Echoes of Separation: From Childhood Trauma to Courtroom Advocacy
About the Author: Leticia (Lety) Madrigal Tapia is a Master of International Human Rights student at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver. She serves as a lead student researcher on the Court Transparency Project with Professor Rebecca Galemba.
Abstract: Through a combination of personal narrative and formal court observation at the GEO Aurora Detention Facility, this piece illustrates the systemic cruelty of the U.S. immigration system.
Keywords: systemic cruelty; bond; family trauma
Citation
Madrigal Tapia, Leticia. 2026. “Echoes of Separation: From Childhood Trauma to Courtroom Advocacy.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34113333
Access link: www.publicethnography.com/semi-structured-all-issues/issue-3
When I was 9 years old, I sat on a hard and uncomfortable bench in an immigration courtroom and watched my dad’s deportation proceedings. After what felt like hours of a very long back-and-forth between a lot of adults in the front of the courtroom, the judge ruled to deport my dad to Mexico. As a 9-year-old girl, in the 4th grade, I didn’t know that I was witnessing an immigration removal proceeding. I did not know what a master calendar hearing was, or a Notice To Appear (NTA), or any legal jargon for that matter. But I did know that the judge was making a very important decision about my family, and that decision would lead to a ripple of many other hardships for my mother and my siblings.
Now, nearly 15 years later, I serve as a lead research assistant for the Court Transparency Project at the University of Denver. I have observed and documented more than 200 hearings, each representing an individual family, at the GEO Aurora Detention Facility. Each hearing carries a heaviness. Even after extensive observation, documenting unfavorable outcomes remains emotionally challenging. Personally, the "hardest" cases involve family separation. Bond hearings, in particular, carry a lot of profound hope and disillusionment. In these hearings, a detained individual asks an immigration judge to be released on bond while they wait for their next court date. During most of these hearings, children and loved ones sit in the back of the courtroom, deeply hopeful that their loved one will be granted bond and released to reunite with their family.
To frame my court documentation experience, the following bond hearing testimony is key. As the bond hearing began for the morning court session, the guard allowed about five family members in to support and watch their loved one’s bond hearing. The guard seated one member to my right, another to my left, and three others, who appeared to be his children, in the back of the courtroom. I then turned to a new form to document his case; the top of my page read Adrian’s full name and his A number.i
As the proceeding continued, the Judge began to make statements and ask questions that I had heard before.
“Preliminary jurisdictional issue.”
“Mandatory detention.”
“Class membership under Maldonado Bautista.”
Based on what my team and I had been documenting in court, we knew that these were a set of keywords and questions that all led to the same ending: the Judge finds no jurisdiction over the case and refuses to rule or even hear a case and its merits because of it.
“Maldonado Bautista” would have the most immediate consequence. To invoke “Maldonado Bautista” is to reference an ongoing court case (Maldonado Bautista v. DHS), which revolves around the question of whether a respondent has a right to a bond hearing based on how they entered the country.
This question has only emerged because of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the application of mandatory detention, despite years of established interpretations and application of immigration law in bond hearings. Over the last two years, DHS has attempted to enforce mandatory detention and deny bond requests from immigration judges for anyone who ever crossed the border without inspection.
In contrast to these efforts, a California federal judge ruled in “Maldonado Bautista” in late 2025 that immigrants who entered without inspection were entitled to a bond hearing. Yet despite this ruling, DHS continued to ignore the ruling in practice and fight the precedent in the courtroom over the last year. In our experience, once a respondent’s attorney invokes “Maldonado Bautista,” DHS argues that the ruling was “not binding to Judges” or that the respondent was “legally detained” only because a respondent did not fit into the designated class membership, meaning that the respondent doesn’t deserve that hearing at all.
As soon as I heard those words, along with DHS’s nearly identical argument, I knew that the Judge would find she did not have jurisdiction over this case, and Adrian would not be granted bond that day.
In more direct terms, this decision would have a ripple of consequences for Adrian. It would mean that if he wanted to be released on bond from detention, he would have to pay his lawyer to file a very costly habeas petition in federal court and remain detained for as long as that took, in the hopes that at the end an immigration Judge would give him a fair bond hearing. This meant more time in detention, more money spent on costly legal fees, and more pain and hurt for his loved ones.
Having sat through dozens of these hearings, I knew exactly what no jurisdiction meant.
However, to his family, whose only hope seemed to be that he was given bond and released that afternoon, that finding was not very clear. As I wrote down my notes on the case and checked off the box that indicated the Judge found no jurisdiction, one of his family members, an older gentleman, noticed that I was documenting his loved one’s case. Assuming that I had legal knowledge, he turned to me and whispered, “It’s not going well, right? He’s not getting a bond?”
My heart sank.
“No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”
I wanted to respond with so much more. I wanted to be more supportive and explain my thinking to him, but I knew that if I did, the guard might have asked me to leave. Instead, I wrote on my paper for him to see, ‘Ask his lawyer about a habeas corpus.’ He nodded. No other words were spoken; he simply turned his head back up to his loved one sitting in front of the judge, and I continued to document notes from the case.
As I both expected and dreaded, the judge did rule that she had no jurisdiction and therefore could not decide on bond. Adrian would remain detained.
Once the case concluded, the guard led the respondent and his lawyer out of the courtroom, and his family got up and walked outside the courtroom with the respondent; his children were crying.
His next master calendar hearing in his immigration removal case was scheduled for the next day at 9 am, and one of my colleagues was present to document. They summarized the following: The case was continued at the last hearing to allow Adrian to find more time to look for an attorney for his removal proceedings. Given that the day before he had had a bond hearing, the judge asked whether he wanted to wait for an attorney, but the attorney was only listed for the bond hearing.
Often, detained immigrants only have the funds to get an attorney for the bond hearing, not the rest of their case. Yet some are confused as to why their attorney from the bond hearing is not present for their other proceedings, which the court considers to be separate. He decided to proceed without an attorney present. During this hearing, Adrian asked how voluntary departure (VD) would work if he decided not to move forward with his case. He stated that he did not want to remain detained for a long time, and he would be prepared to request voluntary departure.
Our records show he was later given a removal order instead of granted voluntary departure and was later deported to Mexico, abandoning his case and being separated from all of the family I sat with in the courtroom. Importantly, a removal order is much more grave than voluntary departure, as it means that he is barred from reentering the United States for up to 10 years and from applying for any form of immigration benefits such as adjustment of status through his U.S. citizen children.
Stories like these linger with me, and they should be shared with others to hear. The trauma and the hurt that the immigration court system inflicts go far beyond the person detained; it shatters people's lives and separates families. 15 years ago, I felt the hurt and trauma from experiencing deportation proceedings within my own family. Now, as a 23-year-old master's student, I know the complexity and systemic issues of the immigration system while simultaneously holding the lived experience of this system. Immigrant children and children of immigrants deserve to live free of fear of family separation and should not have to sit in a court proceeding watching their families be ripped apart. Courtwatching and documenting exactly what is happening in ICE detention centers is so important because it allows us to understand the system so that we can begin to advocate against the injustices that we are seeing.
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.