(C) Common Dreams
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There’s No Safe Place for Legal Immigrants in Trump’s America [1]
['Whitney Curry Wimbish']
Date: 2025-07-22
× Expand Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx Federal immigration officers continue to target noncitizens who appear at immigration court in Lower Manhattan for their hearings. Often, family members are left behind and can be seen crying in the hallways of 26 Federal Plaza.
NEW YORK CITY – The federal agents stationed outside immigration courtrooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan wore face coverings, either medical masks or neck gaiters pulled up over their noses. Some obscured their identity further with sunglasses and baseball hats. None displayed their names or badge numbers, though one wore a T-shirt with a picture of a skull and the words “we the people defend liberty.” Assembled in three separate groups, they lingered casually as they waited for their targets, leaning against the wall, chatting, joking around, checking their list of who to disappear.
Each time a courtroom door opened, they snapped to attention, amping themselves up with phrases like “It’s go time.”
Agents snatched a young woman with long curly hair, who jerked away from their grip and held out her hands in the universal sign of “don’t touch me,” but otherwise complied. They separated a man from his wife and two young daughters after the family’s hearing, and led him away as he wept. One man was so distraught when they detained him that he became violently ill, repeatedly vomiting so loudly in the bathroom that he could be heard in the hallway. “Get up, man,” someone begged him. “You gotta get up.” Then the man started to sob.
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The scenes that played out for hours on the 12th floor last Tuesday were the same as the week before, and the week before that. They’ve repeated in federal buildings across the country for long enough that most immigrants now understand that they are in danger regardless of whether they follow the law. If they show up to a scheduled hearing, they risk capture by immigration agents no matter what a judge rules. But if they stay away, a judge will likely issue an order for removal in absentia, which means immigration agents could show up to haul them away from their work or their home at any time. Last week, four legal groups filed a class action case against the Trump administration to halt the courthouse arrests. But they continue in the meantime.
As New York City Comptroller Brad Lander put it last Wednesday, immigration court is nothing more than a “charade.” Court hearings are “just a trap to have made them come in the first place,” he said at a press conference after his seventh visit to observe immigration court proceedings last week. He had watched as ICE agents snatched two asylum seekers from Paraguay immediately after a judge granted them new court dates in July 2029. He had broken convention during the hearing, speaking up and asking the judge to tell the government to prevent agents from interfering with her order.
“But the judge, who works for the same boss as the prosecutor, who works for the same boss as the ICE agents, did not do any such thing,” he said.
The sister of one of the men, a U.S. citizen, tried to hug her brother before agents took him. Agents threw her to the ground. Now she and other family members are blaming themselves for the ordeal, Lander said, “thinking, we shouldn’t have come to this hearing. If he’s going to be abducted from this courtroom, why did we show up? We should have just stayed away from the courtroom and taken our chances, and his sister in particular feels like the whole thing is now her fault instead of Donald Trump’s fault.”
It’s an impossible choice, whether to show up or not, United Farm Workers President Teresa Romero told the Prospect.
“Whatever they choose is going to affect their life in a very negative way,” she said.
THERE’S NO PERFECT ANSWER, ADVOCATES, attorneys, and immigrants themselves said.
“People are so terrified of going to court that many are not showing up,” said Beth Baltimore, director of pro bono and civil legal initiatives at The Door, which offers free legal services to people ages 12 to 24 in New York City. “I think it’s a choice people have to make on their own now.”
The Department of Justice would not disclose how many people have skipped their court cases in recent months, but court-watchers last week said that the drop-off was noticeable. Just before breaking for lunch last Tuesday, immigration judge Donald W. Thompson Jr. had a list of multiple no-shows that morning. He agreed with the Prospect later in the day that the number seemed high, but did not comment further.
When someone skips an immigration hearing, the judge typically issues an immediate order for removal in absentia, which makes it easier for the person to be deported. Federal data shows that judges have turbocharged those orders in recent years, issuing an average of 22,204 a month nationwide during the first part of fiscal year 2025, seven times more than the monthly average a decade earlier. The data does not specify how many orders were the result of a failure to appear in court.
What happens after the order is “very, very case-specific,” said Rosa Cohen-Cruz, immigration policy director at The Bronx Defenders. Agents can show up at the person’s work or at home, but there’s no telling when that might happen, she and others said. There may be ways to challenge the order later, but not always. Those who take this path are constantly looking over their shoulders, and in some cases, so are their American-born children and other family members, who don’t want to inadvertently reveal details that could somehow draw agents’ attention.
× Expand Cristina Matuozzi/SIPA USA via AP Images ICE agents are seen waiting outside a courtroom in the hallway of federal immigration court in Lower Manhattan, June 20, 2025.
People leaving immigration hearings with legal representation largely make it past the agents, and back to their lives, Cohen-Cruz and other attorneys said. But unlike in criminal court, there is no legal right to a publicly funded attorney in immigration court, including for unaccompanied children. Those who can afford to can hire representation, but those who cannot must represent themselves unless they can find a pro bono service in their area. Immigrants at 503,921 of the 735,327 hearings that have taken place during fiscal year 2025 so far had no representation, according to available data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the data-gathering organization at Syracuse University.
The data is nearly a perfect opposite for the number of people who attended hearings during that period. Almost 517,000 attended their hearings regardless of representation status, TRAC data shows. Historical data makes the point even more clearly. Of the nearly eight million immigration hearings across the country since fiscal year 1998, 6.2 million attended, even though only half of that group had legal representation.
The purpose of immigration detention has always been a threat to ensure people show up to court, Cohen-Cruz said, and it’s always been unnecessary because they overwhelmingly do.
“It is particularly cruel to detain people at their hearings when they are, in fact, showing up to court. They’re proving that they are no flight risk,” she said. “They’re proving they’re complying.”
THE TRUMP REGIME, MEANWHILE, IS PROVING that it is intent on punishing immigrants no matter what they do. Fear has taken hold throughout immigrant communities around the country, immigrants, attorneys, and advocates said, and even people who have citizenship or who have made it home from a hearing are scared to leave their house.
It’s driving people into the shadows, emptying restaurants and public parks, frightening children who are afraid their parents will be taken from them. In some cases, immigrants are paying people to run errands for them because they are too scared to drive or step out of the home at all. Other people have stopped picking up needed medication or attending doctor appointments.
One farmworker in the Central Valley of California, who spoke to the Prospect through a translator on condition of anonymity, said, “It’s been not just difficult days, but difficult months. There’s a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. I don’t really do anything but go to work and go home.” She feels nervous even going to church, though she still attends, and she asks God to do something about all the racists who are treating Latinos and other immigrants like they are criminals. “I really don’t feel safe anywhere,” she said. “I go everywhere with fear now.”
While she does not have to attend an immigration court hearing, she’s well aware of the choice Trump is forcing people to make, and called it “a pole with two sharp ends,” a Spanish phrase with a similar meaning to the American “catch-22.” If you go, you get deported. If you don’t, you get deported.
She wants to know: How is it possible that Trump could treat farmworkers so badly, just five years after he said they were essential during the pandemic and that the U.S. needed them? She asks: “What harm have we done to this country to be treated this way?”
The source of her strength and motivation to keep coming to work is her young son, she said. She must provide for him.
× Expand Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo Federal agents detain Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, center, from Paraguay as they pull away his sister, Porfiria Lopez, a U.S. citizen, left, outside immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, July 16, 2025, in New York.
In many cases, older children with U.S. citizenship are shouldering work their parents would normally do out of the house, said Keilly Leon, an organizer with the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. It’s heart-wrenching to watch, they said, because the experience of seeing parents frightened and stepping up to help will undoubtedly leave a mark. “I can’t imagine the little kids that see that and have to rely on the family’s oldest child,” they said. “For the most part, a lot of their children are U.S. citizens [and they’re] having to become adults earlier, having to take on enormous responsibility, having to grow up a lot faster.”
Leon noted that another consequence of Trump’s racist deportation plan is to erode organizing efforts. They’ve noticed that even those who are community leaders are stepping back in some cases. For example, Lelo Juarez, a prominent farmworker organizer in Washington state who has been in ICE detention for four months, last week agreed to voluntary departure, after reckoning that he would be unable to win a fight against his seizure.
The blast radius of fear extends well beyond each targeted person, said UFW’s Romero, devastating not only the workers she represents but their families and entire community. Like others, she too called attention to the effect on children.
“I have spoken to U.S. citizen children who are seven, eight, nine years old, they don’t want to go to school because they’re afraid mom and dad won’t be home when they get back,” Romero said. Parents are “not going to school functions, not going to the park, not taking [their kids] to have a hamburger on the weekend.”
Even only going to work is dangerous in Trump’s America, a point the Prospect’s Harold Meyerson made when he discussed how in some states, the racist regime is targeting anyone with brown skin, regardless of their citizenship.
AGENTS THEMSELVES ILLUSTRATED THEIR COMMITMENT to this policy earlier this month when they arrested 25-year-old military veteran George Retes during their violent raid on Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, in which another worker died.
Retes, a U.S. citizen who grew up in Ventura, was driving to his job as a security officer on the farm when he saw the raid under way. He kept driving, thinking, “I’d just figure it out … Just like everybody else, I have family to feed and bills to pay. I have an eight-year-old and a three-year-old daughter,” he told reporters last week. But when he got closer, agents broke his car window, pepper-sprayed him, and dragged him out to the ground. Two knelt on his back and one on his neck before cuffing him, he said.
They didn’t care that he said he was a U.S. citizen. They wouldn’t tell him why he was arrested and sent him to a facility in downtown Los Angeles. Though he was covered in pepper spray and tear gas, staff at the detention facility didn’t let him shower, telling him that the pain would pass. It did not. They didn’t allow him a phone call, so he couldn’t tell his family where he was. They wouldn’t allow him to speak with an attorney.
After the first night, Retes was so shattered that officials deemed him to be at risk of suicide. Their treatment was to transfer him to solitary confinement, Retes said, but nothing more. He didn’t want to discuss his health or state of mind, saying only that the experience was “a lot” and made worse by the fact that he was missing his youngest daughter’s birthday. Two days later, with no explanation, officials let him go and said they were dropping the charges against him. He still doesn’t know what the charges were. He still doesn’t know what agency arrested him.
“They gave me nothing … I was like, ‘I’ve been in here locked up for three days for no reason?’” Retes said. “It was kind of just like silence. No one told me anything.”
Retes is planning on suing. His car window is still smashed. He’s not sure if he’ll return to Glass House; no one from the farm has contacted him.
Asked what he made of the impossible choice Trump is handing immigrants, he said, “I don’t think it’s right at all.”
“The way they’re going about this deportation process is completely wrong,” he said. There’s no reason to chase people, or sic five armed agents on a single unarmed worker. “No one deserves to be treated the way they treat people.”
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-07-22-no-safe-place-for-legal-immigrants-trumps-america/
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