Caitlin Dickerson

So what I saw was a judge sitting in an empty courtroom and looking into boxes on her screen, calling people up and moving incredibly quickly through their cases.

Most people in court that day were unrepresented by lawyers.

As people may or may not know, in immigration court, you don't have the right to an attorney if you can't afford one or to a jury of your peers.

And people were panicked.

They were in shambles.

I definitely saw the change in this administration wherein most people who are being arrested by ICE on a given day have been in the United States for a long time and have no criminal record.

In that, you know, I was hearing parents break down in tears, crying and saying, you know, I'm worried about my child.

There was one father in particular in my story who said he was arrested in front of his two youngest children who were both under five years old.

He said he was desperately worried about how they were going to survive without him.

People like this father, but others too, were asking about their children and how they were going to be dealt with because they'd been taken away from their children when they were arrested.

And the judge really seemed uninterested in answering their questions, was just moving very quickly through their cases.

you know, there's all this focus on numbers.

Each one of them, I was reminded in court, is not a number, is a person and has family and has employers and a community that is impacted each time that this happens.

So I was just, I was really struck by the speed with which this judge was moving through cases.

You know, you could tell that a lot of people were confused.

You have a lot of people for whom English is a second language, or maybe they don't speak English at all who are in immigration court.

And

The Zoom hearings make it that much more difficult because you might have inconsistent video.

The translation might not be as good quality as it could be.

It seemed to me that some people whose cases were being heard didn't even fully understand what the judge had decided.