Man-Made: A Poem
About the Author: Bobbie Barren is an undergraduate in Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach and participated in Justice In View in the Santa Ana immigration court. Bobbie’s research interests in cultural anthropology and digital ethnography.
Abstract: Immigration court reveals the rule of law as an inconsistent, fatigued, and deeply human-made system shaped by routine procedure, discretion, and indifference.
Keywords
procedural discretion; bureaucratic fatigue, routinization
Citation
Barren, Bobbie. 2026. “Man-Made.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34028376
Access link
www.publicethnography.com/semi-structured-all-issues/issue-3
I think of the rule of law as a forged tool,
Hammered, it takes its form as a blade
Yet who decides how to hone its edge?
In immigration court, judges hold its handle
To shape
To sharpen
To chip away
I thought court procedure would be fairly tempered
Welded and fused together
A structure meant to keep justice steady.
I naively listened to the sounds of construction
And believed them deliberate,
Methodical,
Consistent.
But inside the courthouse,
the structure
Bent
It looked less like a work of intentional design
As a constant conveyor belt of demands grew
Procedure is not a structure
Rather, it's a factory
Where Justice shifts from a craft
To a quota
As the conveyor rages on
The edge changes
With each hand that holds it
One judge demands a child's presence
Another does not.
One asks the respondent their native language
Another does not.
One is patient
Another exhausted.
Yet the line–that’s not really a line–never ceases
Justice, meant to be methodically built
Becomes reduced to process
Another case
Another file opened.
Another person called forward.
There’s a regular rhythm to the factory
Even as those it handles
May never experience this as ordinary
A job people leave at the end of the day
“Happy Friday,”
“Have a good weekend!”
And sometimes gossip becomes the easiest thing to say.
“Judge said she’d be out by 4… it was 4:15.”-
A small laugh passed between an interpreter
And a clerk
“That’s early for her!”
They hiss.
A judge glances at a thick blue case file and sighs:
“The bigger the file, the more I hope
for a failure to appear.”
The blade dulls under repetition
Fatigue settles into the hand that holds it
I was there only as a witness,
and saw the factory behind it–
The conveyor
The tools
The hands that keep it moving.
Here I understand
That none of it was inevitable
It was wholly man-made.
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