Lost Refuge: A Day in Miami Immigration Court
About the Author: Lucía Armengol is a 2026 graduate of Princeton University. She studies grassroots community organizing for immigrant and workers’ rights. As part of the Justice in View ethnographic court watching project, she has observed immigration court in Miami, Newark, and Philadelphia.
Abstract: A student observer reflects on her family history and the bureaucratic machinery of immigration court as people search for a refuge that no longer exists.
Keywords: Miami; Refugees; Confusion
Citation
Armengol, Lucia. 2026. “Lost Refuge: A Day in Miami Immigration Court.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34113303
My grandfather drops me off at immigration court just past 8:00 AM. It’s winter break, and I am visiting my grandparents in Miami. He wishes me luck and tells me to stay safe.
The night before, my grandmother had asked me to print out a copy of my U.S. birth certificate to bring to court. I tried to assure her that I was fine—I’d been to court before, and I knew I would not be in danger as a student observer. But she had seen the news coverage of masked ICE agents in the hallways of New York’s 26 Federal Plaza immigration court. I told her I would have my driver’s license with me as identification, but with my noticeably Hispanic name, she was not satisfied. I ended up printing out a copy of my birth certificate and tucking it into my little court observation notebook for her peace of mind.
In a small windowless courtroom, families sit on hard benches, quiet and nervous, waiting for the proceedings to begin. Judge Barba enters the courtroom fourteen minutes late. She seems harried as she takes her seat at the dais and sets a large pink Stanley cup next to a computer monitor. She moves through the Master Calendar hearing with a palpable air of exhaustion and frequently complains about bureaucratic inefficiency. Most of the respondents, I notice, are from Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela.
At the end of each quick hearing, Judge Barba asks the respondent, in a perfunctory manner, if they have any questions or comments. Typically, they all shake their heads, eager to leave the front of the courtroom. Then, one man answers Judge Barba. Yes, he has a question. He is from Cuba, and his asylum application, filed with USCIS, was denied. Now, he is in removal proceedings. He does not understand what happened.
Judge Barba tells him he needs to file a separate asylum application with the court. He asks, confused—why does he need to file two asylum applications? Judge Barba attempts to explain the bureaucratic technicalities, but when the man follows up with more questions, she cuts him off. She tells him she needs to move on to the rest of her cases and dismisses him for the day. The man leaves, clearly disturbed by the interaction.
Judge Barba continues with her docket. Almost every case follows the same pattern—rescheduled after a DHS motion to pretermit the case, meaning one’s application for relief from removal is denied prior to a full hearing. I sense they are all building toward the same, seemingly inevitable, conclusion: an order of removal or voluntary departure.
In the afternoon, my grandparents pick me up from court. My grandmother wants to take me to the Freedom Tower, a historic building in Downtown Miami only a few blocks away. The Freedom Tower, once known as El Refugio, served as the Cuban Refugee Center from 1962 to 1974. My grandmother, who left Cuba in 1960 at the age of thirteen, was not processed through El Refugio, but the exhibit reminds her of how, upon arriving in Miami, she and her family received winter coats, packages of cheese and peanut butter, and other products and services to assist in their resettlement.
The first two floors of the Freedom Tower are now an exhibit commemorating the building’s history as El Refugio. As we walk through the exhibit celebrating the bravery and resilience of Cuban exiles, I think of the Cuban man whose USCIS asylum application was denied. Six decades of international relations and immigration policy separate him from my grandparents.
Cold War foreign policy was once a driving force behind U.S. immigration policy toward Cuba. The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act granted lawful permanent residency to Cubans who have resided in the United States for at least one year. The Act contributed to a narrative of the United States as a land of freedom and refuge for Cubans fleeing communism.
Over the decades, foreign relations with Cuba evolved. After the 1994 Balsero Crisis, the Clinton administration introduced the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, restricting the protections offered to Cuban emigrants to those who successfully arrived on U.S. soil. Then, efforts to normalize relations with Cuba under the Obama administration ended the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, meaning Cubans who arrived in the United States without authorization could be subject to deportation.
In 2025, the Trump administration terminated humanitarian parole for Cubans and paused their review of Cuban immigration cases, including those filed under the Cuban Adjustment Act. Despite these restrictive policies, Cuban migration has only increased in recent years. Since 2021, Cuba has been experiencing its largest wave of emigration in history in response to a humanitarian crisis fueled by political repression and the U.S. embargo. Yet Cold War-era preferential migration policies for Cubans no longer outweigh the mass deportation agenda of the U.S. government. Cuban emigrants now find themselves funneled into a system whose object is deterrence and exclusion.
The mundane and confusing proceedings of immigration court simultaneously enact violence and obscure this political history. For the Cuban man in court today, there is no refuge, only a vast bureaucratic machinery intent on securing his exclusion and removal from the United States.
About the issue
This article is part of On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, a special issue of Semi-Structured. This collection features the work of 22 student ethnographers, who offer insights, analysis, and experiences based on hundreds of hours in immigration courtrooms across the country over the last few years. Through their work in observation projects under the direction of scholar-activists Lauren Heidbrink, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba, students gained critical training in ethnographic practice and a crash course in immigration law, especially in the disjunctures between law on the books and law in practice. Understanding that wider audiences would benefit from hearing and learning directly from their students, Heidbrink, Frank-Vitale, and Galemba approached Semi-Structured to steward this thoughtful, ambitious collection. We are honored to run this issue and invite readers to consider what student observers witnessed, felt, and learned in court and why ethnographic observations are important to broader publics.
Semi-Structured is the open-access journal from the Public Ethnography Lab. The journal is dedicated to showcasing ethnography as it unfolds in the world. This journal exists because we believe ethnographic work matters beyond the academy—that the insights generated through sustained engagement with communities, organizations, and institutions can and should inform decisions, shape practices, and drive meaningful change.