Performative Due Process: Opacity and Structural Coercion in Colorado’s Immigration Proceedings
About the Author: Ella Iveslatt is a graduate from the University of Denver (BA International Studies and Economics, ’24). She has been observing immigration court since 2023 as part of the DU Courtwatch Project and has since become the Project Manager of the newest rendition, The Court Transparency Project, which is a collaborative initiative between DU and the Colorado Asylum Center.
Abstract
Removal proceedings operate on more than just immigration law alone. The opaque structure of the immigration system allows its structural violence to go unnoticed and appear legitimate, fair, and unproblematic.
Keywords
DHS incompetence; court opacity; voluntary departure
Citation
Iveslatt, Ella. 2026. “Performative Due Process: Opacity and Structural Coercion in Colorado’s Immigration Proceedings.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34028382.
“Wait – final hearings in immigration court are closed?” The former judge looked at me in shock about what I had just said. It was my first day at a new part-time job working in family law. Until this moment, nearly all of my court experience had been in immigration court, and one of the firm’s attorneys – who was a former Colorado county court judge – was asking me about the research I conduct in Colorado’s immigration courts. As I answered his questions regarding what exactly made immigration court so opaque, I casually mentioned that the public could not observe respondents’ final merits hearings without direct permission from the respondent and their attorney, if they are represented. His expression shifted into visible disbelief – he had always been accustomed to courtrooms as transparent spaces under public scrutiny.
I was equally as shocked by his reaction to a restriction I had become used to after years of observing immigration hearings at both Colorado’s non-detained (Denver) and detained (Aurora) courts. In most courtrooms, I learned that the norm is that they are open to the public and that it is difficult to close them. However, I’ve come to find that many immigration proceedings are characterized by closed doors, documentation difficulties, a lack of public awareness, and procedural decisions that unfold with little to no explanation to those directly impacted. The result is a system that operates through opacity even when hearings are technically publicly accessible, shaping what can be observed, understood, questioned, and scrutinized. This makes it difficult to hold the immigration court system accountable.
This lack of transparency serves a purpose: protecting a facade of an immigration court system that is fair and just, upholds principles of due process, and operates with allegiance to the law. Once inside the courtroom, it becomes clear that the respondents’ immigration proceedings and outcomes are not shaped by the law alone - but rather by an intricate web of the violence of detention, procedural exhaustion, a lack of due process and liberty, and weaponized incompetence.
The Colorado Court Transparency Project (CTP), for which I serve as the project manager, documents the workings of the immigration legal system. In the first ten months of the project (October 2025 through June 2026), the team has observed 477 Master Calendar Hearings (MCHs) and 117 bond hearings for those detained and 514 MCHs for those non-detained. Even though these hearings are “open to the public” on paper, observers have difficulty entering courtrooms – often noting barriers like having to wait for prolonged periods to enter or being required to show unnecessary identification documents.
Even when entry is permitted, the proceedings themselves often remain functionally opaque to observers. Legal shorthand dominates hearings, in which judges and attorneys often use acronyms, case citations, procedural terminology, adjournment codes, and references to forms that non-lawyer observers may have difficulty understanding. This is compounded by the rapid procession of master calendar hearings, where context is rarely discussed and assumptions (sometimes false) are made that all parties understand the dynamic and frequently changing institutional routines. These difficulties are even more poignant for unrepresented respondents who are expected to navigate a confusing, complex, and convoluted immigration system without access to the guidance of an attorney; among the master calendar hearings observed by the CTP team at the Aurora Detention Center, only 40.9% were represented.
Once inside the courtrooms, observers see respondents experiencing their own kind of opacity. CTP observed 170 hearings at the Aurora Detention Center where the respondent had already filed a form of relief (such as an application for asylum or a family-based visa petition) with the immigration court or with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). In 31 of these hearings, the respondent chose to abandon their application and asked the judge to instead grant voluntary departure or a removal order. Many of these respondents expressed that they wanted to continue with their applications for relief, but that they “don’t have any money [for an attorney]” or that “[they are] still afraid [to return home], but instead of being here, detained, I’d rather be there.” The structure of immigration proceedings, particularly when coupled with the pressure of prolonged detention and lack of access to representation, makes decisions structurally coerced rather than freely chosen.
I vividly remember one of the first hearings I observed at the detention center. It was the last hearing of the day in fall 2025. A woman from Mexico, whom I refer to as ‘Elena’ to protect her identity, had been detained for several months but had been in the U.S. since 1997. Her three adult children, all U.S. citizens, were sitting next to me. Even as the judge explained that all three of them were eligible to petition for her status, Elena requested voluntary departure and explained that she wanted to leave the facility as soon as possible – despite foregoing a potential opportunity to stay in the U.S. with her children.
Even as the judge was explaining the process of voluntary departure, Elena kept asserting that she wanted to leave more quickly, requesting an earlier departure. She was granted voluntary departure, and my heart dropped as I watched Elena and her three children fall into each other’s arms sobbing amidst the uncertainty of their shared future across seemingly impermeable borders.
These structural barriers are only compounded by procedural errors by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) or courtroom staff. For example, CTP observers have documented DHS paperwork being noted on the record as missing, incomplete, or lacking the necessary signatures from DHS employees, incorrect names, photos, and addresses, malfunctioning courtroom equipment, incorrect or incomplete translation, or even an inability for staff to find respondents for hearing despite them being detained. I have come to see this as a form of weaponized incompetence, through which mistakes, errors, and negligence, if not intentional, proceed with a seeming lack of accountability or even concern. Respondents are then largely forced to absorb their costs through the negative impacts on their cases. Considering this alongside Crooke’s notion of “weaponized inefficiency” (2024) helps expand and name a pattern through which administrative failures are not merely bureaucratic accidents but instead accomplish detention and deportation goals with dangerously consequential effects.
As an example, we’ve seen DHS attorneys fail to file an I-286, also known as a Notice of Custody Determination, in 12 bond hearings — rendering the respondent jurisdictionally ineligible for bond because DHS failed to file the one document that has historically always been filed before detaining someone in the first place. One respondent expressed that they had never been able to get a hold of their deportation officer. In another hearing, the DHS attorney asked the judge what a “fee waiver” was for an asylum application, and another attempted to defer to the Court while reserving appeal in the same breath. While these may appear to be gaps in knowledge on the surface, they create confusion, delay proceedings, prolong detention, and construct unnecessary barriers to relief.
Yet, you’ll likely never see any of this on the news. Not because it isn’t happening, but because the opacity of immigration court prevents what happens in courtrooms from being easily seen or understood. The county court judge was right. It doesn’t make sense, but perhaps the system is functioning just the way it was intended to — a new era of mass deportation defined by opacity, exhaustion, and pressure that quietly compels people towards deportation under the false guise of choice and fairness.
References
Crooke, Catherine L. “US Asylum Lawyering and Temporal Violence.” Law & Social Inquiry 49, no. 3 (2024): 1510-37. https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2023.45.
About this 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.