How the Trump Administration Pushed Judges to Deport Children
Key takeaways
- The cases were entirely virtual; Sponzo appeared on a television monitor in an empty courtroom.
- The immigrants who appeared before Sponzo were classified as unaccompanied alien children, or U.A.C.s, which meant that they had entered the U.S. alone.
- Sponzo asked their lawyers to waive interpretation so that everything could move more quickly. “So waived,” they each replied.
Illustration by Chris W. Kim Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story At a hearing in April, Jem Sponzo, an immigration judge in New York City, ordered a dozen teen-agers “removed”—legalese for deported—in less than an hour. The cases were entirely virtual; Sponzo appeared on a television monitor in an empty courtroom. Her eyes were blue, and her robe was astral black. The hearing took place on the twelfth floor of 26 Federal Plaza, the towering regional headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the section of the Department of Justice that runs the immigration courts. Last year, amid a federal deportation surge, ICE agents there tackled protesters and made numerous arrests. The building was quieter now. There were no court schedules tacked up for the public to peruse. In the hall outside Sponzo’s courtroom, I chatted with a former immigration judge who had come to sit in on proceedings. She and about two hundred of her colleagues—roughly a quarter of immigration judges nationwide—had been laid off or pushed out. We spotted a group of ICE officers, in masks and tactical vests. One agent gestured at her and yelled, “That’s the chick that got fired!”
The immigrants who appeared before Sponzo were classified as unaccompanied alien children, or U.A.C.s, which meant that they had entered the U.S. alone. They were mostly older boys from Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador; also, Bangladesh. The judge didn’t speak their names or address them directly. They flashed into view—a vertical closeup of a face, a slumped shape at a conference table—only when they forgot to mute themselves.
Sponzo asked their lawyers to waive interpretation so that everything could move more quickly. “So waived,” they each replied. Translated jargon is still jargon. Such efficiencies had recently helped Sponzo get through more cases than any other judge in the courthouse. Many of the immigrants who appeared before her had pending applications for asylum or special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status, the two main ways for U.A.C.s to avoid deportation.