SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Courts are typically places ruled by procedure. There are strict rules about where things happen, how they happen and who can be present. Proceedings go down with a lot of order and decorum, but that has not been the case in immigration courts recently.
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XIMENA BUSTILLO, BYLINE: I'm standing outside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. There are barriers blocking portions of the street, police cars lined up and a mix of people making their way into the building. Many of them are dressed in nice clothes and are clutching files of paperwork for their hearings. There are also activists, community members, journalists and sometimes even elected officials and clergy. It's quite chaotic, and there's a palpable anxiety.
DETROW: That is NPR immigration policy reporter Ximena Bustillo reporting from an immigration court in New York City.
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BUSTILLO: I'm here in New York because two federal buildings have become notorious for violent scenes of people being detained by masked federal agents, and their job is to make arrests of people coming in for routine immigration court appointments. As I go inside those same federal buildings in lower Manhattan, it's quiet today. Lawyers and immigration advocates inside say people are afraid. Benjamin Remy, an immigration lawyer, is in court almost every day. Now many are too scared to show up, he says.
DETROW: According to the law, migrants who have been in the country less than two years are more at risk of what is being called expedited removal. You can be put in expedited removal after not showing up for a hearing for your asylum case, for example. So these courts are typically places where migrants without legal status would go in order to comply with law. But this year, they have also become a place where migrants are exposed to greater risk of arrest.
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BUSTILLO: The Manhattan courthouse halls have been one of the epicenters of such arrests.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Move, move, move.
BUSTILLO: The scuffles have gone on for weeks. Members of the public have been pushed out by federal officials who say that they're making it harder for them to work. Here, you can hear the protests against the arrests.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) No hate, no fear. Immigrants are welcome here.
DETROW: The chaos in the courthouses is exacerbated by the presence of officers from various federal agencies all vying to enforce their separate security protocols. Unlike federal and state courts, immigration courts are under the authority of the executive branch, not the judiciary. But exactly who makes the rules and who enforces them is not always clear. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to speak with Bustillo about this new ICE tactic and why she decided to spend two days watching it play out. She told me navigating the halls of that immigration court in New York as a reporter was immensely confusing.
BUSTILLO: So every different floor that we went to had completely different rules, and in some places, we were told that we were not allowed in public spaces because we were journalists, which is incorrect protocol. There are varying levels of protocol in terms of, like, what are spaces that I can record in? Can I record in a hallway? Can I not record in a hallway? I can't record in a courtroom. That's generally understood. But in terms of just me physically - like, can I sit here, can I stand here? - it really varied and changed in a way that I had not experienced in other places.
DETROW: Why did it change so much from floor to floor? Was it because of the judges overseeing the floor? Was it because it was - I mean, that just seems incredibly arbitrary and confusing.
BUSTILLO: A lot of it came down to individual court security. So court security, as in other federal buildings, is contracted out by the Federal Protective Service...
DETROW: OK.
BUSTILLO: ...Which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. They were getting, every day, changing directives of where public and press could be. I do want to come back to the idea of these courts being very administrative, very procedural, arguably in the past, probably pretty boring to the public eye. And so this massive media scrum and attention that they've gotten over the last, you know, four or five months since ICE and other federal law enforcement have begun arresting people in these hallways is probably unprecedented.
And so there had been changing directives coming from DHS, but then at the same time, you have a completely different arm of DHS - ICE, which is also running point on these arrests and is calling the shots on these arrests and what they need in order to do their jobs.
DETROW: OK, so this is, like, quite the cocktail for confusion and confrontation if you look at...
BUSTILLO: Yes.
DETROW: ...All of these different...
BUSTILLO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Offices clashing...
BUSTILLO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...With each other, the stakes of people being arrested in the hallway, the stakes of law enforcement, ICE, who do not want to be documented. We have seen the fact that throughout the country, they are masking themselves at any given point.
I want to talk about two different moments of your story. One was a bit of a confrontation that you had as a journalist in the hallway, a place where you were allowed to be, and somebody reacting. Walk us through what happened.
BUSTILLO: So essentially, in that moment, I had opened a double door that led into a hallway. And as I opened that double door, there were about five federal officers. You know, I can't tell you necessarily what agency they were with. They just - their vests just said federal police or police. That's about as much identification as they had. They were already walking down that hall. So I essentially intercepted their path, not meaning to. And in that process, you know, one of them turns around. He'd seen me in the area the last few days. And he turns around, and he says, why the F are you following me? Stop F-ing following me. And then he has a similar altercation with a member of the public, or what's been called as a court observer...
DETROW: Yeah.
BUSTILLO: ...Then down the hall. And they have the same interaction, but he ends up arresting her.
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UNIDENTIFIED COURT OBSERVER: Don't [expletive] touch me, OK? Why are you pushing - why are you shoving me?
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UNIDENTIFIED COURT OBSERVER: Why are you pushing me?
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UNIDENTIFIED AGENT: You've been following me all around (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED COURT OBSERVER: I'm not pushing - I'm not following you.
UNIDENTIFIED AGENT: Put your hands behind your back.
BUSTILLO: You can hear her ask, why are you shoving me? - him asking, why are you following me? - her say that, I'm not following you. And he says, hands behind your back. He takes her into a service elevator bay, and the yelling continues for a few minutes.
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UNIDENTIFIED AGENT: Stop following me around.
UNIDENTIFIED COURT OBSERVER: I'm not following you around. Not everything's about you.
BUSTILLO: I can't see what's happening, but I can hear what sound like handcuffs.
DETROW: I mean, that's a really tense moment to observe as a reporter. What were you thinking as that happened, and how have you followed up on that story?
BUSTILLO: I think in that moment, it just became really clear how hot tensions are running.
DETROW: Yeah.
BUSTILLO: And that had been made clear to me the day before as well, where there was a separate instance where, you know, federal law enforcement asked me to leave a courtroom that I was actually allowed to be in.
DETROW: Yeah.
BUSTILLO: I think that there is a general frustration running through everyone that is working in that building. I frankly don't think anybody's fully enjoying their jobs at the moment, either the federal agents that, you know, have to work in a space that they have not worked in before for arrests. You have the court personnel that are needing to, you know, manage and deal with and navigate separate agencies. You have all the different security forces that have competing directives. I mean, it's just a lot of tension all at once.
DETROW: This might seem like an obvious question, but at this moment, where there is so much opposition to you simply being in a hallway, being in a courtroom as a reporter, what is the value of seeing this play out in person?
BUSTILLO: I think the value of seeing it play out in person is, you know, No. 1 rule of a reporter is show up, right? And getting an understanding of, you know, even off the record, how people are feeling, you know, be able to have those conversations like I did. Like, that's not going to happen if I'm just watching videos online or just placing phone calls from my desk. You know, I think that this court particularly had become almost so notorious that it was worth going to see for myself what it was like. And a part of the preparation for that was also knowing doing this kind of reporting means you're going to get what you get.
And the days that I went to that courthouse, I was told, were actually some of the quietest in months. You know, it had been weeks and weeks and weeks of these viral videos of, you know, people getting detained and put into elevators and, you know, people protesting, and then they're getting detained. And when I went, it was really empty. It was really, really quiet. You know, we were often sometimes the only reporting crew in these hallways, so you could really hear everything and, you know, kind of getting an understanding of what that also means for the environment as well.
DETROW: Were you able to follow up on what happened to the woman who was detained, the outside observer who was obtained while you were watching and recording?
BUSTILLO: Briefly. I did reach out to the Department of Homeland Security, and they confirmed that this was an incident that occurred. You know, they say that the individual had shouted numerous vulgar and inappropriate statements at them, which, you know, the F word was thrown around a few times. They say that, quote, "during this interruption, ICE handcuffed the individual and transferred her into Federal Protective Service custody, and then Federal Protective Services issued her two citations for trespassing as well as failing to follow lawful commands from an officer.
DETROW: This is your beat. You are covering all of the many different aspects of immigration in the United States right now. What was your takeaway as a reporter from this story? What did you learn that you hadn't fully realized before?
BUSTILLO: I think I - what was made really crystal clear to me during this assignment was how the clashes of authority are really playing out. You know, one of the other instances that I was privy to was when federal law enforcement officers asked me to leave a courtroom that a judge had told me that I could sit in on. And then once I was allowed back in, the door had been shut on them. And, you know, I remember in that moment right after, you know, whether it was some member of court security or ICE, banged on the door of a court hearing that is actively ongoing. The judge is presiding the case. And it was this moment of, like, immediate, like, five-second tension, where I just didn't know what would happen next. I didn't know...
DETROW: Yeah.
BUSTILLO: ..If federal law enforcement was going to force their way in because they have some authority and they want to see inside this judge's courtroom. I didn't know if the judge was going to stop proceedings, if she was going to flinch, if she was going to, you know, what she was going to do. And I think this tension is something that I've heard a lot while covering immigration courts, of it is unheard of to have such a big enforcement presence in what's supposed to be a fair adjudication space. And that's been a very radical change for a lot of court personnel, also for the law enforcement personnel as well, where...
DETROW: Yeah.
BUSTILLO: ...They're not used to doing this kind of work in that kind of space.
DETROW: Ximena Bustillo, thank you for talking to us about your reporting.
BUSTILLO: Thank you.
DETROW: Late last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration's expedited removal strategy. Meanwhile, the administration has authorized up to 600 military lawyers to work for the Department of Justice as immigration judges.
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