This courtroom I’m observing in is open to the public. The only reason refugees are summoned here is to refresh their status and ensure they are still making themselves available to court scrutiny and to set a hearing date if they don’t have one, or to confirm or change their existing hearing date.
The immigrant is sent a notice to appear. Failure to appear gives the court immediate power to have them tracked down and deported. If they have a lawyer or if they represent themselves and can do so in court-accepted English, they can appeal this order.
But most of these ‘failures to appear’ in the time of tRump comes because of the threat of violence displayed by the ICE and their servants and arrest, in addition to being clandestinely shuffled off to places unknown and unreachable by family members and even lawyers.
Today there were three “failures to appear” when the judge ordered the three picked up and deported back to their countries of origin, regardless of the threat to those individuals being returned there, or the pain and turmoil inflicted on those left behind here.
Most of those refugees who appeared did not have a lawyer. This sitting judge recognized out loud how difficult it is to obtain a lawyer, had the clerk hand out a list of resources that he admitted were almost impossible to contact, urging the refugee to try calling frequently different days and times until they were hopefully successful. Almost 100% of refugees representing themselves get denied, imprisoned, and deported. Not unlike what individuals here facing the judicial system without a lawyer get.
There was a family of four who had escaped Columbia present.
When I look at them, I see a skinny teenager in a pressed suit and tie, 18 years old; a 9 year old equally slender with a dress shirt and ironed slacks – both boys; a mother dressed in heels, a suit jacket, skirt and blouse, her long hair neatly tied back and her face immaculately made up, carrying a bulging pink folder under one arm, her purse slung over the other shoulder. The father is tall and dignified, also in dress clothes, attempting to hold his face expressionless.
But what I see first is a family who has survived the deplorable dangerous journey, including through the Darien Gap plus surviving passage through country where the cartel is victimizing desperate people. I can only imagine what these children have gone through let alone their mother and father.
And for what? To have to go through this dehumanizing and extremely stressful process to escape unacceptable if not dangerous conditions in their homeland.
The entire family is clearly frightened and stressed and as clearly evident this isn’t their first time in court and it is clear they have a lawyer – one the mother says is on vacation until the 29th and request that this court date be postponed until the lawyer can attend. It is a motion the judge immediately denies. The mother is the spokesperson and there is a Spanish interpreter for the family, the judge, and me as well as the entire courtroom.
Because of where this family lives, they are all sent to the other California Immigration Court in Concord. Hopefully
