Earlier this summer, after watching horrifying footage of masked immigration agents snatching civilians off the street under the guise of fighting crime, I decided to volunteer as an immigration court observer at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza. This is one of many federal immigration courts across the country where President Trump’s brutal leadership has dispatched agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as a hodgepodge of other federal agencies, to arrest immigrants who are dutifully showing up to long-scheduled court hearings. Many of these people have no idea they are walking into a trap. I’ve watched judges grant people 18-month continuances, only to have those masked federal agents — usually burly men of all races — take them away to a holding floor. They are held in rooms without basic accommodations for several days before being shipped off to a larger detention center somewhere in the U.S.
The point of court watching — which has been organized by local groups including New Sanctuary Coalition, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America — is not merely to observe. We’re there to gently, calmly tell immigrants awaiting their hearings that there is a chance they might be taken away regardless of their hearing outcome. We ask these people — whom we call “immigrant community members,” “neighbors,” or “compas,” short for compadres in Spanish — if they will share their vital information. We ask for their name, phone number, immigration number and their emergency contacts. If they are indeed detained, we can let their contacts know, and also try to connect them to legal aid. Often, we are the only link between a compa and the outside world once they are effectively disappeared.
We are not there to obstruct, jeer at, or otherwise mix it up with the masked agents doing the disappearing. Doing so could not only get us arrested, it could also jeopardize the entire court-watching effort. Though it’s perfectly legal for citizens to be in the building and observe the hearings, court administrators have threatened us with expulsion should we interfere too much.
And that has been a challenge for me. As an early member of progressive direct action groups such as Gays Against Guns and Rise and Resist and various HIV/AIDS rights organizations, I’ve long participated in confrontational protests where it not only feels good, but it’s expected that you name, shame and blame as loudly as possible.
But immigration court watching requires stoicism. You come within mere feet of faceless thugs doing the Trump administration’s sadistic and arguably unlawful bidding, but you can’t block or provoke them in any way. You’re witnessing unspeakable cruelty, but you can’t lash out. You have to remember that you are there strictly as a friend of immigrant community members on what may be one of the scariest days of their lives. You’re also there to alert the outside world to what’s happened to them.
Many of the compas are migrants and asylum seekers coming to court for routine check-ins that probably wouldn’t have led to immediate deportation before Trump 2.0. They’re walking out of court thinking they’re good until their next hearing, and instead, being ensnared by this country’s ever-growing deportation machine.
If they should be lucky enough not to be nabbed when they exit the courtroom, then our job extends to walking them out of the building and to the nearest subway.
How We Court Watch
Because we are dealing with people who are vulnerable and afraid, we start by introducing ourselves. If we speak their language, we tell them that we are their neighbors and we are there to help. (If we don’t, we give them a flyer with all the necessary info spelled out in either Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Haitian Kreyol, Russian, Spanish, Turkish or Wolof.) We then ask them if they want to fill out a small information sheet with their name, country of birth, A-Number, phone number, and the name and number of an emergency contact. We tell them that if they are detained, we will pass this sheet to another volunteer who will reach out to their emergency contact.
Because our neighbors may be separated from their cell phones during their arrest or detention, we advise them to write down essentials on their arm, such as their emergency contact’s name and phone number and 9233#, the phone number of the National Immigration Detention Hotline.
When we can, we sit with our compas in the courtrooms, where the judges vary from total assholes, who clearly don’t want us there — to laid-back and ally-ish, suggesting to me that they are horrified by what’s happening outside their courtrooms and welcome our mitigating effect.
After the court proceedings — the ones I’ve witnessed tend to take 15 to 20 minutes — we walk out with them. This is the heart-pounding moment of truth: They will either be apprehended by those masked agents, or allowed to walk right by them and proceed down the elevators and out of the building. If the former happens, amid our dejection, we immediately pass the information they gave us to a central organizer.
If it’s the latter, we offer to escort them out. That’s because ICE agents might be lurking by the elevators, on the ground floor or just outside the building. If a compa doesn’t have a lawyer — and many do not — we alert the central organizers to try to connect them to legal representation. We can never fully know why one of our neighbors is detained, or where ICE agents will catch them. There’s a seat-of-your-pants vibe as volunteers split into small groups to strategize.
A Tale of Two Shifts
Since I started court watching in early July, I’ve left my shifts both happy and dejected. July 11, my second day, was relatively happy. My watch partner and I were working with two compas who received follow-up hearing dates in early 2027. We were able to safely escort them to the subway, and they repeatedly thanked us for being there.
It was not a good day for other watchers who witnessed their neighbors being detained. In one case, when a terrified man began yelling “Ayúdame!” — “Help me!” in Spanish — ICE agents tackled him to the ground. Since then, I’ve seen countless excruciating videos of similarly chaotic apprehensions, including ones with women and children wailing in agony as the man who is presumably their spouse and father is taken away.
Although scenes like these make my blood boil, it has still been healing to my soul to be working with a group of people who, like me, are so offended by what they’re seeing that they’re doing what they can — rather than just going about their lives. (Many of them are some damn tough middle-age ladies with frizzy humidity hair and WNYC tote bags, and I love them all.) Even if the people we are trying to help never see another free day in the U.S., I hope that they remember that not everyone here was against them.
July 30 — my third time court watching — was brutal. My team and I were accompanying two immigrants who showed up dutifully for their hearings. One was a woman from Colombia who actually wanted to tell the judge that she was ready to self-deport. I wasn’t allowed to go into the courtroom with her. As she exited, I seized my chance to get into the courtroom with the compa I’d attached myself to, a soft-spoken Senegalese man.
Later, someone on my court watching team told me they’d witnessed the Colombian woman taken away by the two masked female immigration agents wearing all black, backed up by their large, unmasked male colleague who, in a T-shirt and jeans, looked like any schlub who just walked in off the street. Who even are these people?, I constantly ask myself as I stare at these mercenaries.
The Senegalese man I was with was hoping to get an extension so he could continue looking for an affordable lawyer for his asylum case. We sat together for 90 minutes with me speaking to him in French, even though his better language was Wolof. The hardest part was telling him that he would most likely be deported. I knew this because when we walked down the hall to go to the bathroom before his hearing, one of those two female immigration agents tried to detain him. They only paused when a waiting room security guard told them he hadn’t yet had his hearing.
When he finally did, the judge granted him a continuance. He was ordered to come back to court in early 2027, but I suspected this meant nothing. Sure enough, as soon as we walked out of the courtroom, the two masked women and the unmasked man took him away. He went without resistance, his head hanging. I called out to him, “I’m sorry! We’ll tell your emergency contact and try to get you legal aid.” And then he disappeared around a corner.
This was around 11 a.m., the usual end to our shift. My team and I had been there since 8:30 a.m. Deflated, we left the building to get coffee and commiserate. I said that in several years of different kinds of activism, this was both the saddest and most enraging work I’ve ever done. The groups organizing this work host both in-person and online debriefs after shifts so volunteers can process the emotional toll of doing this work.
The Deportation Machine Up Close
I started this work in July, about two weeks after masked ICE agents arrested New York City Comptroller and then-mayoral candidate Brad Lander for linking arms with a man being taken into custody. “Do you have a judicial warrant?” Lander repeatedly asked as agents apprehended the man. But as lawless as it may seem, immigration enforcers don’t need a judicial warrant to arrest a non-citizen in a public space. (They may obtain an administrative warrant, which doesn’t require a signature by a judge.)
And since Congress just ballooned the budget for immigration enforcement to approximately $170 billion over four years, there is little doubt that these disappearances will happen more often and in many more venues, including: farms, restaurants, hospitals, parking lots, and houses of worship during sermons and preschool pickup. In this climate, more U.S. citizens who are nine months pregnant will be surrounded and arrested by masked male Customs and Border Patrol agents in military garb.
To ensure that there are enough workers to carry out deportations, ICE is offering new agents signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and student loan repayment and forgiveness up to $60,000.
To hold the thousands of people ICE is deporting, the Trump administration is using empty prison beds and reopening troubled correctional facilities, like Leavenworth in Kansas.
And states have passed dozens of anti-immigration bills that fuel the Trump administration’s crackdown. In a recent article, The Marshall Project found at least 34 new statutes in 2025 that “encourage state and local police to cooperate with federal authorities, criminalize aid to undocumented immigrants, create state immigration enforcement bureaus and more.”
Even as I continue to do this work, I remain shocked that it is happening. I’m not naive. I know the U.S. has a brutal history, on our soil and overseas, of physically capturing people. And yet this moment still outrages me. For one thing, I can’t believe that most of the agents are masked, and many refuse to show their badges if they even have one. It’s a reminder that Gestapo tactics, stormtrooper tactics, the kind of thing we associate with dystopian movies, are now the order of the day in Trump’s ever-more authoritarian United States.
The other thing that outrages me is that, according to the Cato Institute, the majority of the people taken by ICE have no criminal records, and nearly all of them have no records of violent crime. In a quest to fulfill Trump’s pre-election promise of mass deportations, the regime is scooping up countless garden-variety undocumented immigrants, many of whom have been quietly living and working here for years. They’re also picking up recent migrants and asylum seekers who were once insulated from deportation by the Biden-era expansion of Temporary Protective Status. So far, the Trump administration has rolled back this humanitarian status for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
I dread the thought of these often brutal apprehensions — at least one of which I witness via my social media feeds daily — penetrating deeper into American life, including my own majority-immigrant neighborhood in Queens, New York.
I’m involved with a handful of groups who are poised to organize nonviolent mass civil disobedience in response to this escalation. I desperately wish this weren’t happening. But if it does, I can’t wait for the chance to stand with my neighbors and scream into the face of those masked goons what I’ve wanted to scream for so long:
How can you live with yourself, doing what you do? Why don’t you show your face, you coward? Do you tell your own kids that you separate other kids from their parents for a living?
In the meantime, I’ll keep showing up for court accompaniment (even as reports come in that fewer and fewer immigrants are showing up for their court dates). I’ve realized it’s good for me. I’ve almost always expressed my thirst for justice and fairness through anger. But we don’t have that option in immigration court. So what’s left is an act of love — the quiet, frustrated love of sitting or standing by someone’s side through a process that will culminate in either a bit more freedom or the abrupt end of their American dream. The comfort of talking to them in their own language, or a gentle hand on their back or a squeeze of their shoulder. The profoundly good feeling of walking them to the train, knowing they’re going home, at least for a while, to their family or friends. The rightness of centering the vulnerable over the villains.
After all, if those things — gentleness, kindness, compassion, love — are not at the center of all fights for what’s right, then what’s the point of rage in the first place?
Tim Murphy is a New York City-based freelance health journalist, the author of novels including “Christodora,” and the creator of “The Caftan Chronicles,” a Substack featuring interviews with famous and notable older gay men.
