D (45:24)
Point because then people will like be like, get out. Yeah, they'll self deport because being in detention is terrible even in the best of circumstances. Or if they don't, the government will do the job for them. I spent a lot of time while I was reporting this story trying to put together the puzzle pieces and see what this all adds up to. What does the Trump administration want? The immigration court station in the end, I don't think it's that complicated. Trump made a promise of mass deportations, so he's finding a way for the courts to not get in the way. His people are good at this sort of thing, pulling any lever available to them, showing every institution exactly where their power ends. And if judges are the obstacle, like wrenches in the gears of the mass deportation machine, that's no problem. There are a few ways to put pressure on a judge to co sign on deportations. You can change procedure, the rules of the court. That's what the memos did. You can intimidate the firings, the threat of more firings coming up every few weeks. And there's one more cleaner, more direct and effective way if you run the doj. Change the case law, set new legal precedents, precedents that judges now have to follow. Which is exactly what Trump Coj has been doing since March. Decisions have been coming fast and furious out of the Board of Immigration Appeals, setting new legal precedents for how things will work now. For example, the Trump administration has narrowed the kinds of cases that are eligible for asylum and made it much harder to prove them. Also, maybe the biggest change, any undocumented person, even if they have a legal case in process, even if they've been in the US for a decade, they can now be detained indefinitely before you could post bond and get out while you fought your case. Now, no more bond, just detention. Nothing but detention, potentially for millions of people. And in A big picture way. There's no one left at the top to disagree with all these big changes, because a month into the new administration, the DOJ removed nearly half the judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals. Everyone had been appointed under Biden, pretty much. So all this new case law now matches the Trump policy objectives almost completely, and the judges, of course, have to adhere to it. So say this all works out the way the Trump administration seems to be hoping, and we start detaining more people and having them do their entire legal process from detention, what does that actually look like? What's the result when you put all these cases inside that used to be outside? I want to tell you about one person who had to do this, had to navigate this new world of detain. Now, figure it out from there. It's a case from where we started, New York. And the reason I want to take you through his story is because it illustrates the positive side of what the Trump administration is doing. His case speeds to a quick resolution, and it also illustrates the downside, which I'll get to. I'm going to call this person David. He's an asylum seeker. David's from Ecuador. I talked with him on the phone when I asked him about his life in New York, which was only five months. Listen to the feeling. You can hear him smiling. David loved New York. Like many gay men before him, he was happy here. Back in Ecuador, he actually ran this drag club. It's Time to Get It On. That's the name of the place, because he says when you do drag, you get on your heels, you get on your wig, and whatever else you want to get on. David told me that in Ecuador, it's not an automatic death sentence to be gay like it is in some places. There's gay marriage, for example. But for him, it got really bad there because he had dated a politician who was closeted. After they broke up, he came after David. David thinks he sent cops to harass him, smashed up his car. So David moved to the capital, Quito, to get away from this guy. And he says the politician and his people followed him, beat him up so badly, he woke up at the police station hours later, not knowing how he got there. This was the moment that David thought, I'm not safe anywhere in Ecuador. He decided to leave, and he did everything our government told him to do in order to come here the right way. He entered the United States without breaking any laws. He crossed at a border checkpoint, which is legal. He used the official government app to schedule his crossing, which is how he told immigrants to do it. At that time. It meant he waited for months till it was his turn. And once he was here, he had permission to work. And now he was going through the required process to stay. It was all above board. David has a sister who lives in New York. He's 33, number six out of nine siblings. He decided to go stay with her, live his New York dream. And he got a job he liked doing marketing for a supermarket chain. And he met someone. David says the first thing he remembers is he asked me if I could speak English. And I was like, nope. The man that would become his boyfriend didn't let that stop him. He sat on the sidewalk with David and Google Translate, and they talked for hours. David was like, he's cute. They started dating. And then David gets his first immigration court date. It's a routine scheduling hearing at the courthouse downtown on June 4. He wants to be prepared. So ahead of time, he goes to a law clinic, gets help with his asylum application, makes two copies, one for himself, one for the judge. But he was watching the news and started to see that ICE was picking up people in the courthouse. I was afraid to go, david says. But my boyfriend insisted. He was like, you want to do things the right way? So David wakes up the morning of his hearing, puts on his suit to go to work. He was hoping if it all went well, it would just be a quick. And he'd go to work right after. And he heads downtown. He says there were bad signs along the way. Like at breakfast, they wouldn't serve him and his friends. It took forever. And then he dropped all these napkins. They blew everywhere in the wind. It was like a dark omen. When he finally got to court, he sat in the waiting room, went in front of the judge when it was his turn, offered the two copies of his asylum application, and the judge didn't take them. He heard the DHS attorney ask for his case to be dismissed. He heard the judge agree to the dismissal because he'd been watching the news. He knew what that meant. As soon as he walked out of the courtroom, ICE officers cuffed him and walked him to the elevator. I went into shock, he says. All I did was walk. I didn't know what was going to happen, what was happening. I didn't feel hot or cold or sadness or happiness. Just nothing. They cuffed my waist, my feet, my hands, and they took me down to the parking lot. I tried every time I could to tell my boyfriend what was going on, David says. And the last message that I sent him. That he still can't forget is when I texted him, they're taking me. David got held on the 10th floor at 26 Federal Plaza in New York for three days. There's a holding cell there that's supposed to be temporary, but the summer has become the de facto detention center, and all reports out of there say that it is rank. David says it was so packed in there, you could only sleep standing up. David then got sent to a detention center in Newark, New Jersey. He would be there for about 10 days. While he was there, he kept asking Ice to let him do a credible fear interview, which is one of the first steps in the asylum process. He was like, I had my application. I'm afraid to return to Ecuador. He says the ICE officers would just stare at him and not say anything back, or they would tell him to do it in writing, which he did. There was no response. He never got an interview, just to say he's supposed to get one as soon as he asks. ICE is supposed to facilitate it, but that doesn't mean they always do. And this, judges and immigration lawyers told me, is one of the biggest problems with having people pursue their cases from inside detention. ICE sometimes ignores the legal process, and the detainees don't have much access to a lawyer to force them to follow it. We asked ICE about all of Dabeed's claims, including how they ignored his request to get a credible fear interview. They didn't respond. One day in June, ICE put David on a flight. He didn't know where he was going, and no one told him. He was brought to a detention center in Louisiana. Lots of people with cases from New York get sent down south to Louisiana and Texas, where judges are extremely strict. The case law is harsher against detainees. And there are more detention centers. There are so many people there, David says, so many tons of bunk beds in one giant room. And it was super dirty. It was unbearably hot. He says everyone hung out in their underwear because it was so hot.
