Words by Soren van Loben Sels PZ ’28, Graphic by Eli Heart PZ ’26

On Thursday, June 26, 2025, at the immigration court in Concord, CA, ICE attempted to detain two Brazilian immigrants without respect for the Judge’s decision. I arrived there, as a court observer, at 1:02 p.m., as proceedings started for that day’s hearing. 

Those two minutes between 1:00 and 1:02 p.m. — minutes that I missed — had been crucial. During them, I later heard, the judge discovered that ICE had sent two officials who identified themselves as “ICE interns” to sit in on the hearing. 

As I entered, the judge was asking the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorney if he was intending to dismiss any cases that day. The attorney answered in the affirmative and provided two case numbers: a husband and wife from Brazil seeking asylum. The judge immediately scheduled their case for the end of the hearing, ensuring that legal aid volunteers could advise the targeted asylum seekers on their right to oppose the case against them being dismissed. 

This reaction would be odd in any other field of law, where the dismissal of a case means that the threat of legal implications / punitive measures to the accused would be over. This logic has been turned on its head by a new DHS policy that pursues dismissals. This is because people who are still in removal proceedings through the court system cannot be taken by ICE for removal without due process, a process called Expedited Removal. To get around this, the DHS has begun dropping the removal charges against someone so that they can be detained and put into Expedited Removal. There is a pending class action lawsuit on the legality of these dismissals.

Volunteer courtroom navigators, including one immigration attorney, explained these details after moving with the couple into the hallway. For most immigrants, volunteers are the only available source of legal advice; the vast majority of people in immigration courts go unrepresented, especially among Hispanic immigrant groups. Immigration court evades the 6th-amendment endowed right to an attorney to adults as it isn’t a court under the Judicial court system, but a court system attached to the executive branch.

The rest of the cases proceeded without the couple. This was an administrative hearing, which quickly moves through the procedural details necessary to work out before final asylum hearings, so the cases passed quickly. Outside of the room, the legal aid volunteers struggled. At the Concord court, legal aid groups can only have so many volunteers there in a day. The groups cater to the two languages most used by immigrants who come through the Concord immigration court, Spanish and Punjabi, but not the Portuguese that the Brazilian couple required. 

The court itself also had problems with translation. Speakers of any but the most common languages had to either settle for a second best language (as I saw for a Quechua speaker who had to settle for Spanish) or hard to understand translation-by-phone. In one case, in which respondents only spoke Turkish or Kurdish, none of the three translation services the court used were able to provide any translator. 

When all the other cases had passed, the Brazilian respondents crossed the bar with a volunteer attorney waiting just behind it. The mundane details of their case — name, housing, and the fact that they had a legally submitted asylum claim — were confirmed. Right before the DHS formally moved to dismiss their cases, the couple attempted to link their cases, so that whatever judgement was rendered would not separate them. The judge ruled that that motion would be answered after the dismissal. 

With the legal advice on what dismissal was, the husband was able to respond effectively to the motion to dismiss. His wife was already starting to break down at this point, terrified of detention. His arguments, that they were correctly following the procedures for asylum and absolutely could not go back, may not have been entirely well-formed in the legal sense. That was why the judge, instead of ruling one way or another, gave him ten days to get the help of legal representation to make those arguments properly. The judge set a court date and that was supposed to be the end of their case for the day. They left the courtroom, but I did not.

At the end of every administrative hearing, the court issues deportation orders for people who did not show up to their hearing. The non-appearances, scared from the courtroom by fear of ICE detainment, confused by a change of court date, or driven off by other fears, are ordered to be removed with little recourse. I stayed to take notes on how many “in absentia” cases were removed.

From what the legal aids later told me, ICE was waiting and had attempted to detain the couple outside of the hearing. The husband was seized as his wife was in the bathroom. She was in there when two male armed ICE agents entered to grab her. She fell and began having a panic attack. Someone called paramedics. I exited the courtroom to find almost a dozen ICE agents hovering in the halls, many masked and all in irregular uniforms. The husband had already been brought down to whatever vehicle ICE had, but everyone still on the ninth floor of the building with me was waiting for those paramedics to arrive. 

When the woman exited the bathroom, ICE agents hovering around her, she was distraught. She retched into a trashcan as tears ran down her face. The paramedics arrived and took her into a side room. I lost track of what was really going on from there. The lawyer from the legal aid organization —Contra Costa Immigrant Rights Alliance —went in and out and spoke to the ICE agents and paramedics, but there was little that I or the non-lawyer aid volunteers could do. Eventually, the ICE agents on the floor took the elevator down and left her in the hands of the CCIRA volunteers. 

I went with them to the elevator but elected to catch the next one, not wanting to crowd the distressed woman any more than was necessary. When the next elevator came, four ICE agents were in it. They were trying to find her, and the security guards told them to go to the ground floor. Why they were sent to find her after the others had left, I do not know. I caught the elevator down with these agents. During the ride, one of them asked who I was. Upon finding out that I was an observer, he made some comment about us each having our own jobs that I do not remember the specifics of. I did not respond.

Arriving on the ground floor, I assumed the targeted woman and her accompanying volunteers had left the building and quickly made my way outside. A crowd of rapid response protestors had gathered around the glass doors on either end. Once I was outside, with no way to go back in, I realized that somehow I had ended up ahead of the elevator that had first left. The woman and the immigration aid volunteers were all still inside with a number of remaining ICE agents. I don’t know how the group talked their way out but they did, whisking her off to her car and to a temporary safety. Her court date was only days away and her husband was sent to detention God knows where. 

I don’t know what happened to her next.

By arresting her husband mere days before the hearing that would determine if his asylum claim would continue, they intentionally sought to ruin his chance at defeating the dismissal. Whisked across the state into inhumane conditions, away from familial or legal support, and in front of a likely less sympathetic judge, they stacked all the odds against him. It is a special and specific cruelty. 

The heartwrenching piece of the couple’s story that I witnessed is unfortunately not unique. We hear about detentions like this every single day. Every video you see of ICE agents in courthouses is a result of either an illegal action or a manipulation of case dismissal rules. Additionally, the Trump administration has ended protections given to refugees of many foreign nations with serious crises. Not all of these revocations have gone into effect, but I still saw multiple Afghan people on those lists of non-appearances, deported in absentia. The system, especially volunteer, and aid organizations, are already overflowing. 

That was something I noticed again and again in observing the immigration court system. The Trump administration has placed more and more burdens on this system and worked their hardest to cut away the few protections that existed within it, but they are not chopping at a healthy tree. Removal in absentia has existed in the system for decades, and has been cruel the whole time, but every seizure in a courthouse makes it worse by scaring more people into not appearing. It is a weak system that was never fixed as it became more and more overloaded. A bridge made of rotten logs is easy to break.