ICE agents are harassing the courthouse volunteers who assist besieged immigrants

The recent, nationwide phenomenon of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showing up at federal courthouses to arrest undocumented people after their immigration hearings has inspired an outpouring of volunteers who come to observe the hearings and assist the immigrants and their families.

ICE personnel in Sacramento, California, clearly aren’t happy about this. Volunteers say agents there have been obstructing their work and harassing them, even though court hearings are open to the public under federal law and the First Amendment.

They “have been taking photos of our volunteers and have made threatening comments,” says Autumn Gonzalez, a volunteer with the nonprofit NorCal Resist. “People have been pushed, shoved. Officers have locked people in an elevator and pushed all the buttons. There’s very open hostility from the ICE agents toward people who are just community volunteers trying to make sure that nobody disappears and gets lost in the system without anyone knowing.”

NorCal Resist was established in 2018, during the first Trump administration. It accompanies immigrants to court appearances and ICE check-ins, runs a hotline to report ICE activity, offers legal assistance to asylum seekers who can’t afford attorneys, and operates a bail fund.

In May, it added a “court watch” program that will typically send a couple of volunteers to each courtroom to obtain an immigrant’s contact information before their hearing begins, enabling the volunteers to reach out to the person’s family or help them find legal counsel if they are taken into custody afterward. Sometimes the immigrants, fearing the masked agents in the hallways, ask the volunteers to escort them to and from the courtroom.

On June 12, volunteer Morgan Murphy was escorting immigrants into an elevator at the Sacramento courthouse when two ICE agents got in with them, rode with them down to the lobby, and then, before they could get out, “proceeded to push every single elevator button” and say, “‘We’ll just go for a little ride,’” she recalls.

“It was just an intimidation thing, to scare us and the other immigrants in the waiting room,” says Heidi Phipps, another volunteer who witnessed the incident. As the elevator stopped at every floor, one of the agents, a white man, joked that his ICE colleague, who had darker skin, had an immigration hearing coming up himself and didn’t know how to speak English, Murphy told me.

“It was jarring,” she said. “They have handcuffs hanging out of their pockets; I didn’t feel safe.”

The federal agents also have been photographing them escorting families, volunteers say, and sometimes threaten to use facial recognition tech to identify them, which they view as another intimidation tactic. One of the agents from the elevator incident, Phipps says, has even been sexually harassing her—she now asks colleagues to escort her to her car at day’s end. “It’s sexualized, flirtatious, unwarranted attention that I do not like, and I will turn my back when that agent is around, and it’s just nonstop,” she says.

Murphy corroborates this: “It’s a look in his eyes—he came in the waiting room recently and he’ll just stare at the women,” she says. He won’t reveal his name or badge number, the volunteers told me. Phipps says she hasn’t filed a formal complaint because she doesn’t think ICE would take it seriously.

In another troubling incident about a week after the elevator ride, two female volunteers were escorting a man from his hearing when “more than a dozen plainclothes ICE officers swooped in, pulling up their masks to hide their faces and forcefully snatching the man out of the grasp of the women,” wrote Robin Epley, an opinion contributor for the Sacramento Bee who witnessed the encounter. The agents shoved the volunteers to the ground and against the wall, leaving them with bruises and welts on their arms, she wrote: “I find myself struggling to describe just how terrible the situation truly was.”

These sorts of things are happening regularly in Sacramento, according to Gonzalez. “They will start yelling and screaming at people that they are interfering with an arrest, that they will be arrested,” she says. “There’s usually one or two, maybe three, volunteers up there and 12 giant ICE agents. Our volunteers tend to be small women, some of them are older retired women. They can’t go up against 12 big guys. It’s not that kind of situation.”

“They don’t want anyone to see how they treat people,” she adds. “They want to be doing this”—their deportations—”with no witnesses.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, a Justice Department office that oversees immigration courts, declined to comment. In a written response, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, seemed to lump together court watchers and protesters, calling them “rioters.”

“We are so glad Mother Jones is covering rioters at courthouses who have actively obstructed law enforcement as they enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email. “While the media is trying to paint a sob story for these rioters, many of them have assaulted law enforcement.”

“Our observers,” responds Gonzalez of NorCal Resist, are “everyday community members who want immigrant families to feel safe in court. To call them ‘rioters’ or claim that they are assaulting ICE agents, who have guns and are in tactical gear, is absurd.”

The complaints aren’t limited to Sacramento. In San Diego last week, federal officers handcuffed a 71-year-old volunteer who had come to observe the court proceedings and detained her for eight hours. An ICE agent accused the volunteer, Barbara Stone, of pushing her. “Individuals like Ms. Stone are not innocent observers,” wrote DHS’s McLaughlin.

Stone disputes the agent’s account. “She is a soft-spoken person who was here to protect innocent refugees, and she is the last person in the universe who would hit an agent or interfere with their work,” her husband, Gershon Shafir, told local TV news affiliate NBC 7. ICE didn’t press charges against Stone, but her phone was confiscated and she was bruised by the handcuffs. “I feel mentally and physically traumatized,” she told the reporter.

In Denver, volunteer court watchers have been handcuffed and detained “without justification,” according to the ACLU of Colorado. They’ve also been “denied entry to the courthouse without explanation” and prevented from entering courtrooms due to “space constraints” when there are clearly empty seats. They’ve even been prohibited from taking notes, and have been “silenced” in the lobby and hallways, where “quiet and nondisruptive conversation has been permitted for years,” the ACLU adds.

“We condemn this brazen abuse of power,” Tim Macdonald, ACLU of Colorado’s legal director, said in a statement last month. “Detaining, arresting, and handcuffing legal observers reflects the aggressive and violent tactics that the government is using to try to limit due process and remove our immigrant neighbors without public awareness.”

In San Francisco, community court watchers report that security has gotten tighter. “They don’t want us to sit in the waiting room at times, don’t want us to be in the hallway, and that hasn’t always been the case,” says Sanika Mahajan, director of community engagement and organizing at the nonprofit Mission Action. (ICE agents often initiate arrests in the hallways.)

Part of the heightened security may be in response to the testiness of recent protests. Last week, agents clashed with activists who tried to block an arrest outside a San Francisco courthouse. After the agents loaded a detained immigrant into a van, protesters blocked the vehicle’s path, but the van drove off anyway, dragging a protester down the block. (Protests were continuing peacefully at the courthouse when I stopped by Tuesday morning.)

For about a week in June, federal authorities in Sacramento cut off public access to the courthouse altogether, prompting a response from Sacramento Assemblywoman Maggy Krell. “Everyone has a right to a fair process, and we need an open courthouse to assure that,” she told the Bee.

More recently, “no loitering” signs have appeared in courthouse hallways, further discouraging volunteers who say agents have sometimes physically blocked them from interacting with the immigrants who show up for a hearing.

Limiting access is just one way the Trump administration has tried to shield itself from accountability while pursuing its mass deportations. The officers arresting immigrants out in the community now routinely wear masks and sunglasses to hide their faces. (Democratic senators introduced a bill last week that would ban the practice, but it is unlikely to win any Republican support.) In New York City, an immigration judge even allowed lawyers for ICE to keep their names off the record during court proceedings, according to a report by the Intercept.

The San Diego activists worry that ICE’s tactics will discourage volunteers from signing up to watch court hearings. Following Stone’s arrest, Ruth Mendez, a member of the group Detention Resistance, told NBC 7 that ICE was sending a message: “For us to be afraid to come back and do the work that we’re doing.”

“They’re just using any method possible to make us uncomfortable, thinking maybe that will keep us away,” Murphy says of the Sacramento situation. But “we’re still showing up,” adds Phipps, and “overcoming what they’re dishing out.”