On a cold, windy morning in late December, about 10 people gathered around a table at a deli across from 26 Federal Plaza, one of New York City’s main immigration courthouses and a field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). John Sirabella, a member of the New Sanctuary Coalition, a faith-based organization that opposes detentions and deportations, was the point person for the group, which included veteran court watchers and first-time volunteers. Since March, Sirabella had been going into 26 Federal Plaza to support and accompany immigrants — whom he and others with New Sanctuary called “friends” — and training new volunteers at a Quaker church in downtown Brooklyn every other week.
Only a few courtrooms were in session because of the holidays, Sirabella explained, so the hallways would be quieter than they had been in the months since masked ICE agents began arresting immigrants and taking them away. But, another court watcher chimed in, there could still be six to eight ICE agents standing by just to grab one person.
After reviewing some basics from the training session, Sirabella told the group to go where they saw gaps: “Think of yourselves as water and be fluid,” he said. Once inside the building, the group proceeded to the twelfth-floor waiting room, where a handful of families were sitting and waiting to be called into a courtroom. The New Sanctuary court watchers split up and started introducing themselves. Their offers to help were, for the most part, quickly and eagerly accepted. The court watchers made small talk — if they could speak the same language as the immigrants — and filled out emergency contact forms in case someone was taken by ICE. They sometimes offered the adults pamphlets with know-your-rights information and gave the children sheets of paper, crayons, and stickers.
“In order to get to one of our neighbors, you have to get through all of us.”
One court watcher with basic Spanish struck up a rapport with a family from Venezuela that had arrived in 2023: a mother, father, high-school-age son, and elementary-school-age daughter. (Their names have been withheld for their privacy.) The father carried a thick packet of documents, which he consulted to fill out the court watcher’s emergency contact forms. He told the volunteer that his son was a baseball champion, taking out his phone to show a photo of himself and the boy in uniform, holding a large trophy. As his ponytailed daughter played with an orange origami bird, he explained that he had been a member of the National Guard back in his country and was targeted by “collectivas” — gangs that supported the Maduro regime — when he refused to sign off on an illegal supply of weapons to them. Gang members had shown up at his home and pointed a gun at his son’s head. He took out documents from Mount Sinai Hospital attesting to his children’s PTSD as evidence of what the incident had done. In Venezuela, there was “no security,” the father said in the little English he knew.
The family waited for hours as others emerged from the courtroom, crying or looking despondent. One woman threw up in the waiting room before her appointment. There were no ICE agents in sight on that floor, but a New Sanctuary volunteer had conveyed in the volunteer group chat that agents had taken an immigrant on another floor that morning: “ICE piled onto a young Venezuelan man on the fourteenth floor,” Sirabella said. “He was struggling as they quickly handcuffed him and took him away. He was taken even before he had a hearing.” Over the last year, videos from 26 Federal Plaza have shown ICE agents dragging away immigrants as their families weep and plead. In one clip, a tall ICE officer in a plaid shirt slams the wife of a detained immigrant to the ground in front of their young children. ICE agents’ violent handling of journalists and politicians, including New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, has also been documented. After some of these videos went viral, the Department of Justice, which oversees immigration courts, cracked down on videotaping and use of smartphones in certain areas of the Manhattan courthouse. Posters explaining this new rule were displayed in a waiting room.
In the courtrooms, too, due process is under attack. The Department of Justice has issued a flood of new memoranda and appellate decisions restricting asylum and procedural rights since Donald Trump resumed the presidency. Despite a massive backlog in immigration cases, more than 100 immigration judges around the country have been fired — including at least 15 in New York. The New York City Bar Association recently condemned the Trump administration’s authorization of military judges to step in to clear the backlog, calling the move “misguided and potentially unlawful” and warning that it would result in “inconsistent rulings, fundamental legal errors, and flawed decision-making.” In another unprecedented move, attorneys for Homeland Security, who act as prosecutors in immigration court, have been asking judges to dismiss asylum cases without hearings and to deport applicants to countries other than their country of birth or citizenship under new agreements brokered by the administration with countries like Honduras, Ecuador, and Uganda.
On that December day, the judge called in the Venezuelan family, who were representing themselves, sans lawyer, a little before noon — and allowed the court watcher to accompany them. The judge told the father, through a translator, to put away the packet of documents he was beginning to take out. The government lawyers had filed a motion to send the family to Ecuador to pursue their claim there, the judge explained. They would also allow the family to self-deport back to Venezuela. The government lawyers, who referred to the family only by their case number, handed them a copy of the agreement with Ecuador as they got up to leave the courtroom. They had 10 days to respond to the motion.
The recent confusion and volatility in immigration proceedings have made court watching more important — and riskier — than ever. Volunteers with groups like the New Sanctuary Coalition, as well as unions, political organizations, and more diffuse, autonomous collectives, have increased their efforts to escort and help immigrants fill out forms and to observe and take notes at hearings. “If we stop fighting, if we stop appearing in the hallways of these federal courthouses, we’re basically ceding our rights,” Andrea Vasquez, a court watcher and the secretary of the faculty union at the City University of New York, said. “We may feel like we’re putting ourselves in danger now, but it would be much more dangerous for us if we did nothing.”
Court watching is just one part of a larger pushback against Trump’s immigration policies. On the streets, activists have set up rapid response networks to track ICE and other federal agents — a neighborhood watch meant to frustrate, instead of aid, the police. “It’s a network of networks,” said Tupac, a longtime organizer and member of NYC ICE Watch, who asked that his last name be withheld for fear of government retaliation. “In order to get to one of our neighbors, you have to get through all of us.” Groups operate tip lines and hyperlocal chats and distribute old-fashioned whistles. “Three long whistles means ICE is abducting a member of your community,” a social media blast by the New York Immigration Coalition instructs. “If you hear the whistle, vulnerable people, get inside!”
These tactics show no sign of fading away, even after two volunteer observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were shot dead by federal immigration authorities in January in Minnesota. If anything, their deaths have galvanized others to join in anti-ICE efforts. Such efforts aren’t meant to dismantle the deportation system as a whole — volunteers know that is not possible — but to make it creakier and less efficient. The point is to support directly targeted individuals in concrete ways and to document and spread the word about how the system functions. It’s a species of harm reduction.
Court and cop watching have a long, distinguished history. In Antebellum Boston, Black abolitionists like Robert Morris deployed a network of spies to track the movements of slave catchers and kidnappers. The agents and conductors of the Underground Railroad used birdcalls, songs, and code phrases to warn that slave catchers were nearby.
The work requires being connected offline and listening to those who are most vulnerable to surveillance and retaliation.
The Black Panthers prided themselves on “policing the police.” They created one of the first organized cop watches in the 1960s, patrolling cities with firearms and cameras, as law professor Jocelyn Simonson noted in a 2015 article. Around the same time, the League of Women Voters monitored misdemeanor courts in Chicago. In the 1990s, advocates for domestic violence survivors started to attend the hearings of suspected abusers, as Simonson details in her book, Radical Acts of Justice.
Simonson tracks more recent efforts in local criminal courts as well. The practice surged during the first years of the Black Lives Matter movement, after police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. A second surge happened in 2020, after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis and protests spread across the U.S. These court watchers have documented the conduct of judges and prosecutors — for instance, whether bail is set and for how much — and used that data to support campaigns for bail reform. Court watchers have also flagged especially egregious actions for partner organizations that can then pursue legal redress.
Court Watch NYC, founded in 2018, focuses on criminal proceedings and has a running list of around 1,000 trained volunteers. These watchers wear bright yellow T-shirts to attend arraignments, visibly flagging their presence, with the goal of disrupting the churn of the proceedings — to show that the defendants have community support and “are not just numbers, they’re not just case dockets,” said S. W., who joined the group about a year ago (and asked not to use their full name for fear of retaliation). “They’re not just the charges they’re being accused of.”
The criminal and immigration systems are intertwined. Data sharing between local, state, and federal law enforcement is common, and prosecutions for traffic violations and other minor offenses are “where the ICE dragnet starts for so many people,” S. W. explained. “That’s not to say we don’t think there should be accountability for wrongdoing. We just don’t think prisons, and the police that funnel people into the prisons, are the answer.”
Court watchers can change courtroom policies and thus “create conditions for judicial accountability,” Matthew Clair and Amanda Woog write in the California Law Review. Research shows that being watched can change a person’s behavior to be more empathetic, cooperative, and altruistic. This applies to law enforcement officers and judges as well. Simonson has pointed to data from Philadelphia court watchers, demonstrating that, in cases where criminal defendants were eligible for release pending prosecution, judges were more likely to order release on recognizance than on cash bail when activists were visible in the courtroom.
The influence of court watchers on immigration hearings is less studied, but its proponents detail many layers of impact. Watchers take what they learn and share it with the world, Simonson said: They post testimonies on social media, write reports, circulate videos, make zines, and hold press conferences. The more people observe and understand these systems, the more they realize how deeply unjust they are — and the more likely they are to think of alternatives and build community with those affected, court watchers say.
In immigration court, some watchers have been more than dispassionate witnesses; they have helped people understand and navigate the confusing bureaucracy. Vasquez, the unionist in New York, recalled meeting a teenager in the courthouse waiting room and offering her a Spanish-language adventure novel. The girl looked happy to receive it and started reading right away. “We bring a bit of humanity to a horrible place in a horrible circumstance,” Vasquez said.
Tupac, of NYC ICE Watch, said that he feels optimistic about the many people without histories of political activism who got involved last year. This focused, direct involvement perhaps lays the foundation for broader political engagement. “The trick is to build something revolutionary out of that,” he said. Having the average New Yorker see activism as something that gives value to their life is “the real challenge,” he said.
Chicago, like New York, has long been a target of Trump’s — and a site of impressive pushback on the streets and in the courts. Activist Diego Morales has been busy since the president’s first term. In 2017, he started to lead the ICE rapid response team in Pilsen, a majority-Latinx neighborhood in the city’s northwest. In early 2025, he and other advocates with the group Pilsen Unidos por Nuestro Orgullo (PUñO) started a MigraWatch initiative. MigraWatch has since helped distribute whistles, educated locals on how to verify ICE’s movements and document arrests, and trained businesses on when it’s permissible to deny entry to ICE. The group’s orientation sessions ballooned from 20 or 30 attendees to several hundred.
MigraWatch is a strong example of how documentation can lead to intervention. “We are primarily focused on trying to prevent an unlawful arrest or to help win release from detention,” Morales said. “Just because somebody has been abducted by ICE does not mean that’s the end of the story.”
Efforts like those in Pilsen had an immediate effect. Last January, just after Trump’s inauguration, Tom Homan, the administration’s new “border czar,” told CNN that ICE agents were having a difficult time in Chicago because its residents were well “educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.” He said, “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘how to escape arrest.’” When Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and his troops later arrived in Chicago to commence Operation Midway Blitz, he was greeted by an organized mass of activists, lawyers, and press — and a hostile citizenry. Agents used force on priests and protesters outside a key ICE detention facility and teargassed ordinary residents, including young children. One officer shot repeatedly at a woman who was honking her car horn to alert people to ICE’s presence, claiming that she “rammed” an ICE vehicle in an act of domestic terrorism. (The government later dropped the charges against her.)
Morales and his MigraWatch team documented street-level abuses and shared their evidence with organizations fighting these assaults in court. During a deposition, Bovino admitted to lying to justify the use of tear gas. A judge ordered around 600 Chicagoans arrested by federal agents to be released (although an appeals court later temporarily blocked their release).
In New York City, street-level rapid response has secured significant wins. Late last year, around 200 protesters successfully blocked Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, forcing immigration agents to abandon a raid. A few days later, residents of Staten Island, the most conservative part of the city, slashed the tires of an ICE vehicle, quite literally slowing down the system. “We’re talking about very directly keeping people from incarceration, detention, and deportation,” Tupac said. “Keeping people out of that system is the most important thing.”
Street-level rapid response, with its heavy reliance on visual documentation and social media, raises a number of ethical questions. How do you balance the need to illuminate violence with the need to protect someone’s privacy during the worst moments of their life? What does it mean to disperse such visuals in a world where the average person scrolls past thousands of images of harm every day? ICE watchers must consider the ways information is weaponized by propagandists and livestreamers and understand how Big Tech helps circulate — and capitalize on — social ruptures. The work requires being connected offline and listening to those who are most vulnerable to surveillance and retaliation. “Our most successful neighborhood chapters are the ones that meet in person regularly and actually are out in the community,” Tupac said.
“Just because somebody has been abducted by ICE does not mean that’s the end of the story.”
Watchers also have to balance the risk of bodily harm — in courtroom hallways and in the streets, where federal agents have been using force with abandon on immigrants and citizens alike and have shot at people in 23 incidents during their street operations so far — and systematic efforts to surveil and delegitimize this movement. In November, The Guardian related that the FBI had infiltrated a Signal group of court watchers in New York and described the participants as “anarchist violent extremist actors” in a report. The New York Police Department confirmed that it had aided the federal government in its spying. (New York City’s newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, called the news “deeply troubling” and vowed to review the incident.) But reports of this surveillance and the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti have made it so people are “not so much scared as they are enraged,” Tupac said. “And there’s a space for that rage in the streets.”
Court and cop watching may be a time-worn tactic, but the government has its own, very old playbook. It has always used informants and terrorism laws to infiltrate and implode movements, and when that has failed, agents have used direct force. “People must assess the risks realistically and decide what risks are worth taking for themselves,” Morales, the Chicago activist, said. At the same time, “there is no way to properly meet this moment and not assume some level of risk.”
Tanvi Misra is a writer and investigative journalist covering immigration. Her work has appeared in New York, Mother Jones, The Nation, Jewish Currents, the New Republic,The Guardian, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications.
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