It’s been a tumultuous year in San Francisco immigration court. At least 88 asylum seekers were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at court hearings. More than half of immigration inspectors were fired. Fear and anxiety are widespread.
At the heart of it all has been immigration lawyer Miri Atkinson keeping things together. She leads the San Francisco Bar Association’s “Lawyers of the Day” program. This program provides free legal advice to people throughout Northern California when they appear in immigration court. She also heads San Francisco’s Rapid Response Network, which seeks legal representation for people in the city arrested by ICE.
The Guardian followed her recent high-stakes day in court as she pivoted from case to case and tried to maintain her sanity. What follows is the story of a typical day, constructed from Atkinson’s own words and additional reporting.
5 a.m. – Home in San Rafael
The alarm clock rings at 5am. You dragged yourself out of bed to check Signal to see if any messages about ICE arrests were hitting the Rapid Response Network hotline overnight.
You’re not a morning person, but you have to be at court by 8am. Otherwise, you will miss out on an already short window of time to provide legal advice to illegal immigrants before the hearing begins. While making instant coffee, I write a to-do list, anticipate everything that could go wrong, and try to prepare for any fires I might have to put out.
For immigrants from all over Northern California, from Humboldt County to Monterey County, you and your colleagues are often the only people you can get legal advice from in the minutes between sitting in court and the judge starting the case. Being late can result in work being missed and people being detained or deported.
When someone is arrested by ICE in San Francisco, the city’s rapid response network calls you, and you call a network of volunteer attorneys to ensure that person gets legal advice right away. We are here for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. During the first Trump administration, we received one or two calls a month. Currently, we are dispatching two to three lawyers a week.
During your commute into the city, you try to take a mental break by listening to non-political talk radio. The light is gentle and the clouds are spectacular as you drive across the Golden Gate Bridge.
8 a.m. – San Francisco Federal Court
At 8 a.m. sharp, grab an iced coffee and join the line outside 630 Sansom Street. This federal building houses immigration courts, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and ICE field offices.
Dozens of people are waiting for appointments with USCIS, and we know that today will not be a good day for some of them. Between 10 and 20 people are being detained by ICE per day at the time of these appointments to meet the government’s deportation quotas.
Show your ID as you go through security, head to the elevator and press the button for the 4th floor. Families with children of various ages are starting to arrive. They speak in hushed voices outside the courtroom.
When the doors open, families are squeezed into wooden chairs. Before the judge arrives, we will introduce the lawyer program of the day in Spanish. Since the courtroom arrests by ICE, they have started conducting roll calls of clients to ensure that no one is left and the lawyers are trying to reverse engineer their identities.
Our staff speaks over 32 languages, but that’s still a big problem. Today, the judge called for an interpreter service for Kazak, but there was no such interpreter. Some spoke Hindi and Mām, an indigenous Mayan language spoken in Guatemala.
The risk of miscommunication is high, and if you fill out a form incorrectly or don’t understand a question, you could be accused of lying and increase the cost of your asylum application. If legal advice is lost in translation, they can be detained and deported. But dial-in translation services can be spotty, and phone connections now crackle and hiss so badly that judges have hung up on them.
The judge will ask people if they have brought documentary evidence and if it has been translated into English. Make it clear to the man that no, his wife’s asylum claim does not cover him. He has to file himself. But he doesn’t realize that and has been in this country too long to qualify.
Judges handle a large number of asylum cases in quick succession, so they need to know what they’re doing and resolve the issue instantly.
You tell people that if a government lawyer tries to dismiss an asylum case and a judge approves it, ICE will likely arrest them. You say to them, “Make sure you explain to the judge that you don’t want the case to end.” They’re whispering to people behind the courtroom, knowing ICE is waiting outside.
This isn’t my first rodeo. There was a lot of turmoil during the first Trump administration, with harsh rhetoric and policies implemented in bizarre ways. This time, the administration seemed ready to implement policies as quickly as possible, legal or not. The situation has become even more tense due to the sheer number of people being detained. Every day feels like an onslaught, so you have to pace yourself.
10am – Tour of the ICE Field Office
You take a group of three journalists and a city supervisor on a tour of the sixth floor of the federal courthouse. It houses an ICE field office and is used to detain people in ICE custody.
Your clients say they are held in detention, sometimes for days on end, with no private bathrooms, no medical care, and limited access to legal counsel. The room was brightly lit 24 hours a day and was freezing cold. They say they have no beds, no clothes, no access to hygiene products and often no food. (In response to a lawsuit by the ACLU, which represents people detained by ICE, a district court judge issued a preliminary injunction in November requiring improvements to conditions in ICE detention cells. ICE referred the Guardian’s investigation into conditions in San Francisco detention cells to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond prior to publication.)
You showed them the hallway and a small room where detainees could talk to their lawyers. The small room, cut in half by thick glass, has two entrances, one for the two lawyers and the other for the two detainees, connected by a telephone in the wall.
Without a person’s full name, ICE will not allow lawyers into the room. This is particularly difficult for trans asylum seekers whose legal name does not match the name on their documents.
You return to the lobby to interview one journalist, then walk a few blocks away to a cafe for a second interview. There’s a fourth journalist who wants to meet you. You drink your third cup of coffee of the day while doing the interview, then move on to the fourth journalist. Over the past few months, we have received a steady stream of requests for interviews from the media.
12:30pm – Return to office
You return to the office for your weekly staff meeting. Lawyers and project managers share what they are working on. The immigration defense program you lead is just one of many programs at the San Francisco Bar Association. Management gives you HR and organizational updates, confirms schedules, and gives you a shout-out to show your appreciation.
Immigration attorneys are trained to deal with the trauma of representation, but now you are dealing with direct trauma. Now you are seeing families being arrested and nursing mothers and pregnant women being taken away in handcuffs and shackles, all because they showed up to a court hearing.
There are days when I break down in tears. There are days when the staff breaks down in tears.
We must lead by example and avoid burnout. It’s a balancing act when everything feels like a crisis. If you can delegate, delegate. If you can’t do that, just say you’re sorry. If you give your all, day in and day out, without rest, it is impossible to keep going.
5pm – I’m about to switch off.
Even if I haven’t finished my work for the day, I still have to force myself to close my computer and go for a walk outside at 5pm.
You hate running, but you started running because you were bad at meditating and needed a way to force yourself to think about your breathing.
Historical romance novels also separate you from reporting on torture. It should be complete garbage – so low level that it doesn’t require much involvement and you can skip a few pages without losing the plot.
You check social media expecting light pop culture content. TikTok has destroyed your attention span. You try to avoid doomscrolling, but the algorithm keeps giving you videos of ICE arrests.
You make sure to stick to your weekly activities. I tap dance on Tuesdays and go to my sister’s house to play mahjong on Thursdays. Even if you don’t feel well, try to spend time with friends and family. They know not to ask about immigration or the news.
You’ve been in this job for a long time, so it’s going to be a long game. You’re scheduled to be on-call on Christmas Day, but you don’t want to oblige your staff because you know that ICE agents also work weekends and federal holidays.
You grew up in a California town with a multicultural heritage where classes were taught in English and Spanish, in a family that valued helping others. As an American, it breaks my heart to know what has become of my country. I feel like I’m in a weird otherworld where the laws no longer apply to me.
If there is any light at the end of the tunnel, it is the hope that the policy changes will be reversed and people will understand how illegal they are.
You also successfully filed a petition for habeas corpus in federal court, alleging that a person’s detention was a violation of his constitutional right to due process. All the people your team brought this case against, 44 people, were released, but it wasn’t until September that you adopted that strategy.
Recent victories in habeas corpus cases give you hope. There is hope when a lawyer appears on “Today’s Lawyer.” Seeing people taking part in rallies and marches in solidarity with immigrant communities gives me hope and makes me feel like I’m not alone.
