Opinion | You Don’t Have to Go to the Border to See Cruelty to Immigrants

I thought about that while I sat on a bench in the courtroom, next to toddlers wearing their hair in ribbons, staying as quiet as possible and waiting to see their parents, who filed in wearing orange jumpsuits, their wrists shackled to their waists. State and federal criminal courts also put shackles on defendants, but they are usually removed during trial to avoid prejudicing a jury. No such courtesy is offered to immigrants. They stay shackled the whole time, unable to sit comfortably or wipe their face as they recount the worst moments of their lives in their home country, asking for a stay of deportation, pleading for a chance to resume their life here in America.

I sat in on a couple of hearings that morning and saw some judges treat immigrants humanely and politely, looking directly at them and explaining what was happening, even wishing them luck before adjourning. I saw other judges treat immigrants like parts on an assembly line. But judges are operating within the rigid and outdated confines of immigration law, and these days they’re under more pressure than ever before. Since last October they’ve had to work under a quota system, requiring them to “complete” 700 cases each year. Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told CNN that “It’s another representation of the improper use of the court as an extension of the law enforcement policies of the executive branch.”

As I left the courtroom I glanced at my phone, and saw reports of more overcrowding at the border in Texas. It’s difficult to bear the news, to know that there are children looking after babies and sleeping, hungry, on concrete floors. But cruelty can take many forms. A person who happens to be born elsewhere can have their rights stripped away in a detention camp or a courtroom. There is an entire system of brutality against immigrants in this country, some parts are new and shocking, other parts are quieter — and they’ve have been here all along, even in my beloved New York.

Walking back to the subway through The Village, I stopped to look at the menu of a hipster cafe with a $24 steak and eggs breakfast. Extraordinary to think that this place exists just around the corner from 201 Varick St. “New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along,” E.B. White wrote in “Here is New York,” and it does so “without inflicting the event on its inhabitant; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.” To conserve our souls, immigration court is a spectacle we must choose to look at.

Maeve Higgins is the author of “Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else” and a contributing opinion writer.

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