Once a week since July, Amelia Christmas Gramling, a writer and teacher living in New York, volunteers as a "legal observer" at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City—where immigrant families from Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Haiti, and beyond await their federal immigration hearings.
Gramling sits with the families as they await their hearings—not as a legal aide or social worker, but as a concerned neighbor. In this account, she describes what she sees in the gray, windowless building. It's a lot of kids, she writes—and a lot of men in masks.
ICE is effective, in part, because they appear to transcend the judicial system and its more predictable rhythms. The judge's jurisdiction ends at the courtroom door, but ICE moves through the building freely. They appear and disappear through armored doors. When a respondent walks into the gray, windowless room outside the courtroom, they are sometimes taken, sometimes not. Every respondent I have accompanied is afraid, and I can't, in good faith, tell anyone who reports to the 12th floor as an "alien" that their fear is misplaced.
Learn more about what happens on the 12th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, from a pair of eyes inside the room.
No comments:
Post a Comment