'There Is No Law': Scenes From a Houston Immigration Court in Trump's America

"I'm here because of due process."

In June, a Houston immigration attorney was addressing protesters across the street from a prison owned and operated by CoreCivic for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A group called FIEL—the Spanish acronym for Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight—sponsored the rally.

"People can be given a court date to appear, and then the prosecutor can literally dismiss their case, send a text message or a Teams message—yes, I know that you guys use Teams, DHS—to the ICE agents, who are in the hallway, and then they know exactly who's coming out."

Several CoreCivic employees watched from outside the perimeter fence. When I asked what they thought of the protest, one said, "I'm not at liberty to speak." His identification tag, flipped around so that his name was hidden, hung from his neck on a purple lanyard with white lettering that said "CoreCivic Diversity Equity Inclusion." CoreCivic used to be the Corrections Corporation of America, which boasted in promotional materials that its Houston detention center was "the world's first privately designed and built prison."

The attorney, Bianca Santorini, said: "The men [with their faces covered] who are approaching people who are leaving court did not have any badges, they did not have any uniforms, they had zero insignia, they did not identify themselves. And when I refused to let them detain one of the individuals that they approached, and I specifically asked them what agency they were with, they didn't answer... They said, 'We're here assisting' .... And that's [who is] coming up behind adults, children, women, and just grabbing them and taking them."

I'd met Santorini outside the South Gessner immigration court earlier that week. FIEL had posted a call for "media and supporters" because ICE was arresting immigrants who were showing up for their hearings. Soon after I got there, I joined a small group following the crying and screaming of a woman in the parking garage adjoined to the building by a glassed-in walkway. She and other family members watched four unidentified men put their handcuffed relative into an unmarked car.

Their relative, a Cuban man, had appeared in court as part of the application process for political asylum, and now Santorini calmly but loudly spoke to him through the noise and confusion as agents put him in the car. After he was gone, she spoke to his relatives. Then she showed me a court document, folding it to hide the applicant's name, which documented that the immigration judge (IJ) had ended the whole process at the government's request and denied the Cuban a chance to argue his case.

In the garage she said in Spanish, "The law is not operating here. There is no law."

I went back to the main lobby, through security, and up to the 10th floor to watch proceedings in an immigration courtroom. As I stepped off the elevator, I saw that two plainclothes men had just handcuffed another man. One of the presumed government agents pulled up his "neck gaiter" to hide his face, keeping one hand on his prisoner. The prisoner said, "Ayúdame." Help me.

It happened quickly. The masked agent had the handcuffed man at the back of the elevator. His partner stepped toward me and barked, "Get back!" and "You're not coming with us!" I asked the masked agent if the man could tell me who he was or whether there was someone I could call for him. The agent said no. The elevator doors closed. It was the end of the day and the hallways were empty. A clerk watched from behind the check-in window of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is part of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

*

In May, attorneys around the country started noticing that plainclothes agents were grabbing noncitizens in hallways—sometimes in bathrooms—outside immigration courtrooms and taking them away. The new tactic was straightforward. DHS lawyers ask immigration judges to dismiss cases. Judges tell the "respondents" they may leave. ICE (and sometimes other federal agents) are waiting in the hallways to grab them.

These courthouse arrests have focused on people who arrived less than two years ago. After their cases are dismissed, they're put into a process called "expedited removal," a "cursory removal process with almost no substantive or procedural protections that requires detention in most circumstances." The process has always been intended for people at the border who had arrived less than two weeks earlier. The Trump administration widened the net exponentially. That widening is based on two policy changes, both of which, according to an August lawsuit by African Communities Together, are illegal, and which the administration implemented to help it reach a reported daily arrest "goal" of 3,000 by "turning mandatory hearings into traps." (On August 29, in a related case, Make the Road New York v. Noem, Judge Cobb temporarily blocked the expansion of expedited removal; the administration has appealed.)

The first change was a memo from DHS that allows ICE agents to make arrests in courthouses even when doing so violates local laws against such arrests. The second change was a DOJ memo that "allows" judges to dismiss ongoing proceedings, including unresolved asylum applications, without giving any reason, so that ICE can make those hallway arrests. The DOJ has made it clear to IJ's that they must grant these motions to dismiss or risk losing their jobs. This threat is important because it facilitates the collaboration between the government attorney and the immigration judge.

"If you have no justice, and you only have enforcement, you no longer have a democracy, you have an authoritarian state."

What we usually think of as a judge is part of the judicial branch of government (as per Article III of the US Constitution). But immigration judges are what Robert S. Kahn, in Other People's Blood: US Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade (1996), calls "bureaucrats in judges' robes." In immigration court, the government attorney is employed by DHS, and the immigration judge is employed by DOJ. That means they have the same boss: the president.

Certainly many IJ's fight to remain independent. But, as one judge in New York told me, referring to those appearing in court without lawyers, "What was disturbing was that if we gave pro se respondents time to respond to the motion to dismiss made unexpectedly by DHS counsel in court, ICE would pick them up anyway."

For the sake of more "efficient" deportations, such judges are being replaced by former DHS attorneys, by military lawyers, and, in Florida, by National Guard officers. (The latter scenario might be illegal.) DOJ has announced that it will now assign lawyers "without prior immigration experience" to serve as temporary immigration judges. To help shield the new judges from any potential empathy, the new DOJ rule also reverses Biden-era changes by replacing the word "noncitizen" with "alien," and changing "unaccompanied child" back to "unaccompanied alien child."

George Pappas, one of those recently fired, told PBS, "We have a huge increase in supporting enforcement and we have... an attack on the court system [and] on judges." The "huge increase" is $170 billion for immigration enforcement, which includes $45 billion for detention operations, or "at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention," Eunice Cho of the American Civil Liberties Union told Mother Jones.

There are approximately 60,000 immigration detainees acknowledged to be held by the US as of late August—"a number that excludes thousands more held in off-the-books facilities," according to Austin Kocher of Syracuse University. The administration's stated goal is a detention capacity of 100,000. Detention is part of the deportation process, and the administration has suggested to Time magazine that it would start by banishing 1 million human beings each year, eventually to target 15 million people in "the largest Mass Deportation Operation in History."

Pappas said, "If you have no justice, and you only have enforcement, you no longer have a democracy, you have an authoritarian state."

*

Immigration law is complicated even without the language barrier. One judge in Houston had these exchanges with a respondent through an interpreter:

"Do you want to designate a country of removal?"

"I don't understand."

"What kind of relief are you going to be seeking?"

"I don't understand."

When a Nicaraguan woman holding her infant was ordered deported, she told the judge, "I want to take my daughter with me." The judge said that "the court" had no control over the "removal" process, but that she had 30 days to file an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals. She said, "I don't understand."

Not surprisingly, immigrants are much more likely to win their cases when they have lawyers—which they are not entitled to, as in the criminal justice system—and when they're not detained. That's why the immigration agency wants more people detained and has always opposed due process and interfered with legal help.

In Houston, attorney Santorini noticed that government agents waited until volunteer lawyers were gone before making arrests. On a day when she and other local lawyers organized themselves to show up in all the courtrooms, there were no arrests. That afternoon, in another garage press conference, a reporter from Spanish-language TV asked a Venezuelan man flanked by the volunteer lawyers whether he knew that ICE was arresting people who showed up for court. The man said in Spanish, "Yes, obviously. My legs were shaking, I had to go the bathroom, my head hurt—all the symptoms of terrible stress, but I have to do things legally."

In Sacramento, the government actually barred attorneys from immigration court at least once, Kamalpreet Chohan of the California Immigration Project told me. At a press conference in late May outside the federal building in Sacramento, attorney Chohan said: "ICE wants the public to believe that immigrants are missing their court dates, or that they have done something wrong. But that couldn't be further from the truth. It is ICE that is obstructing justice—spreading fear, misinformation, and chaos in order to justify its actions."

A protester holds a sign at a rally outside a Houston CoreCivic facility on June 13, 2025. (Photo by Mark Dow)

*

The media and public have tuned into a previously obscure aspect of the immigration process. Communities around the country are organizing, and experts are training people to observe court proceedings and support immigrants through "accompaniment." On a smaller scale this has been happening for years. Now in Denver, the American Friends Service Committee has over 100 volunteer court watchers. In San Diego, when pastors showed up at immigration court, ICE agents "scattered" and there were no arrests.

The administration has responded. In a high-profile incident, New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested outside a courtroom. Such violence and interference are widespread. Federal agents have detained or arrested immigration court observers in Denver and New York. In Sacramento, a volunteer observer was roughed up by agents when she tried to accompany an immigrant. In Phoenix, activists were barred from distributing "know your rights" cards.

She told me that my presence put the applicant in danger—never mind that she was trying to deport the applicant to Cuba because (among the reasons which the judge had read aloud) the multiple beatings at the hands of Cuban police were "not excessive."

For now at least, federal law allows public access to immigration court except in certain specified situations. But in Houston that didn't stop judges from telling observers and journalists, myself included, that they had to leave the courtroom, or needed to make an appointment first, or could not take notes. In Sacramento, the government has repeatedly stopped volunteers and reporters from entering the federal building, and a Sacramento Bee reporter was threatened with detention himself for standing in a hallway near immigration courtrooms.

*

When I walked into one immigration courtoom in Houston during a recess, the judge and the DHS attorney were chatting about the latter's military service. There were no other observers or respondents there. The lawyer suggested that the judge tell me to leave. The judge said he saw no need to close the hearing and went back "on the record" to order the removal of respondents who had "failed to appear." The proceeding was over in a few minutes. There wasn't even something to hide. In the hallway I asked the attorney, a DHS supervisor, why he'd wanted the judge to close a public hearing. He said, "Have a good day, sir," and kept walking.

I know that lawyer's name because when judges go on the record, they announce their own names and those of the lawyers and respondents who are present. But reporter Debbie Nathan wrote in The Intercept that an IJ in New York recently refused to say a DHS lawyer's name even "after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers" because (the judge said) "'things lately have changed.'" This makes sense, of course, as the equivalent of agents hiding their faces.

In another courtoom I listened as a judge read aloud his reasons for denying political asylum to someone. Again, there were no other observers—just me, the judge, his clerk, an interpreter, the DHS lawyer, the asylum applicant, and her lawyer. When the judge finished reading, he told the applicant her deadline for filing an appeal. The applicant nodded to me as she left with her lawyer. The judge and the clerk left. Then the DHS lawyer asked me who I was, and I told her. She began screaming, "Security!" over and over again.

She told me that my presence put the applicant in danger—never mind that she was trying to deport the applicant to Cuba because (among the reasons which the judge had read aloud) the multiple beatings at the hands of Cuban police were "not excessive." She kept screaming. I sat down to wait. The security guard who came rushing in recogized me. We had chatted on my previous visits, and he told the DHS lawyer that I was just observing immigration court. She kept yelling. The judge's clerk came in. Then the court administrator came in and asked if I'd wait while they all spoke to the judge.

Asylum applicants are entitled to confidentiality (although the US government has often violated it), and according to immigration law an IJ may closes an asylum hearing at the request of the applicant or at their own discretion. According to the law, and as I've confirmed with a different immigration judge, my presence in court was legal. EOIR's own webpage says so here and here (last accessed September 3, 2025). A sympathetic if overly cautious DOJ official still suggested it would be safer to avoid writing about this.

After about 10 minutes, the court administrator returned and said, "Sorry you were on the receiving end of that" and "We'll talk to DHS about that."

*

After about three weeks, we learned the name of the man arrested. He had been transported by ICE with the Cuban man whom Santorini spoke to in the garage, and the Cuban knew his first name. That was enough to let us find his full name on a copy of the day's docket. ICE's "online detainee locator" said that Carlos wasn't in the system. But an employee at one GEO-ICE immigration prison north of Houston helped, and we found him at another, GEO-ICE's Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas.

A group went through security, up the elevators, through a series of corridors with remotely controlled locked doors at both ends, and then to a row of cubicles where visitors spoke to prisoners through plexiglass on telephones. One family shared a single chair among several adults and young children to visit a man in his 70s. Why do "administrative detainees" only get to visit family and friends through heavy plastic and without privacy? It's not about security; visiting hours were arranged according to security level, and these were the lowest-security inmates. An employee out front said, "It's always been like this."

The Montgomery Processing Center was holding some 1,500 prisoners in July. Carlos was in a pod with 80 other men. The GEO employees answering the phone and managing the sign-in sheets had been polite, but the guards treat the men as delinquentes, or criminals, Carlos told me. Carlos had entered the US legally more than a year earlier and had appeared for his court date. He wasn't accused of any crime. But they were all wearing prison uniforms and they were incarcerated, after all.

In defending an executive order "guaranteeing... protection against invasion" by "aliens," the deputy assistant attorney general avoided giving a clear answer when the judge asked him whether the President could simply order that any border-crosser be shot

In the visitation area, a guard told me it was impossible to give Carlos a lawyer's business card, so I held it up to the plexiglass. Carlos put the phone reciever down, using one hand to hold a crumpled paper napkin in place and the other to copy down the information with a short blunt pencil. Years ago an immigration prisoner in Louisiana cautioned me that reporters focus on stories of beatings and overlook the small indignities that make detention unbearable. Even when there is no "mistreatment," every aspect of the detention system is meant to dehumanize—dehumanization is both cause and consequence—and it works. Carlos decided against exercising his legal right to appeal because that would have meant staying inside even longer. He had met prisoners locked up for months even after agreeing to be deported. His only hesitation was that if Venezuela stopped accepting deportees again, he had no idea where the US would send him.

In late July, Carlos' phone access was cut off. His wife was used to speaking to him every day and now she was terrrified because she couldn't reach him. A legal assistant had explained that ICE does that within 24 hours of a scheduled removal. But for so-called "security" reasons again, ICE would not say where Carlos was or when he might actually be flown out. A volunteer advocate named Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border monitors deportation flights, and he provided information about upcoming ICE removals to Venezuela. That gave Carlos' family some reassurance at least.

I'm only writing about Carlos because I happened to be there when he was arrested, and I'm hesitant because his case might give the wrong picture. Carlos has been treated unjustly. But unlike others, he was not sent by the US to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison. He wasn't sent to the "lawless enclave" of Guantánamo, or deposited in a country to which he has no connection, such as Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan, or Uganda. He wasn't locked up for a week in a temporary "holding area" outside the immigration courtrooms in Manhattan, where a guard would squirt some water into prisoners' mouths when they were thirsty enough. He wasn't held in a sewage-flooded cell in Estancia, New Mexico. He wasn't sent to the new "soft-sided" immigration prison in the Florida Everglades, where guards chained a Nicaraguan asylum-seeker hand-and-foot outside in the sun for six hours without water—and then did the same to a Honduran man who protested.

But the same unchecked authority makes everything on this spectrum available to the government thugs and bureaucrats. That's why, in defending an executive order "guaranteeing... protection against invasion" by "aliens," the deputy assistant attorney general avoided giving a clear answer when the judge asked him whether the President could simply order that any border-crosser be shot.

*

Carlos' renewed work permit arrived at his home while he was detained. It didn't matter. In July, with no chance to pick up his possessions or tell his wife goodbye, he was moved from the Conroe detention center by bus some 400 miles south to an airport near the US-Mexico border. He was shackled—encadenado—at wrists, waist, and ankles for the bus ride and then, with some 300 others, for a flight from Harlingen, Texas, to Honduras. There US officials removed the waist and ankle chains, and they replaced the handcuffs with plastic flex-cuffs for the final trip to Venezuela. Altogether the transport took about 32 hours. Prisoners were given a cheese sandwich, an apple, and water.

Six weeks earlier, on the day Carlos was arrested, I had overheard two non-ICE federal employees chatting as they passed through the walkway to the garage where the Cuban's family had been screaming a few hours earlier. One man said casually, "I heard they were rounding people up."