Migrants with court hearings face an impossible choice

Federal immigration officials
continued targeting people at the Phoenix Immigration Courthouse on
Thursday, surveilling and detaining migrants whose cases were dismissed
minutes earlier in ways that appear to be an attempt to minimize
attention from both protestors and media. 

Berta, a soft-spoken 48-year-old
woman who was afraid to give her last name, spoke to the Arizona Mirror
while she and her lawyer took refuge near protesters. She said that the
United States has been her home longer than Mexico ever was. 

“It’s been 28 years,” she said. “More than half my life.” 

Returning to Mexico terrifies her,
she said, and she’s been working with an immigration lawyer to make sure
that never happens. On Thursday, she went to Phoenix Immigration Court
to attend a mandatory hearing. 

ICE agents were waiting.

Berta is one of hundreds of people
across the country with tenuous legal protections who have lately been
caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation
campaign. 

Trump promised on the campaign trail
that he would deport millions of people. But doing so has proven more
difficult than simply declaring that it would happen, and Trump has reportedly spent months angry that immigration agents haven’t rounded up more immigrants. 

In what legal experts have derided as a bid to boost deportation numbers, the Trump administration has recently launched raids at immigration courthouses in multiple cities,
targeting migrants and asylum seekers who show up for scheduled
immigration hearings. Last week, more than a dozen people were detained
by ICE agents in Phoenix, shortly after federal prosecutors filed to
dismiss their cases, effectively leaving them open to deportation.  

That same pattern played out in
Berta’s hearing on Thursday afternoon. The federal prosecutor made a
motion to dismiss her case, and the judge granted it. The consequences
were almost immediate. When she and her lawyer, Erica Sanchez, exited
the courtroom, they noticed ICE agents. Thinking quickly, they ducked
into the bathroom to wait it out. Later, the pair were able to exit the
courthouse building and stood with immigrant rights advocates until
Sanchez’s husband arrived to pick them up. 

At the same time that Berta and
Sanchez climbed into the black Jeep, a federal agent raced down the
stairs from the courthouse’s covered carport towards them, but they
drove away before he could stop them. On the second floor of that
parking structure, which is directly across from the courthouse’s
entrance, ICE agents could be seen looking through binoculars and
speaking into walkie talkies, ostensibly taking note of which cars
immigrants were leaving in and relaying that information to other
federal officials waiting in white paneled vans and vehicles with
out-of-state license plates in the surrounding streets.

Thursday was the second day ICE agents employed a new tactic
of following migrants outside of the courthouse grounds and pulling
them over blocks away. Immigrant rights advocates say the move is
intentional: detaining people in the surrounding streets instead of the
elevator or courtroom lobby makes it more difficult for advocates to
protest or film the arrests. At least one woman was observed by a
reporter being detained after being pulled over in her car, but it’s
unclear how many more people were arrested under the new strategy. 

But opponents of the raids haven’t
let that new difficulty deter them from at least trying to monitor ICE
activity. Members of pro-immigrant groups, including the Phoenix branch
of Indivisible, Common Defense, Fuerte and the Borderlands Resource
Initiative, organized themselves via text messages, Signal chats, phone
calls and walkie talkies. 

Some protestors gathered in front of
the courthouse entrance and warned migrants entering and exiting the
building that ICE agents were watching. Others stood near two white
paneled vans with U.S. Department of Homeland Security license plates
parked behind the courthouse on 9th Avenue and Van Buren Street. A few
jumped into a car to respond to a tip sent to the ICE watch hotline set up by immigrant advocacy groups in January, in anticipation of Trump’s hostile agenda.

And when an immigrant woman whose
case had just been dismissed approached protestors waving posters at
oncoming traffic advising them of ICE’s presence, a man who would only
identify himself as “P” for fear of repercussions, accompanied her to
the McDonald’s across the street and ordered her a Lyft home. “P”, who
teaches music in the Creighton Elementary School District, said that it
was clear the woman was being followed by ICE because the duo had cut
through a construction area, crisscrossed streets and turned down
corners only to consistently find ICE vans nearby. He said it was
“surreal” to watch federal agents try to arrest a person simply
attending a scheduled immigration hearing — going through the same legal
process border hawks have for years advocated for. 

Artie, who also teaches at Creighton
Elementary School District, said he was inspired to join the handful of
protestors because of his own history with the immigration system. In
1979, at just 14-years-old, Artie left Guadalajara, Mexico, with his
parents to immigrate to the United States. He’s since become a citizen,
but that experience helps him empathize with the fear that people
attending immigration hearings on Thursday felt. 

“I’m here to support, to try to get ICE to be less effective,” he said, calling their strategies “crazy”. 

While the threat of a detainment
persists at Phoenix Immigration Court, migrants with scheduled hearings
have no other option but to show up. Those who skip a hearing have a
deportation order filed against them and their case is closed; getting
back into the legal process is much more difficult if that happens. 

Carlos accompanied his wife to
Phoenix Immigration Court on Thursday morning. While she attended her
hearing inside, Carlos waited across the street on a public bench. He
was nervous and restless, walking back and forth between the bench and
the courthouse, then up and down the public sidewalks near both. When
Phoenix police officers arrived to keep protestors away from the
courthouse entrance, he kept a close eye on them, worrying that they
might be ICE agents. He had heard about the arrests of the past two
weeks, and said the news scared him and his wife. 

“It almost makes you not want to show up,” he said. “You show up and you get deported anyway.” 

But, he added, they went to the hearing despite the risk because the alternative only guarantees a deportation order.