcripts record what is said, but not how or if it is understood; they capture decisions, but not the conditions under which these decisions take shape or how they reverberate beyond the hearing itself, from courthouse lobbies to kitchen tables. Rose-Merline at her kitchen table, the detained Guinean migrant on the video screen asking how he will live when expelled to a foreign land—for each of them, asylum is formally available but practically foreclosed. Increasingly, vulnerable people are calculating that seeking protection is more dangerous than forgoing it.