Letter from the Issue Editors: Framing ‘On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court’
Lauren Heidbrink is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach. She is co-PI of Justice in View, a teaching and research initiative that brings students into the heart of immigration courtrooms across the United States to observe and document how justice is enacted—or denied—in real time.
Amelia Frank-Vitale is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is co-PI of Justice in View, a teaching and research initiative that brings students into the heart of immigration courtrooms across the United States to observe and document how justice is enacted—or denied—in real time.
Rebecca Galemba is an anthropologist, Professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver (DU), and co-director of the DU Center for Immigration Policy & Research. She is PI of the DU Courtwatch Project, a research, teaching, and advocacy project in partnership with the Colorado Asylum Center that collaborates with students, immigration attorneys, and nonprofits to provide transparency into immigration court processes.
“Immigration court hearings are open to the public, with limited exceptions, as specified in law. You do not need to notify the immigration court in advance of your visit.”
- Executive Office of Immigration Review
The first time I observed immigration court at the Aurora, Colorado immigration detention center in November 2025, I was running a few minutes late to meet Ella–a former student and recent graduate. I had been to this detention center before, most recently as an expert witness on an asylum claim, but I had never been there as an observer. Although detained master calendar hearings are legally open to the public, we felt immediately surveilled when we entered the facility. We had to sign in as observers, provide our home addresses, pass through a security screener, and surrender our IDs and car keys in exchange for an observer badge; we were allowed to bring only paper and pen. That first time, I brought my purse, thinking I could leave it in a locker as I had when serving as an expert witness accompanying an attorney; as an observer, this was not allowed, so I had to take it back to my car.
After passing through the screener, we waited in plastic chairs for a guard to unlock the hallway door. In the corner was a sign “Celebrating 30 years of Operational Excellence.” Next to me sat three backpacks tagged “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” I felt a strange twinge of irony when a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorney walked through the security screener carrying a tray one-third full of carrot cupcakes and set off the security alarm. The guards ignored it as they each took a cupcake—leftovers made by his mother. One of the guards eventually opened the door and escorted us through two more sets of locked doors leading to the courtroom but only after she finished her cupcake.
Inside, the courtrooms had no windows and the clock was sometimes broken. Without a phone, we quickly lost a sense of time and space. The first few times I observed detained court, I was allowed to bring a clipboard, but a few months later it was confiscated. We came to understand what attorneys had told us, that the rules are rarely actually rules and that, in practice, we were often at the mercy of whichever guards were on duty. We had to be confident enough to assert our right to observe, but we also learned which battles to fight because access to court often depends less on what the law says than on relationships with guards, clerks, and judges.
-- Rebecca
Immigration court hearings are, with limited exceptions, open to the public. Yet across the courtwatching projects represented in this collection, students and faculty quickly learned that “open to the public” is less a straightforward condition than a practice negotiated at the courthouse, or even courtroom door. These interactions and contradictions are how immigration courts are experienced. Students encounter wall-mounted organizers advertising legal resources that are consistently empty, hours of waiting for hearings that may last only minutes, confusing and inconsistent interpretation, rapidly changing procedures, and rules that depend on the discretion–or sometimes the mood–of court personnel.
Immigrants (referred to as “respondents” in immigration court) encounter the same opacity under much higher stakes. They may be told to find an attorney while being referred to organizations with no capacity to take their case or to even answer the phone. A judge may grant them just two weeks to secure counsel while remaining detained. They are asked to navigate legal categories that may bear little resemblance to how they understand their own experiences, as when someone charged with unlawful entry insists, “We turned ourselves in to request asylum,” or “we entered with permission.” These moments reveal the limits of the public record. A docket record may tell us whether asylum was granted or denied, whether a person had counsel, or whether the judge set a bond for release from detention, but it cannot capture the confusion, waiting, idiosyncrasies, discretionary encounters, and unequal forms of access that produce those outcomes.
It is precisely this gap between the formal record and the lived experiences of the courtroom that drew us, as scholar-activists already engaged in asylum cases, accompaniment, and immigration research, to bring students into court. Across distinct university-based projects, we train students to attend not only to outcomes and formal due process violations, but also to the mundane interactions through which bureaucracy, state power, uncertainty, and unequal access to justice take shape.
This collection showcases what student observers witness, feel, and learn in court, and why ethnographic observations are important to broader publics. Specifically, it underscores ethnography’s unique capacity to make overlooked institutions and hidden codes of conduct more publicly knowable and to understand how the law lives or dies in the courtroom.
Models for building an ethnographic record
Legal and religious organizations create court observation programs to provide extra eyes and ears in the courtroom and hold immigration judges accountable. Their role has become more urgent amid federal funding cuts to nonprofit groups that previously provided legal orientation services in immigration courts and detention settings. The DU Courtwatch Project and Justice in View build on this accountability framework to provide more transparency around due process and access to justice.
Each of our initiatives with students in immigration court varies in scale and design. The DU Courtwatch Project and the subsequent Court Transparency Project, developed through a partnership between the University of Denver and Christina Brown’s Colorado Asylum Center (CAC), use a small, intensively trained team of students to repeatedly observe Denver’s non-detained immigration court and the Aurora detention court. The model prioritizes longitudinal observation, familiarity with courtroom actors and practices, and the ability to track changes in individual cases and procedures over time. Detailed ethnographic fieldnotes make it possible to return to earlier observations and backcode emerging trends such as when attorneys sought information about access to bond hearings and results of habeas corpus petitions.
Justice in View (JIV) uses a more distributed model by supporting professors and students observing across multiple immigration courts via online training and regular national calls with students and faculty. This approach distributes the logistical, pedagogical, and emotional burden of sustained court observation across institutions and observers (Frank-Vitale, Heidbrink, & Guaman, 2026). It also allows for comparison of legal cultures, procedures, and access to justice within a decentralized federal system.
These models span detained and non-detained courts, in-person and virtual hearings, and master calendar (pre-hearings), bond, and merits proceedings. Their designs produce distinct insights; both allow documentation practices to adapt as immigration policies, legal challenges, and courtroom practices rapidly change. Bringing them into conversation with each other expands our understanding of what is happening in immigration court and what being present in court means for students who choose to participate.
At the center of this work are student experiences. Each person has different expectations before they set foot in a courtroom, and most students participating in these projects are not law students, although some have legal career aspirations. They may miss certain legal details, but their confusion can itself be analytically revealing. Many immigrants in removal proceedings also lack legal training and appear without counsel, making students’ perceptions instructive for understanding the accessibility or inaccessibility of these proceedings. Students are taught that immigration courts differ from other courts, like criminal or district courts, in fundamental ways. The immigration court is not part of the Judicial Branch, meaning that immigration courts, immigration judges, and the Board of Immigration Appeals are not independent. They are under the Department of Justice and the Attorney General in the Executive Branch; the prosecuting attorney represents DHS; there is no jury of one’s peers; appeals and judicial review are limited; and due process rights and standards of evidence for the government are watered down. Structurally, there is no separation of powers between immigration court and the Executive Branch. Importantly, students learn that immigrants in removal proceedings may have an attorney but are not entitled to government-appointed counsel. However, students are not always prepared for what this means and looks like in the courtroom.
Courtwatching as witnessing
I first brought students to immigration court as part of classes I taught on asylum. One version of this class had students partnering with a local immigration legal services organization to work with asylum seekers on their applications. Initially, the idea was that by observing in court, students would have a better sense of what the asylum-seeking clients would encounter in their hearings.
In coordination with the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), 22 students were divided among a variety of master calendar hearings and some merits hearings at the 26 Federal Plaza immigration court. I sat with three of my students in the tiny courtroom of a judge who was hearing closing arguments in an asylum case that had been continued from an earlier hearing. The judge was present; the respondent, their attorney, and the DHS attorney were all there via Webex. The judge explained to us the complicated nature of the case, how the law could go either way, based on precedent, country of origin, and unpublished circuit court decisions. After hearing closing arguments, the judge commended both attorneys for being so prepared, then retired to his chambers for about fifteen minutes to decide the case. When he came back, he granted the person’s asylum claim.
He stayed to answer questions from my students and insisted his decisions were made by “simply following the law.”
When we left the courtroom, we looked up the grant/denial statistics of this particular judge. He had one of the highest denial rates of any judge in New York City. We could not be sure, of course, but we all had the sensation that he had granted in favor of this woman - whose case, he had explained to us, “could really go either way” – at least in part because of the presence of observers in his courtroom that day.
-- Amelia
Witnessing, we know, is never neutral or impact-free. Like ethnographic work more broadly, our presence shapes and influences the field we are observing. We therefore understand what we do and what we train students to do as ethnographic witnessing, rather than legal observation or court accompaniment. We are not exclusively tracking due process violations and case outcomes, nor are we walking beside individuals navigating their own hearings (Yarris & Duncan, 2024). Instead, we are attuned to the patterns that emerge from mundane interactions in court and how those interactions may change over time and geography. And we understand that our presence, even if we are not intervening, also impacts the court, the people in it, and the processes that unfold there.
Observation as witnessing becomes an exercise in reflexivity and positionality. Students quickly learn that witnessing is not neutral: who they are shapes what they notice, how others understand their presence, and sometimes what happens in the courtroom itself (Benson et al. 2025; Gill & Hynes 2021; Euber n.d.). Their positionalities may affect whether a security guard asks them for identification, mistakes them for a respondent, allows them to copy information from the docket, or treats them as someone who belongs in the courtroom. Their personal histories also shape what they see and feel. Students write about these experiences; many see their own family members among the people appearing before judges. For students from immigrant families, observation can prompt reflection on the timing and accident of birth that separates their own documentation status from that of people they observe and, in some cases, members of their extended families. Another student’s attention to interpretation and exclusion may be informed by their own experiences translating for their parents. These experiences require students to ask why they noticed particular things, what they may have missed, and how their own presence shaped what they were attempting to document.
As detailed in student contributions in the series, they observe judges who roll their eyes, frustrated with having to repeat themselves or answer questions from confused respondents; respondents who turn to the students to request help or insight; the tension an asylum seeker faces as she wants to tell the judge what happened to her without her young child overhearing the trauma; a parent being ripped from his child’s hand; DHS attorneys who fail to locate required documents such as a passport that was confiscated; and judges who navigate political pressure and sometimes push back. Students drawn to projects like these also often feel pulled to act when people are being made to suffer. In some ways, we can do the work of witnessing because others are also in court: advocates, ministers, journalists, volunteers, and family members, each with different goals. Some offer legal information, others provide emotional support, some ensure family members and friends know what happens when a person is detained, and others put themselves between those being detained and the masked federal agents pursuing them. We can witness via these long-term, engaged practices only because others are doing the immediate work of intervention and accompaniment.
What students learn from witnessing
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. Students have observed judges, for example, acknowledge a recent federal court ruling making a detained immigrant eligible for bond and then, in the next sentence, defer to a DHS attorney’s contrary interpretation. Such moments push students beyond thinking of law as a stable set of rules and toward examining how power, discretion, institutional pressure, and interpretation produce legal outcomes.
They also confront the emotional toll of witnessing. Student pieces describe feeling unsettled and fearful, helpless, and experiencing forms of vicarious trauma or re-traumatization connected to personal experiences with immigration court and the detention and deportation industrial complex. For some, the heaviness of observation can be too much; for others, the personal stakes motivate their participation, inform their career goals, and make them particularly attentive to the affective impacts of bureaucratic processes. Poetry, art, and performance provide other ways for students to process and communicate what they witness.
Students also learn that neither public access nor ethnographic methods in court are equally available to everyone. Security practices, identification requirements, and guards’ discretion can determine who is treated as a legitimate observer, while detention center courts impose even greater barriers. These concerns are especially acute for undocumented or precariously documented students, international students, and students of color. The physical demands of observation also raise questions of accessibility and ableism: sitting for hours on a wooden bench without food or drink, writing quickly by hand, or relying on a guard to leave and reenter a detained courtroom can make courtwatching inaccessible for students with disabilities, medical needs, or different linguistic backgrounds. As teachers, we must balance students’ desire to contribute with their safety, accessibility needs, and the pressures they may feel when participating through a course or supervised project (Galemba, Horton & Yarris, 2025).
What students carry from courtwatching can shape what they do next. Some go on to law school with a deeper familiarity with courtroom dynamics and the importance of asking careful questions that reveal the meanings beneath a person’s words. Others pursue social work, education, direct services, clinical practice, public policy, or community-based research with a fuller understanding of the multiple hardships that migrants endure. Still others turn toward organizing, public scholarship, or artistic practice to document and challenge what they have witnessed. For some, courtwatching leads to a deeper understanding of their own families’ migration histories, including how immigration adjudication and opportunities for relief and adjustment have changed over time. Whatever the path, students learn to assert their right to observe, recognize when to draw boundaries and seek support, take detailed notes, think critically about institutions, and communicate what they witness to different publics.
As mentors, we stress the importance of supporting and accompanying students through this work, not only to care for them but also to continue observing and learning alongside them. Coming together to share their reflections with one another and with a wider audience through this collection is part of that collective support. Their essays, poetry, art, and performances build a record of what happens in immigration court even—and perhaps especially—when those reflections are raw, partial, or messy and when the incoherences of court come through in the telling. At a moment when many legal and social institutions are under strain or active dismantling, courtwatching helps prepare students to move beyond critique toward imagining and building what should come next.
References
Barak, M. P. (2023). The slow violence of immigration court: Procedural justice on trial. New York University Press.
Benson, L. B., Coviello, D., Persico, N., & Todd, P. E. (2025). Legal representation in immigration courts: The impact of randomly assigned observers. Northwestern University. https://wwws.law.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/events/colloquium/law-economics/documents/immigration-project-model.pdf.
Euber, S. (n.d.). Bearing witness in immigration court: The importance of showing up in solidarity. Immigrant ARC. https://www.immigrantarc.org/the-labyrinth/bearing-witness-in-immigration-court-the-importance-of-showing-up-in-solidarity
Frank-Vitale, A., Heidbrink, L., & Guaman, L. X. (2026). Empty justice: Ethnographic court-witnessing in authoritarian times. Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 29(1), e70009. https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.70009
Galemba, R. B., Horton, S. B., & Yarris, K. E. (2025). Teaching in immigration court: Engaged anthropology, student supervision, and ethical challenges involved in observing public hearings of asylum claimants. Practicing Anthropology, 47(1), 49–59.
Gill, N., & Hynes, J. (2021). Courtwatching: Visibility, publicness, witnessing, and embodiment in legal activism. Area, 53(4), 569–576.
Yarris, K., & Duncan, W. L. (Eds.). (2024). Accompaniment with im/migrant communities: Engaged ethnography. University of Arizona Press.
How to cite
Heidbrink, Lauren, Amelia Frank-Vitale, and Rebecca Galemba. 2026. “Framing Letter from the Issue Editors.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34247994