This summer has been brutal for our undocumented and mixed status community members in Orange County. The violent arrest of Orange resident Narciso Barranco at his landscaping job in June drew both local and national attention to the frequent raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that target people on the basis of their ethnicity, language, and form of employment – now with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. But ICE’s malign presence in our community has had a less visible, but no less oppressive, side as well: courthouse arrests.

Since early July, I have been volunteering with an interfaith group at the Santa Ana Immigration Court, located in a featureless office park on Dyer Road. As part of our ministry, we accompany immigrants to their hearings. In the best cases, we are able to take down the contact information of a loved one before ICE agents detain an immigrant and take them out the back door. In the worst cases, we bear silent witness to the routinized violence of an immigration system that tears apart families and the more acute violence of courthouse arrests by plainclothes ICE agents.

Over the course of the summer, I have seen firsthand how immigration courthouse arrests are the culmination of a bewildering system whose machinations of exclusion and alienation begin long before an immigrant is forcibly taken away in an unmarked white van.

Here’s what being in that system feels like: Imagine being given 15 minutes of rapid-fire instructions that sound like “failure to submit corroborative evidence in support of your application for relief, asylum, or withholding of removal will result in your application being deemed frivolous and abandoned pursuant to section 208(b) (1) (B) (ii) of the REAL ID Act.”

But that’s not what you’re actually hearing. You don’t speak English, so you’re getting all this through interpretation over a crackly speakerphone across the courtroom via an interpreter in another state or via headset as the court’s Spanish interpreter whispers a simultaneous interpretation.

The interpreter is doing her best, but the headset is faulty and you keep getting distracted by what you do understand of the judge’s English and missing the interpreter’s whispered Spanish. You don’t know what half these legal terms mean and while a good lawyer would help, like 63% of your fellow immigrants – many of them children — you don’t have one.

You don’t have a lawyer because the government does not have an obligation to provide you one in immigration court. You’ve called every single number on the “free and low-cost legal services” flyer three times only to meet with a string of full voicemails and no call backs.

You did finally find someone offering affordable legal services online but they took $2000 from you, didn’t show up for your hearing, and you never heard back from them. You know that’s wildly fraudulent and illegal, but what are you going to do? Appeal to the system that’s seeking to deport you?

Your hearing concludes, the judge barks out that any questions have to wait until 1 pm but you’ve already missed six hours of work. A kind but useless community volunteer in the hallway tries to help but insists she cannot give legal advice because she’s not a lawyer, and her Spanish is terrible.

You have no idea that you’ve missed a crucial instruction — that all asylum declarations must be given in your language with a certified English translation, that any application that takes more than a year requires a new $100 fee, that your fear of violence in your home country is only grounds for asylum if it’s related to a specific set of criteria and if you don’t mention those in your application, it will be rejected. When you show up for your next hearing, the government moves to dismiss your case.

At first you think that sounds good, but there’s a flurry of activity in the back of the courtroom. When the judge grants the dismissal, the sleepy-eyed man in the baseball cap in the back bench suddenly stands up. The judge tells you may leave the courtroom, so you do, but the minute you step into the hallway, Baseball Cap and four other men in flannel shirts pull you aside, inform you they’re with ICE, and take you out the back door to a waiting unmarked white van, bound for a detention facility in which you will suffer for an unknown amount of time.

At no point were these proceedings meaningfully accessible to you. The judge’s reliance on legal jargon failed to inform you in a constructive way about what was happening and what your options were. You had no meaningful access to counsel. No one told you ICE was waiting in the hall or that you could be detained today. At no point in these proceedings did you interact with any official who spoke your language.

This summer of raids and deportations has opened the eyes of many to the brutality of our country’s immigration enforcement system. Through my observations at the courthouse, I’ve borne witness to a more insidious, bureaucratized form of cruelty at the heart of the system: one that denies immigrants access to justice through legal language and practice. The raw brutality of this summer’s ICE raids in my community have shocked me, but it is this routinized violence, occurring in windowless courtrooms and bland hallways, behind the mirrored windows of an anonymous office building on Dyer Road, that has left me chilled to the core.

Erin Lockwood lives in Irvine, California and is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine and a volunteer with an interfaith group conducting court observations and ICE watches in immigration courts in southern California. 

Opinions expressed in community opinion pieces belong to the authors and not Voice of OC.

Voice of OC is interested in hearing different perspectives and voices. If you want to weigh in on this issue or others please email opinions@voiceofoc.org.

Related