How Detention Drives Desperation in Immigration Court
About the Author: Olivia Sanchez is a Master in Public Affairs candidate at Princeton University. She has been a participant in Justice in View since its pilot in the summer of 2025, and is currently serving as the summer student coordinator. Her senior thesis, “‘I Have No Control’: Detention Center Creep in U.S. Immigration Courts,” uses ethnographic and analytical methods to examine the increased use of detention as a coercive tactic in immigration adjudication in both detained and nondetained courts.
Abstract: Behind locked doors and barbed wire, the immigration court at Krome Detention Center operates under conditions unimaginable in most other American legal settings.
Keywords: DHS incompetence; court opacity; voluntary departure
Citation
Sanchez, Olivia. 2026. “How Detention Drives Desperation in immigration Court.” Semi-Structured (Washington, D.C.), On Ethnographic Witnessing: Student Encounters with Immigration Court, vol. 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.57912/34113324
It was 8:30 a.m. on October 14, 2025, and in a small, windowless courtroom nestled within Miami Krome Detention Center, a detainee was growing agitated before the immigration judge. Krome is a 500-bed facility located about an hour away from downtown Miami and minutes from the Florida Everglades, in which violations have been reported over the last 30 years.
“Why isn’t he in KBHU?” the judge asked the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), referring to the Krome Behavioral Health Unit attached to the detention center. “He should really be in KBHU.” The man had previously been found mentally incompetent by the court. Though the judge was frustrated that the man was being detained in a non-behavioral unit, the DHS attorney asserted he could not be moved to the mental health facility due to a lack of beds.
Yet as these legal officials talked past him, the man was insisting—in fluent English— that he was a citizen of the United States.
“Do you want me to break another TV?” he asked, attempting to convey his frustration.
The judge replied that he did not, adding, “I understand that you broke government property at your last facility.”
It was then that the man lunged at the judge, breaking the legs off of the wooden table in front of him before being tackled by the lone security guard in the room, who yelled, “What are you doing? Crazy n***a.” The guard turned to those in the courtroom, shouting for us to “get the f**k out!” The other 20 or so detainees rose, and he shouted, “No, not you people!”
I was closest to the door, so I opened it. The rest of the nondetainees in the courtroom—attorneys, loved ones of those in detention, and court personnel—ran out with me, from the courtroom through the secured hallway and into the main front lobby. I later learned that during the attack, the judge was fruitlessly pressing a broken panic button underneath his desk and had to go to the emergency room for elevated blood pressure.
The government attorney arguing on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security asked the front desk to send for backup for the guard in our courtroom, as no one had come to assist him. As more guards arrived and poured into the secure hallway, we watched the scene through the door windows and saw as three guards slammed the respondent into the wall. There may have been blood on the ground, because when I re-entered the hallway there was a janitor mopping the floor.
Though I do not know what became of the frustrated detainee, this outburst had ripple effects for everyone that day. The judge canceled the rest of his cases, meaning that people who had traveled to watch their loved ones’ cases—one woman drove over four hours to see her husband—had to go home and wait for the case to be rescheduled for a later date. The judge in the next courtroom over, Romy Lerner, was left alone with 20 detainees when the single guard there had to help subdue the detainee. Court-watching programs were forced to end their observations at Krome, as observers were repeatedly turned away by court staff in the following weeks due to safety concerns.
This moment, which begins my senior thesis on detained immigration courts, encapsulates much of what is wrong with the U.S. immigration court system. Courts located inside of secure detention facilities—essentially prisons—blur the lines between enforcement and adjudication. The very infrastructure and procedures, purportedly designed to keep the public safe, endanger detainees, immigration judges, and other court personnel. Billions of dollars have been pumped into the DHS, yet facilities remain short of beds, and security forces lack the staff to adequately monitor all courtrooms. More and more immigrants in detention do not have any criminal history at all, much less severe criminal convictions, and some are even American citizens. Release from detention has also become increasingly difficult, with DHS stripping bond jurisdiction from immigration judges. And when frustration boils over into physical violence, courts use it as an excuse to prevent public access, drawing the curtain even further over already obscure proceedings and enabling further structural violence.
Immigration detention does nothing to protect the American public but instead serves to break immigrants down and coerce them into signing their own deportation orders or accepting voluntary departure in exchange for an “exit bonus.” This detainee’s outburst, while aggressive, is a comprehensible expression of his frustration with the confusing, infuriating, and violent system he has been placed into against his will. As detention becomes increasingly arbitrary and prolonged, it is understandable that detainees will react to the system’s brutality with frustration and hostility. Unless significant changes are made, it is to be expected that structural violence will spill over into incidents like this one.
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.