Caitlin Dickerson writes:

One morning in March, as ICE was building momentum in carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, dozens of people who had recently been detained throughout Virginia were being rushed through preliminary hearings. The government was using Zoom to save time, so Judge Karen Donoso Stevens sat in a mostly empty courtroom, adjourning some proceedings in less than two minutes each.

Donoso Stevens yelled at a man to “stop talking!” while his own case was being heard and became frustrated with another who got confused when she referred to him as “the man in the green jacket.” (He wasn’t wearing a green jacket.) When a father said he was scared to leave the country without his 5-year-old, she ignored the comment and asked if he had enough money to pay for his ticket home. I was in court that day hoping to see how Trump’s new deportation mandate was playing out, but the hearings were moving so quickly that I was having trouble keeping up.

Some people said they needed more time to find lawyers or fill out applications. I was getting only snippets of people’s stories, as one bled into the next. But time seemed to slow around noon, when Donoso Stevens called a man from El Salvador with pale skin and short curly hair, wearing an orange jumpsuit, with his hands cuffed behind his back. “I’m very worried about my three babies,” he said in a slow, shaky voice. “The officers arrested me in front of the two littlest ones, who are 2 and 4.” He began to cry, explaining that his youngest had been sick, and that his 4-year-old’s first words to him since his arrest had been to ask if the officers who took him away had hurt him.

After the hearing, I asked an attorney to try to reach the man. (Only lawyers can directly call people who are in immigration custody. Detainees have to initiate calls with anyone else.) She tried several times but never heard back. He seemed to vanish, leaving me wondering for months what had happened to him.

Since then, I’ve often thought of that man while scrolling social media, where the stories of other people arrested by ICE have gone viral, turning some into minor celebrities: There was Ming “Carol” Li Hui, a waitress and mother from Missouri whose Trump-supporting neighbors and customers wore Bring Carol home T-shirts; and Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a high-school student in Massachusetts whose friends posted signs of his face in their front yards; and Narciso Barranco, the California landscaper whose three sons, all Marines, went on national television to decry their father’s violent arrest. These stories have spread because they seem—due to the young age of the person arrested, their contributions to the country, or the fact that they have young children at home—like exceptions whose treatment was uniquely harsh.

Sitting in immigration court, I saw firsthand that they represent the norm. There was at least one deportation case that most Americans would likely support—a man who had been convicted of child sodomy—but most detainees were people without a criminal history who were worried about getting back to their families and their jobs.

I wondered if the crying father might have also become a household name if his story were online. Instead, like most people who are detained across the country right now, he remained unknown and unreachable. [Continue reading…]