U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is the Officer Friendly of immigration control, by far the least intimidating of the Department of Homeland Security’s three branches.
Its regional headquarters in downtown Chicago welcomes visitors with a five-story, skylit atrium soaring up from a sparkling white-walled lobby. A trip through the metal detectors is mandatory, but moves quickly. On this Friday in May, red tulips bloom out front.
The building’s bright, open design – courtesy of a $75 million facelift in 2006 – befits the mission of its biggest tenant. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services oversees legal immigration, screening visa applications, issuing green cards and administering citizenship oaths. It’s on Twitter. “We’re the nice guys,” said Marilu Cabrera, an agency spokeswoman.
But below the airy, sunlit atrium, past a one-way guarded door, down a set of elevators not accessible from the lobby, at the end of a narrow hallway with low ceilings fluorescent lights and gray carpet, across from the Department of Homeland Security fitness center, sits room #B1330.
It is a small and unpretentious courtroom. Twelve paired airport-style chairs face the front. Past a waist-high wooden rail is a table, where well-worn copies of The Interpreter’s Companion and the Immigration Law Handbook are strewn among case files and yellow legal pads. In the front, an American flag stands under the seal of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the branch of the Department of Justice that oversees immigration court proceedings.
Most of Chicago’s deportation hearings happen eight blocks away at 55 E. Madison St. There, on the 19th floor of a downtown skyscraper, the hallways are packed with people. Children climb on benches as anxious-looking parents wait for their cases to be called; lawyers appear and disappear just as quickly into one of the seven courtrooms, manila folders in their arms and clients in tow. But the space outside #B1330 is empty on this Friday morning. Only a third of the plastic chairs inside are filled.
That’s because the four men whose cases will be heard are 64 miles away, in a hearing room in a jail in Woodstock. When everything works smoothly, they can see and hear the proceedings through a video hookup in the corner of the courtroom. When it doesn’t – and lawyers interviewed for this piece said dropped connections, lack of interpreters, and confusion among the remote detainees are common – the hearings can feel almost Kafkaesque.
Behind the screen
America’s immigrant detainee population has doubled in the past decade, from an average daily count of about 15,000 in 1998 to more than 31,000 last year. In 2004, one-third of all immigration cases involved a detained immigrant; in 2008, it was 48 percent.
The Chicago court alone heard 7,870 detained cases last year, the fourth-most of the country’s 56 immigration courts, according to Susan Eastwood, a spokeswoman for the federal agency that oversees the courts.
To cope, courts have increasingly turned to videoconferencing to expedite hearings and ease growing caseloads. Videoconferencing is cheaper and more secure than in-person hearings, Eastwood said, as detainees do not have be brought in from mostly rural jails like McHenry County’s.
Criminal courts use have long used video technology for bond hearings, arraignments and other preliminary court processes, though not for trials or sentencing. But immigration courts use videoconferencing for what are called merit hearings – when immigrants can be ordered deported – and courts have said it’s constitutional, most recently in a ruling in July 2008 in the federal appeals court in Chicago.
But some advocates say videoconferencing makes already murky system harder to navigate, exacerbating language barriers and reinforcing the isolation many detained immigrants experience. “It adds another layer of alienation,” said Geoffrey Heeren, senior attorney with the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago. He said it forces him to either be in front of the judge or with his client – neither option a good one.
“The stakes are incredibly high, the law is incredibly complicated, and not having that face-to-face interaction is a real disadvantage,” Heeren said. That is especially true in asylum cases, he said, in which the outcome depends heavily on whether the judge believes an immigrant’s story.
Court proceedings, for all their formal trimmings, are a kind of dance, where nonverbal communication is often as important as a case’s legal merits. Defendants must appear credible and sympathetic, lawyers trustworthy and competent. “There’s a personal element to arguing a case that’s entirely separate from the law,” Heeren said.
Layered on this are more than two centuries of legal history that goes out of its way to protect defendants. Though most immigration violations are civil offenses, several quasi-criminal elements – including the growing use of detention for immigrants awaiting their hearings – make protections like those in the criminal system important, advocates said.
“There are basic expectations in a courtroom,” said Tara Tidwell-Cullen, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center, a legal aid and advocacy group. Among them, she said: the right to confront an accuser, to examine evidence and to confer with a lawyer. “Videoconferencing violates nearly all of them.”
But in the basement at 101 W. Congress Parkway, there is no protest.
There is only a half-sheet of paper tacked to the courtroom door with the day’s cases. Four men, from three countries, with four different outcomes. Their cases offer a momentary glance into the nation’s diverse population of immigrant detainees – a group that is inherently transient, growing, and, through laws restricting public access to court files and certain hearings, largely hidden from public view.
Upstairs under the Chicago sunlight, government workers stamp visas and administer citizenship oaths. In the basement, four men appear one by one on a television screen. Here’s a look at their cases:
Lukasz Podlesny, age 26, born Poland, arrived in United States 1998.
The young man’s voice crackles over the speakers. “Yes, your Honor,” he says, with only a touch of an accent from the country he left as a teenager more than a decade ago. His mother, Anna, waves at the television from her seat at the lawyers’ table.
On July 2002, Podlesny, then 20, stole three bottles of vodka from an Osco Drug in Glenview. He pled guilty to theft and underage alcohol possession and received probation, court records show. A year later in April, it was four bottles of Jack Daniel’s from a Walgreens in Northbrook, stuffed under a jacket. Again, he got probation and was ordered to undergo an alcohol treatment program.
These two crimes – both misdemeanors – got the attention of immigration officials, who arrested Podlesny on Feb. 5. Like the other three men on the morning’s docket, he was sent to McHenry County jail to await his hearing date.
Judge Robert Vinikoor throws Podlesny a lifeline. He grants a continuance so Podlesny can file retroactively for legal permanent residency, piggybacking on his mother’s immigration status as a green-card holder. “He’s got a chance,” said his lawyer, Eve Ocasio. “But in this system, you just never know.”
Victor Cossio Caranza, age 64, born Mexico, arrived in United States 1988
“Raise your right hand,” Vinikoor says. The Spanish interpreter, a balding Hispanic man with glasses and a slight paunch, relays the command from his seat at the lawyers’ table: “Levante la mano.” The man on the screen, elderly, stone-faced and in a beige jumpsuit, raises his right hand. Up goes his left hand, too; they are cuffed and shackled to his waist.
On Feb. 22, Cossio was convicted in Cook County of sexually abusing two teenaged girls. He received 30 months probation, court documents show. About two months later, he was arrested at his Des Plaines home by federal immigration agents and sent to McHenry County to await a deportation hearing, his lawyer, Michael Schmiege, said.
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Cossio is the only one of today’s detainees charged with a violent crime, a poster child for Immigration and Customs Enforcement programs that target convicted criminals. Operation Predator, for example, has arrested more than 11,600 child molesters since 2003 and is a highly publicized example of what the agency claims is a laser-beam focus on deporting dangerous felons.
Add one more to the tally: Vinikoor denies Schmiege’s request for a continuance and enters an order of deportation. “This will be the ruling in your case,” he says, and again the interpreter translates: Cossio has 30 days to appeal the decision, after which he will be deported to Mexico and barred from ever returning to the United States. “For life,” Vinikoor says. “Por vida.”
Juan Carlos Contreras, age unknown, born Mexico, entered illegally in 1997
“How many copies of your papers do you have?” Vinikoor asks the man on the screen. The interpreter translates, but something is lost. Contreras, a slight man with dark hair, thinks the judge is asking how many pages are in the document. “More than 20,” he says in Spanish, glancing at the thick stack of papers in front of him. After a few halting back-and-forths between Contreras, Vinikoor and the interpreter, the number comes down to eight – maybe – and the hearing moves on.
Contreras is an example of the perils of navigating the immigration courts without a lawyer. A guaranteed right to counsel, one of the most basic tenets of the criminal justice system, does not exist in immigration courts. Contreras has the right to an attorney, which Vinikoor patiently explains to him, but at no cost to the government.
Of the more than 280,000 immigrants who went through the legal system in 2008, nearly two-thirds did so without a lawyer, federal data shows.
“Immigration court is a totally different ballgame than criminal court,” said Paul Zulkie, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who now practices in Chicago. “It looks like a courtroom, it sounds like a courtroom, but it functions radically different from any popular notion of a courtroom. The right to counsel is just one example of that.”
Another example is openness of access. Courtrooms by law are open to the public, and immigration courts are no exception, save for some asylum cases or cases involving children. But while criminal and civil court records are public, a search for information about Contreras would yield little. There is no public database of immigration cases and the Department of Homeland Security is tight-fisted in releasing information about individual immigrants.
When the screen goes dark, Contreras is gone.
Boualem Boussaha, age 42, born Algeria, U.S. legal permanent resident since 2004
The image garbles for a moment, and you half-expect to see a color-focus pattern fill the screen. Instead, a man appears. Dark hair falls over dark eyes and a five-o’-clock shadow lines bony cheeks.
Boussaha’s journey to the Chicago courtroom today is a fluke of jurisdiction. A green card holder since 2002, he was returning from a visit to his native Algeria in September. When officials at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport’s customs office ran his name, they found a 2004 conviction in federal court in Ohio for illegal possession of food stamps, a crime that could void his status as a permanent resident.
Boussaha lives in Kettering, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton. But because he was arrested just over the Kentucky border, his case fell under the purview of the Chicago ICE office.
So here he is: on a TV screen 60 miles from the courtroom and almost 400 miles from home, while his lawyer comes in through a speakerphone from the 11th floor of a Cincinnati office building.
Logistics notwithstanding, Boussaha is the day’s only winner. Vinikoor rules his previous conviction does not void his residency status and dismisses the case. When he hears the news, Boussaha tilts his head back, closes his eyes and exhales through puffed-out cheeks.
The storm above
Back down the narrow hallway, up the escalators and into the lobby, the bright, five-story atrium is bursting with Chicago sunlight. Suspended from the ceiling are two titanium cloud forms, a stunning piece of public art commissioned by the General Services Administration, the real estate manager for the federal government.
The clouds, each 10 feet high by 11 feet wide by 16 feet long, are 3-D models of meteorological data collected by researchers at the University of Illinois on a real-life storm that blew through southern Illinois and Missouri in 2002, bringing thunderstorms and tornados.
It is called La Tormenta – meaning “the storm” in Spanish – named by Spanish-born artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, who is himself a naturalized U.S. citizen. In interviews, he has said it represents the jumble of emotions – fear, hope, dizzying uncertainty – that define the immigrant experience.
“The Storm” above is a sweeping artistic statement about coming to America, the turbulence of a new life in a new place. The storm below passes quietly, where, after four men appear over a course of two hours, a television screen zaps to black.