‘You show up and get deported anyway': Migrants with court hearings face an impossible choice

Yahoo

3 days ago

Protesters gather at the immigration court in downtown Phoenix on May 22, 2025, to guard against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting people showing up for their scheduled court hearings. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror
Federal immigration officials continued targeting people at the Phoenix Immigration Courthouse on Thursday, surveilling and detaining migrants whose cases were dismissed minutes earlier in ways that appear to be an attempt to minimize attention from both protestors and media.
Berta, a soft-spoken 48-year-old woman who was afraid to give her last name, spoke to the Arizona Mirror while she and her lawyer took refuge near protestors. She said that the United States has been her home longer than Mexico ever was.
'It's been 28 years,' she said. 'More than half my life.'
Returning to Mexico terrifies her, she said, and she's been working with an immigration lawyer to make sure that never happens. On Thursday, she went to Phoenix Immigration Court to attend a mandatory hearing.
ICE agents were waiting.
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Berta is one of hundreds of people across the country with tenuous legal protections who have lately been caught in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign.
Trump promised on the campaign trail that he would deport millions of people. But doing so has proven more difficult than simply declaring that it would happen, and Trump has reportedly spent months angry that immigration agents haven't rounded up more immigrants.
In what legal experts have derided as a bid to boost deportation numbers, the Trump administration has recently launched raids at immigration courthouses in multiple cities, targeting migrants and asylum seekers who show up for scheduled immigration hearings. Last week, more than a dozen people were detained by ICE agents in Phoenix, shortly after federal prosecutors filed to dismiss their cases, effectively leaving them open to deportation.
That same pattern played out in Berta's hearing on Thursday afternoon. The federal prosecutor made a motion to dismiss her case, and the judge granted it. The consequences were almost immediate. When she and her lawyer, Erica Sanchez, exited the courtroom, they noticed ICE agents. Thinking quickly, they ducked into the bathroom to wait it out. Later, the pair were able to exit the courthouse building and stood with immigrant rights advocates until Sanchez's husband arrived to pick them up.
At the same time that Berta and Sanchez climbed into the black Jeep, a federal agent raced down the stairs from the courthouse's covered carport towards them, but they drove away before he could stop them. On the second floor of that parking structure, which is directly across from the courthouse's entrance, ICE agents could be seen looking through binoculars and speaking into walkie talkies, ostensibly taking note of which cars immigrants were leaving in and relaying that information to other federal officials waiting in white paneled vans and vehicles with out-of-state license plates in the surrounding streets.
Thursday was the second day ICE agents employed a new tactic of following migrants outside of the courthouse grounds and pulling them over blocks away. Immigrant rights advocates say the move is intentional: detaining people in the surrounding streets instead of the elevator or courtroom lobby makes it more difficult for advocates to protest or film the arrests. At least one woman was observed by a reporter being detained after being pulled over in her car, but it's unclear how many more people were arrested under the new strategy.
But opponents of the raids haven't let that new difficulty deter them from at least trying to monitor ICE activity. Members of pro-immigrant groups, including the Phoenix branch of Indivisible, Common Defense, Fuerte and the Borderlands Resource Initiative, organized themselves via text messages, Signal chats, phone calls and walkie talkies.
Some protestors gathered in front of the courthouse entrance and warned migrants entering and exiting the building that ICE agents were watching. Others stood near two white paneled vans with U.S. Department of Homeland Security license plates parked behind the courthouse on 9th Avenue and Van Buren Street. A few jumped into a car to respond to a tip sent to the ICE watch hotline set up by immigrant advocacy groups in January, in anticipation of Trump's hostile agenda.
And when an immigrant woman whose case had just been dismissed approached protestors waving posters at oncoming traffic advising them of ICE's presence, a man who would only identify himself as 'P' for fear of repercussions, accompanied her to the McDonald's across the street and ordered her a Lyft home. 'P', who teaches music in the Creighton Elementary School District, said that it was clear the woman was being followed by ICE because the duo had cut through a construction area, crisscrossed streets and turned down corners only to consistently find ICE vans nearby. He said it was 'surreal' to watch federal agents try to arrest a person simply attending a scheduled immigration hearing — going through the same legal process border hawks have for years advocated for.
Artie, who also teaches at Creighton Elementary School District, said he was inspired to join the handful of protestors because of his own history with the immigration system. In 1979, at just 14-years-old, Artie left Guadalajara, Mexico, with his parents to immigrate to the United States. He's since become a citizen, but that experience helps him empathize with the fear that people attending immigration hearings on Thursday felt.
'I'm here to support, to try to get ICE to be less effective,' he said, calling their strategies 'crazy'.
While the threat of a detainment persists at Phoenix Immigration Court, migrants with scheduled hearings have no other option but to show up. Those who skip a hearing have a deportation order filed against them and their case is closed; getting back into the legal process is much more difficult if that happens.
Carlos accompanied his wife to Phoenix Immigration Court on Thursday morning. While she attended her hearing inside, Carlos waited across the street on a public bench. He was nervous and restless, walking back and forth between the bench and the courthouse, then up and down the public sidewalks near both. When Phoenix police officers arrived to keep protestors away from the courthouse entrance, he kept a close eye on them, worrying that they might be ICE agents. He had heard about the arrests of the past two weeks, and said the news scared him and his wife.
'It almost makes you not want to show up,' he said. 'You show up and you get deported anyway.'
But, he added, they went to the hearing despite the risk because the alternative only guarantees a deportation order.
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