I Spent the Day at My Client’s ICE Check-In So You Don’t Have To

Her son is ten years old and fighting cancer. Her baby isn’t yet walking. I sat outside in the heat with her paperwork in my lap, preparing myself to drive home without her.

“Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; it does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
—Toni Morrison

“The longest journey is the journey inward.”
—Dag Hammarskjöld

As I drove my client to her ICE check-in this morning, all I could think about was what it would feel like to drive the car back without her. If they detained her, I’d be the one returning with her phone, her wallet, and that thin folder with documents we selected the day before with proof of her address, her children’s birth certificates, and her son’s medical records.

I kept asking myself: am I her lawyer, or some kind of grim courier? Some strange delivery service that brings mothers to the government and then carries their belongings back to the children they’ve been taken from?

She’s a mother of five. Her oldest is nineteen. Her youngest isn’t yet walking. Her ten-year-old son is fighting T-cell lymphoma. Two of her kids were born here.

We had a twenty-minute drive to the local ICE field office. She sat next to me that whole ride like someone who knew how fragile safety is. Who knew the wrong man in the wrong uniform could upend everything. She wasn’t trembling. She didn’t say much. She was just still. And that stillness did something to me. Like I was sitting beside a glacier that had survived every climate disaster but might finally split apart under this morning’s sun.

When we pulled up, the sidewalk was already full. Families had dragged plastic chairs into little shaded circles — under the tent, beneath a tree, huddled by the hedges that line the concrete path. You could tell they’d done this before. Everyone faced inward but kept their eyes out. People spoke to the ones they came with, but not too loudly. Everyone else they eyed with quiet recognition, like, Is that what I look like right now? Worn-out. Braced for impact.

The kids clung to legs and hips, or collapsed in their parents’ laps. A few were babies. Some were dressed like it was picture day. One boy wore shorts, new cowboy boots, and the kind of buzzcut that says someone loved him enough to make him feel ready. His mom was nursing his baby sister under a blue shawl. The whole family looked like they were headed to a church picnic. And maybe that’s what she’d told them. Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to say otherwise.

I checked my client in at the reception table. Explained her family composition three times to the same man, who kept repeating, “That doesn’t make any sense.” He said it like the facts of her life were an insult to the paperwork. Finally, he wrote down some codes, shoved the clipboard at me, and told me to finish filling it out myself.

Based on my description of her son’s condition, he had written at the bottom of her intake form: “Immigrant child ill.” I added one word, in careful mimicry of the worker’s jittery handwriting: “—cancer.”

Then we waited.

Two hours. Three. Nothing happened except more people arriving. Fathers and sons. Mothers and newborns. Entire family trees. The air got warmer. Sweat started to darken collars. And slowly, this scattered crowd of strangers began to congeal into something else.

A chorus.

That’s the best word I have for it. Like a Greek chorus. Waiting for the main character to walk on stage and tell us what kind of play this would be. Comedy? Tragedy? Farce? We were all just stuck on the same page, trying to guess the ending.

Then the door opened.

A man walked out. Gray hair, military frame gone soft. He called out names, last name first. One by one, people peeled off from the group, approached him like supplicants. He looked them over, handed them a sheet, and said they could leave. Then he grinned. Told them in broken, rehearsed Spanish to smile for the Telemundo reporter standing on the opposite sidewalk. Told them the line they were supposed to say: “They treated me real nice.”

It felt like a game show. Some people got a prize. Others got pulled inside. And no one could tell why.

By now, everyone was watching everyone else. Whispering theories. Praying with their bodies. Some kids had started playing a game. They turned the concrete bench into a throne and took turns zapping each other with invisible lightning bolts. Their screams bounced off the stucco walls and made us all remember what joy used to sound like.

I went inside to use the restroom. While emptying my pockets before the metal detector, I overheard two ICE contractors talking in low voices. The younger one said he couldn’t do it anymore. Said he felt like he was selling himself out. That he needed to get out of there before he forgot who he was.

I wanted to turn and tell him: “You are. And you should. Before the soul you still have gets carved out and replaced with a badge and a script.”

But I didn’t.

Instead, I went back outside and sat some more. I had court at one o’clock. Was already imagining myself logging on to the video hearing from a folding chair in the sun, no tie, a defense prepared in the shade of the lone mesquite tree. But then a man came out and called my client’s name.

My heart dropped.

He called another woman too. We walked up. He motioned us inside. I asked, “Are you taking her?” He shook his head and said, “No.” Then, in Spanish, almost like he was glad to deliver some good news, he told us, “We’re going to fit you for a monitor and cut you loose.”

The grillete.

That’s what they call it in Spanish. It means “shackle.” ICE calls it an “alternative to detention.” But it’s detention. It’s surveillance. It’s punishment in disguise.

They strap it to your ankle. It tracks your every step. It listens. It beeps. It needs to be charged for hours each day, which means you, a human being, must sit plugged into the wall like a used-up phone. You can’t wear it without feeling like a criminal. It pokes through your clothes. It itches. It humiliates.

The man who fitted it on her made jokes. Called it “the new iPhone.” Called it “the latest Apple release.” My client laughed. So did the other woman. That kind of laugh people give when they’ve just narrowly escaped a trap and don’t yet know where they are. Fear mixed with relief mixed with a desperate need to show they’re harmless.

And then we heard it.

A cry from down the hall. The young mother — baby in arms, son in boots — had been told she was being detained. We heard her through the wall. “Why?” she pleaded. “Why are you detaining me?”

We didn’t hear an answer.

We were told we could go.

We stepped back outside and crossed the courtyard. Everyone was watching us. Watching my client’s ankle. Watching her face. Watching me.

No one asked what happened. They didn’t have to. They’d seen enough.

And I couldn’t stop thinking: someone else would be making that drive home alone.

Not me. Not today.

But someone.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe you.

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