When it happens, it’s so much quieter, so much quicker than you expect.
Each weekday immigrants make their way through the halls of 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, uneasy and confused, searching for the right courtroom for their asylum hearing. Most carry a handful of documents and dress in their sharpest outfits. They turn a corner and stop cold as they stumble into a team of black-masked agents huddled against the walls.
The agents stand, shoulders slumped, eyes cast at phones, hands tucked into plate carriers affixed with velcro patches advertising a constellation of three letter agencies—ICE, CBP, ATF, DSS, FBI, HSI—and the US Border Patrol. One is struck by their casual sloppiness and lack of proper uniforms. Take away the service weapons and body armor, and they could be delivering pizzas.
Into this dynamic stumble the photographers. It is a quirk of the ad-hoc nature of the immigration courts that they are shoehorned into hallways that double as public spaces—where the press, same as the agents, is authorized to operate.
The photographers bunch up alongside the bunched-up agents, bored and tired and shifting from one foot to the other, every so often raising a camera directly in a masked face. The agents strike up conversations, curious about the photographers’ work. Sometimes they confide that they hate what they are doing. Sometimes they quietly pass along tips.
The agents thumb through a stack of papers. Each page has a photograph in the top left corner and a name—the “target”—they are hunting. Sometimes they wait quietly in the back of the courtroom, texting colleagues: Be ready. Hearing concluded, the individual exits into the hallway. The agents circle, ask the person’s name, confirming the target, and then take them by the elbow as their expression collapses. The agents walk their captives into an elevator or a stairwell, barking at the photographers backpedaling and jostling for position. And then they are gone.
It is this breach of trust—this shattering of a person’s faith in the benevolence and intrinsic fairness of America, that is the hardest thing to watch. Here legally, engaged in a sanctioned process to determine their eligibility for asylum, they have committed no crime. They are arrested anyway, and the lives they’ve risked to come to the United States are thrown into chaos.
After the last detention on their lists, the agents depart en masse and the photographers head out to compare notes over a sandwich or coffee—or some days over a beer. They talk about what they’ve seen, parse what they have learned. On many days they wonder aloud: “What will we do if they kick us out?”—if the federal authorities cut off press access to the immigration courts.
And then, some days, they wonder: “What will we do if they don’t?”
