by Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Elise Ferrer

In this special issue, “On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court,” we’re honored to present an ambitious collection of 22 student pieces which together offer an embodied, emotional, and analytically rich account of immigration courts across the country in this contemporary moment. As part of immigration-based projects under the direction of scholar-activists Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba (who developed, curated, and edited this issue), students logged hundreds of hours in immigration courtrooms across the country, gaining both critical training in ethnographic practice and a crash course in immigration law. The issue offers a space where students’ insights can move beyond the courtroom and the classroom and into the wider public, for whom these insights are critical.

by Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale and Rebecca Galemba

Immigration courts provide students with an immersion in immigration law and, especially, in the disjunctures between law on the books and law in practice. Students see and feel for themselves how opaque and confusing bureaucratic processes unfold in real time. They observe how rules are interpreted, contested, and experienced. They come to see that legal decisions are shaped by not only statutes and formal rulings, but also language access, courtroom culture, technology, uneven representation, detention, and the discretionary practices of judges, attorneys, interpreters, and clerks (Barak, 2023). At a moment of rapid change in immigration law and policy, they also see how formal policies are translated unevenly into courtroom practice.