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It’s been a chaotic year in San Francisco immigration court. At least 88 asylum seekers have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at their court hearings. More than half of the immigration judges have been fired. A climate of fear and uncertainty pervades.
At the center of it all, immigration attorney Milli Atkinson has been holding things together. She leads the San Francisco Bar Association’s Attorney of the Day program, which provides people from all over Northern California with free legal advice when they show up to immigration court. She also leads San Francisco’s Rapid Response Network, finding legal representation for anyone in the city arrested by ICE.
The Guardian followed along on a recent high-stakes day in court, as she pivoted from case to case – and tried to keep herself sane. The following is a narrative retelling of a typical day, built from Atkinson’s own words and additional reporting.
***
5am – home in San Rafael
Your alarm goes off at 5am. You drag yourself out of bed while checking Signal to see if any messages about ICE arrests came in overnight on the rapid response network’s hotline.
You’re not a morning person, but you have to get to court by 8am, otherwise you’ll miss the already small window you have to give undocumented immigrants legal advice before their hearing starts. You write a to-do list while making instant coffee, trying to anticipate everything that could go wrong and brace yourself for the fires you might have to put out.
You and your colleagues are often the only source of legal advice for immigrants from all over northern California – from Humboldt to Monterey counties – squeezed into the minutes between when they get seated in court and when the judge starts the hearing. If you’re late, you can’t do your job, and that can land people in detention or deported.
If anyone in San Francisco is arrested by ICE, the city’s Rapid Response Network calls you and you call your network of volunteer attorneys to make sure someone can get that person immediate legal advice. You’re on call 24/7. During the first Trump administration, you’d get one or two calls a month. Now you’re dispatching two to three attorneys a week.
On your commute into the city, you try to take a mental break with some apolitical talk radio. The light as you drive over the golden gate bridge is gentle and the clouds are stunning.
8am – San Francisco federal court
At 8am sharp, iced coffee in hand, you join the line outside 630 Sansom Street, a federal building that houses immigration court, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as well as ICE’s field office.
Several dozen people are waiting for appointments with USCIS and you know today will not end well for some of them. 10 to 20 people per day are detained by ICE at these appointments to meet the administration’s deportation quotas.
You show your ID as you go through security, then head to the elevator and press the button for the fourth floor. Families are beginning to arrive with their children of all ages in tow. They speak in hushed tones outside the courtroom.
When the doors open, families squeeze into the wooden pews. Before the judge arrives, you introduce the Attorney of the day program in Spanish. Since ICE’s court arrests, you’ve started doing a roll call of your clients so that nobody just disappears, leaving attorneys trying to reverse engineer who they are.
Your staff speak over 32 different languages, but it’s still a major sticking point. Today the judge called in an interpreter service for Khazak, but no such interpreter was available. Others spoke Hindi and Mam, an indigenous Mayan language spoken in Guatemala.
The stakes of a miscommunication are high: filling out a form incorrectly, or not understanding a question, can get them accused of lying and cost them their asylum case. Legal advice lost in translation can land them in detention and on a deportation flight. But the dial-in translation service can be spotty: today, the crackle and hiss of the phone connection is so bad the judge hangs up.
The judge asks people if they brought their evidence documents and if they have been translated into English. Clarifies to a man that, no, his wife’s asylum petition does not cover him. He has to file his own. But he didn’t realize that and now has been in the country for too long to qualify.
The judge races through a high volume of these asylum cases in rapid succession, so you have to know what you’re doing and problem solve instantaneously.
You tell people that if a government attorney tries to dismiss their asylum case, and the judge approves it, then ICE will likely arrest them. You tell them: make sure to explain to the judge you don’t want to end your case. You’re whispering to people at the back of a courtroom, knowing that ICE is waiting outside.
This isn’t your first rodeo. During the first Trump administration, there was a lot of confusion, tough rhetoric and policy being implemented in a strange way. This time, the administration seemed prepared to carry out policies as quickly as it can, whether they’re lawful or not. The sheer number of people being detained makes this much more intense. You have to pace yourself – because every day feels like an onslaught.
10am – tour of the ICE field office
You take a group of three journalists and a city supervisor on a tour of the sixth floor of the federal courthouse, where an ICE field office is being used to hold people detained by ICE.
Your clients tell you they have been held, sometimes for days, without private toilets or medical care, and limited access to legal counsel. They say the rooms are freezing cold with bright lights 24 hours a day. They say they don’t have beds, they don’t have a change of clothes, they don’t have access to hygiene materials, and the food is often inedible. (In response to an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of people detained by ICE, a district court judge issued a preliminary injunction in November requiring the conditions of ICE holding cells be improved. ICE referred a Guardian inquiry about conditions at the San Francisco holding room to the Department of Homeland Security, who did not respond before publication.)
You show them the hallway and the tiny room where detainees can speak with an attorney. The tiny room, cut in half by thick glass, has two separate entrances and a room for two attorneys on one side and two detainees on the other, connected by phones on the walls.
Without a person’s full, official name, ICE won’t give an attorney access to the room. This has been especially difficult for trans asylum seekers whose adopted names don’t match the names in their documents.
You head back to the lobby and give an interview to one journalist, and give a second interview while walking to a cafe a couple blocks away. There is a fourth journalist who wants to meet you, so you have your third coffee of the day while giving an interview before moving on to the fourth journalist. The past months have been non-stop media requests.
12.30pm – back at the office
You walk back to the office for your weekly staff meeting. Attorneys and project heads share what they’re working on – the Immigrant Legal Defense Program that you lead is just one of many programs at the San Francisco Bar Association. You give HR and organizational updates from the executive management, go over schedules and do a round of shoutouts to express gratitude.
Immigration attorneys receive training to cope with vicarious trauma – but now, you’re dealing with direct trauma. Now, you’re watching families being arrested, breastfeeding mothers, pregnant women, being taken away in handcuffs and shackles, all because they showed up for their court hearing.
There are days when you break down into tears. There’s days when your staff breaks down into tears.
You have to lead by example and not overwork yourself into burnout, which is a balancing act when everything feels like a crisis. If you can delegate, you delegate. If you can’t, you just tell people you’re sorry. If you give everything you’ve got, non-stop, without a break, every single day, it’s impossible to keep going.
5pm – trying to switch off
Even if you’re not finished with your work for the day, you have to force yourself to close your computer at 5pm and go for a walk outside.
You hate running, but you’ve started running because you suck at meditation and you need a way to force yourself to think about your breathing.
You also disconnect from reports on torture with a historical romance novel. It has to be complete trash – so low-level that you don’t have to engage very much and can skip a couple pages without losing the plot.
You check social media hoping for light pop culture content; TikTok has destroyed your attention span. You try not to doomscroll, but the algorithm keeps serving up videos of ICE arrests.
You make sure to stick to your weekly activities: tap dancing on Tuesdays, going to your sister’s house to play mahjong on Thursdays. You force yourself to spend time with friends and family, even if you’re not in the mood. They know not to ask you about immigration or what’s in the news.
You’ve been doing this work so long that you’re in it for the long game. You’re planning to be on call on Christmas Day, because you don’t want any of your staff to have to and you know ICE officers have been working weekends and on federal holidays.
You grew up in a family that valued helping others, in a California town with a multicultural heritage where classrooms taught in English and Spanish. As an American, it breaks your heart to see what your country has come to. It feels like you’re in a bizarre alternate universe where the law doesn’t apply anymore.
If there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the hope that policy changes can be reversed and people will see how unlawful they are.
You’ve also found success filing Habeas Corpus petitions in federal courts, arguing that a person’s detention is in violation of their constitutional right to due process. Every person your team filed this for has been released – 44 people – but you only adopted that strategy in September.
The recent wins on Habeas Corpus cases give you hope. Having attorneys show up for Attorney of the Day gives you hope. Seeing people turn out for rallies and marches in solidarity with the immigrant community gives you hope, and helps you feel like you’re not alone.
