Today was the second day of the Courts and Ports trip. Yesterday’s activities largely focused on the ports. Today we were focused on the courts.
We started the day visiting an immigration court and finished it with a presentation by ProBAR. ProBAR is the principal organization that provides free legal assistance to people seeking asylum. We had an additional stop midday. We visited La Posada Providencia, a long term shelter.
The immigration court is part of the Department of Justice. We saw the proceedings in two different courtrooms. The two judges had very different approaches. It felt like the first judge we witnessed was just shuffling paper in his courtroom. The fact that people’s lives were at stake in his paper shuffling appeared almost immaterial. Instead, he seemed more concerned with moving pieces of paper from one pile (pending) to another pile (resolved). He was extraordinarily efficient. He heard five cases in less than twenty minutes. Three of them ended when the Department of Justice lawyer moved to dismiss the proceedings. This got the cases out of the immigration courts but left the asylum seekers in legal limbo. The government was no longer seeking their removal from the country. They were no longer in process for asylum. After the hearing they essentially had no status. The government wasn’t trying to deport them but they also didn’t have permission to stay.
The second judge seemed to be much more interested in taking on the role of educator. The hearing of hers that we witnessed was an initial hearing. She set a date for a second hearing–more than six months from now–and then spent almost twenty minutes explaining the process to the people who were seeking asylum.
After we left the court, we visited La Posada Providencia. It is the only long term shelter for asylum seekers on the entire border. It is also tiny. It has a scant 58 beds. That’s a woefully inadequate number when the people who are entering the United States each day seeking asylum number in the thousands.
The final portion of our trip was a presentation by ProBAR. They are a project of the American Bar Association. From them we learned about all of the legal walls that are in place to prevent people from receiving asylum in the United States. Every recent US presidential administration, including the Biden administration, has made the process harder.
And I think that’s the point I want to conclude these cursory reflections on. Migrants and asylum seekers are dehumanized in this country. They are dehumanized by the politicians who use them as political football to win elections. And they are dehumanized by the entire immigration system. The system is designed to strip away their humanity, not to build it up. There needs to be a different system. About that I will have more to say on Sunday.
