The Time to Seek Relief
About the Author: Katherine Mora (she/ella) observed immigration court proceedings in New York as part of a class with Dr. Amelia Frank-Vitale. She holds a B.A. in Ethnicity & Race Studies and English from Columbia University and currently works as a paralegal at Children’s Rights.
Abstract: Respondents in immigration court have a collective ask: to have more time.
Keywords: NYC; time; discretion
Citation
Mora, Katherine. 2026. “The Time to Seek Relief.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34050504.
I watch the immigration judge tell the mother and daughter who arrived an hour late to their hearing: “You’re lucky I didn’t order you removed.” The judge was wrapping up her morning Master Calendar hearings, meaning she was about to write in absentia deportation orders for anyone who did not show up for their Monday morning hearing. The judge does not hide her annoyance and repeatedly—harshly—reminds the mother not to be late to a hearing again.
The 15-minute hearing is full of the judge instructing the respondent on all her responsibilities. She must show up on time to her next hearing in three months. She shouldn’t bring her three-year-old next time. She should get an attorney or else she’ll have to self-represent. She needs to file her asylum application before her one-year anniversary of arriving in the United States.
As the administrative procedure continues, the respondent confirms her address; she is coming from Spring Valley, New York. As a Hudson Valley native, I recognize the name of the town, and I know she just went through a 2+ hour trip. She must have had to figure out how to get a bus, train, or car to Manhattan, and then find her way down to 26 Federal Plaza from there.
I think about all the stress she must be under: she has lived in a foreign country for less than a year, handling the pressure of learning to live in a new environment with its own language and quirks, caring for her three-year-old, and on top of that, going through a stressful immigration court proceeding.
I think of how she must be simultaneously processing the hardship that caused her to leave Honduras. I am sure she holds the same grief most immigrants hold, the grief of leaving their home. I try to refocus on the hearing, but I think about my mom and how she arrived undocumented in New York from Ecuador. I think about how normal it is to run late on a Monday morning. I wonder what immigration judges tell themselves in the morning before coming to their bench.
This hearing was one of over 100 Master Calendar proceedings in immigration court I observed in the spring of 2024, as part of a course during my junior year of college. Every judge I observed started their proceedings differently but always said something like: “The United States government believes you have violated the law, and my job is to decide whether or not you should be deported.” Week after week, I watched respondents ask for more time to find a lawyer. Judges almost always responded to the reasonable request with eye rolls, blank stares, head shakes, and sighs.
Some of the kinder judges I observed almost always granted more time. Respondents would react with grateful relief, clutching the free legal services paper while thanking the judge. Yet these instances were not the norm. Usually, judges were cold. They regularly denied extensions and scheduled the respondent for a merits hearing, with or without a lawyer. Those courtrooms were the most silent, where respondents said little and left quickly.
The already limited space for kindness is shrinking, as judges are facing escalating pressure from the second Trump administration to adjudicate harshly and order more deportations, or risk consequences. “Leniency” on asylum and other decisions, whether that leniency is real or imagined, has placed judges under attack. Since 2025, the current administration has terminated more than 100 immigration judges. I question if those few judges I observed who granted more time are still presiding or if they were fired in Trump’s overall campaign “to depict [immigration court] as a place of punishment.”
The merits hearing is designed for an immigration judge to adjudicate a respondent’s fear of returning to their country of origin. An asylum claim, if filed in time and by a lawyer or by the respondent, and if granted by a judge, can provide a path to residency, and then citizenship. Yet, almost all merits hearings for relief are denied, meaning most respondents’ proceedings will culminate with a deportation order.
The relief of granting more time in the Master Calendar proceeding is necessary—it gives folks another chance to seek representation, attempt to file an asylum claim, and not yet receive an official deportation order. But the relief of granting more time becomes a systemic, cruel, futile ritual when a respondent is much more likely to be ordered deported by a judge.
I think back to the cold, early mornings waiting in the long lines outside of 26 Federal Plaza. I think of the unsettling feeling I could not shake after every Master Calendar session. I remember the obstacles respondents face to get to immigration court: the travel, the waiting, the disrespectful security guards, the translators, the impatient judges with long dockets, and the persistent uncertainty of every court date and the days between.
And, woefully, I wonder if immigration courts are only efficient for people to be systematically stripped of their rights to live freely, if immigration courts only serve to hand out deportation orders that will surely—unjustly—only bring more instability into people’s lives.
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.