Inside New York City's Immigration Court Tower Of Terror
And Dom is there.
A slew of federal agents and press have been waiting outside the doors of the immigration courtrooms in New York City's Jacob K. Javits Federal Building for the past several weeks. The agents come from the alphabet soup of federal bureaucracy — Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and those are just the ones I could confirm on one day. The reporters are mostly freelancers, like myself, trying to tell some kind of story through print, still images, and video.
We're all there exploiting immigrants. Honest people, just trying to earn a dollar from of human misery.
Starting at 8 a.m., people classified as non-citizens of the United States start lining up on Broadway. They all have a piece of 8x11 paper. A court summons. Some carry folders, weathered attaches, or those cheap, brown accordion-style document holders. Nobody looks very enthusiastic.
Immigration court is on floors 12 and 14. A large, unfriendly banner reading "IMMIGRATION COURT" greets you upon stepping off the elevator. From there, you wait inside a small, windowless room with about a dozen chairs. There's nothing special about the drab room. The walls are a pale cream, like a soured milk. There are three large, heavy doors. One leads into the room, another to the judge. The last one never opened.
People wait on the kind of aging benches you'd expect to see in a government office. Steel frames holding plastic chairs with slabs of industrial carpeting on the seat.
Outside the waiting room are about a dozen federal agents, photographers, and video journalists practically standing on top of one another in a narrow hallway. Some of the agents talk about protein shakes and supplements. Some of the photographers talk about past gigs.
“Second I heard about this,” says one masked agent wearing an ill-fitting green CBP uniform. He snaps his fingers and says, “Mmmm!”
The green man says he is from Florida, and that he is excited to be in New York. He is eager to see a concert with two storied punk bands, The Dropkick Murphys and Bad Religion.
“I might skip Dropkick though,” he mutters.
The mindless small talk is broken when one agent begins shouting, “Make a hole!”
Suddenly there's a frantic chaos. Agents surround a person and quickly lead them 50 feet from the waiting room over to Stairwell B. Sometimes they're crying. Sometimes they're angry. Sometimes they're confused. The photographers, pressed against the wall, clamor to get the shot like paparazzi.
“No, no, no, no, please no,” a woman tries. She digs her heels and drags her feet on the speckled white tile floor. It doesn’t matter. She’s pushed through the door to Stairwell B anyway.
And when the door catches the latch, the camera shutters stop. The mindless chatter continues right where it left off. We’re all wait for the next victim. Sure, not everyone gets *the business*, but a lot of them do.
But if you listen closely, and tune out the noise, you can still hear the sobbing from Stairwell B.
“I might skip Dropkick though,” he mutters.
Good thing for you. If they found out what you were doing they would probably beat the shit out of you.
Rethink your fucking life if you have to conceal your face to do your job, like a medieval executioner.