If attendance is an indicator, it appears from Friday’s scheduled hearings that immigrants could be skipping their asylum hearings for fear of being detained. While it’s not uncommon for a few people not to show up on any given day, just five of the 15 people scheduled for routine hearings on Friday put in an appearance, at immigration court at 630 Sansome St.
The first hearing was uneventful. Judge Joseph Park, who appeared remotely, via video, as he has for at least the past two Friday mornings, set the asylum-seeker’s final hearing for 2028, and the applicant left the building shortly after.
The rest of that day’s attendees were not so fortunate.
In each case, the attorney with the Department of Homeland Security moved to dismiss the asylum-seekers’ cases, a maneuver the Trump administration has regularly used to detain immigrants and, eventually, remove them from the country. For those cases, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement wait in the hallway outside of the courtroom, poised to arrest the asylum-seekers the moment they walk out the door.
Some judges in San Francisco use, with varying success, coded language to warn asylum-seekers what may happen to them once they step outside of the courtroom doors. (Judges say they do not have the power to stop the arrests in the hallway.)
In Park’s courtroom Friday, that was not the case. He gave the asylum-seekers the opportunity to respond immediately or in writing to the Homeland Security attorney’s motion. He did not rule on any of the motions that day.
The first man took the option to respond in writing.
A second man, who had consulted an attorney before the hearing, pushed back. He was young — just 20 years old, said Joanna Lawrence Shank, a reverend at the First Mennonite Church of San Francisco. The young man attends their church and Shank, and four others from the church, accompanied the man to his hearing that day.
He told the judge he had already applied for an alternative way to stay in the United States, a visa available for people who enter while young, and who have been abandoned by their families in their home country.
The 20-year-old showed that application at court on Friday. He also asked the judge not to dismiss his asylum case, and said he had a “legal right” to have his case heard. He seemed to hint at the fact that these judges are being advised to grant the dismissals. “Only the court has the power to decide which cases get dismissed,” he said.
Park said he would respond to Homeland Security’s motion in the coming days.
Do you have any more questions? He asked the man.
“Simply that I’m afraid to go back to my country, and please look at my situation, and God bless you,” the man said.
A volunteer attorney with the Attorney of the Day Program, which gives free legal advice at court to asylum-seekers who do not have a lawyer, brought him to the back of the courtroom, where he huddled with the first asylum-seeker whose case had been moved to dismiss.
That man was desperately texting on his phone, crying as he did so. By the end of that day’s hearings, the 20-year-old was crying, too.
As they sat in the back of the courtroom, speaking with the attorney of the day, two women had their hearings. In both cases, the Homeland Security attorney moved to dismiss. Both women looked confused. The judge gave the women the option to respond in writing within 10 days before he ruled. Both women took the time.
At the end of that morning’s hearings, the volunteer attorney spoke to all four asylum-seekers at once.
She said, in Spanish, “Don’t say anything, don’t sign anything.”
All four walked out. ICE immediately arrested them, and took them through an unmarked door to the left of the courtroom. Shank, the reverend from the Mennonite Church, tightly held the hand of the 20-year-old asylum-seeker, until ICE took him. She and the four others from the Mennonite Church then started to sing a hymn: “Lord, listen to your children praying.”
Most people who are arrested in immigration court in San Francisco are processed and temporarily held on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St. They are then taken to longer-term detention facilities elsewhere in California, or the country. There are no such detention facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
If asylum-seekers miss a court hearing, or even if they show up late, for reasons other than very few exceptions, like hospitalization, the judges can, and do, dismiss their entire case and order them removed from the country. That puts asylum-seekers in San Francisco in a tough situation: missing court puts them at risk of deportation. But showing up could, too.
After the asylum-seekers were whisked away, another dispute broke out on the floor
Around the corner from the immigration courtroom that was in use that morning is a room that the volunteer attorneys use to speak privately with asylum-seekers in need of their advice. Earlier that morning, the longtime attorney of the day had gotten into a spat with an ICE officer, who appeared to have blocked her pathway from the courtroom to that room, frightening the asylum-seeker who was with her.
After that days arrests, a woman who appears to lead the ICE officers — Mission Local has consistently seen her in recent weeks — briefly stepped into the room that the attorneys use. Behind her was a second ICE officer, a man, dressed in a beige tactical vest, what looked like a black ski mask that covered his entire head and the bottom half of his face, and black sunglasses.
The attorney of the day was in the room, speaking with a lawyer who was shadowing her.
When Mission Local arrived outside the room, shortly after the dispute began, the female ICE officer was speaking loudly to the shadowing attorney: “I can have her removed or barred from the building,” she said referring to the longtime attorney of the day.
“You’re harassing these people and instilling fear,” the longtime attorney of the day responded. “Look at how you’re dressed,” she gestured at both of them. (The female ICE officer has, in recent weeks, started wearing a gator that she often pulls up over her face when she is in court hallways.)
The shadowing attorney tried to diffuse the situation: “You’re escalating and you’re angry,” she said to the female ICE officer. She repeated that the ICE officer should leave the attorney’s room. The male ICE officer nearby repeated back: “It’s a federal building,” seemingly as a justification that they could enter.
The female ICE officer walked down the hallway to where a security guard is regularly posted. Security in the building is staffed by a private contractor. “I want her banned,” the female officer said referring to the attorney of the day, because she’s being “hostile to my agents.”
Flanked by the other ICE officer, the female ICE officer finally left the floor.
Security did not immediately kick out the attorney. About 20 minutes later, the two attorneys left the room. When the longtime attorney walked by the security guard, he, apparently at the direction of the ICE officer, asked for her name. She gave it, then headed to the elevators, and out of the building.