At Immigration Court
June 11, 2025 at 01:54AMOn its face, the premise of this essay is simple to the point of mundane: readers follow along as a man sits through a routine court hearing. But the piece reads like a thriller, because the man is M, an asylum-seeker from Mauritania, and he appears in immigration court in New York City, stalked by groups of ICE agents:
M and I walked through the main atrium, where small clusters of men in plain clothes stood with their phones out. This was also new. Unlike the security team for the building, who are mostly Caribbean, South Asian, Arab, or Eastern European immigrants or Black Americans, all the ICE agents I saw in the atrium were white, medium height and build, and many wore plain baseball caps. They were all men and they stuck out because they displayed an exceeding level of stillness and homogeneity in a room with a flow of people from all over the world, who are always in motion, and who mostly looked different from one another.
I could see that one man in each group was holding a stack of papers with headshot photos. M had been seeing the messages and videos circulating in WhatsApp groups about ICE rounding up migrants at the courts. I’d also begun receiving messages from people telling me that their friends had been taken by ICE. I was getting blurry photos of ID cards forwarded to me, with messages from people saying this person has a bed near them in the shelter and hasn’t returned in three days. A minor from Guinea had been arrested and my friend was on the phone with the kid’s mom back in Guinea, who also hadn’t stopped crying for three days. M said, “I don’t care what they do to me. Only God decides.” He was both lying and telling the truth.
I didn’t point out the agents to M, since my experience in immigration court has so far been that displays of conviction are important to the judge, and that if you hesitate too much or phrase something incorrectly, whether because you are nervous or don’t understand the question or you are in fact lying, it could bring decisive consequences.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/10/at-immigration-court/
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