Immigration Court Observation

On June 10th, I had the opportunity to go to the SF Immigration court on Montgomery Street with a few of my colleagues. I expected the court to be in a standalone building but instead it was spread over two floors in a twenty-five-floor building. The security checks for entering into the court were moderate. Everyone trying to enter the court had to go through a general security check where they walk through a metal detector machine and have their bags go through the x-ray machine. Before we went through the security check, we had to inform the officer on duty that we came to observe the court. Surprisingly I didn’t have to show a state I.D. before entering the court. After clearing the security check, the officer helped us find a courtroom to observe. I was expecting the officers to be harsh and not very helpful but I was surprised and glad to see that all of the
Department of Homeland Security was also present in the courtroom but he didn’t speak much. He continued to work on his laptop through the whole time court was in session. It felt as if he had been doing this for a long time and since the cases were still in the master calendar phase, he didn’t really have to participate in the discussion with the other party. In the six cases I observed in the court, the only thing he really said was his name to acknowledge someone was representing the U.S. government in that case. Five of the six cases were related to people coming from the El Salvador and only one was related to Mexico migrants. In few of the cases the defendants refused to state which country they came from, so the court assigned a country to the case. I wonder how could Judge Marks be sure that the country assigned to the case is actually the country of origin of the defendants? What if the defendant loses the case and gets deported to a country that is not his or hers? Then I realized that this is a risk that the defendant is taking by not stating a country of their