The federal immigration court is located in a large cinder block building tucked away on a side road, in a quiet industrial park off Route 30 in York, PA. A person looking at the building would have a hard time distinguishing it from the York County Prison. The immigration court is housed, in fact, in the York County Prison.
Inside the cinder block walls of the prison, immigrants are detained and federal immigration judges make decisions that will change the course of an immigrant’s life.
Professor Jill Family regularly takes her immigration law class to sessions at the court to help them gain a real-life perspective about immigration court proceedings.
“Visiting an immigration detention center is often a transformative experience for my students,” Professor Family said. “Seeing the reality of immigration detention- that it really is no different than criminal incarceration- informs my students that representing detained foreign nationals provides for a lifetime of meaningful work.”
The students watched a handful of cases where the U.S. government has charged a foreign national as removable (deportable) from the United States. The students saw “master calendar hearings,” which are shorter, preliminary hearings when the immigration judge decides what issues in the case need more in depth attention and whether a foreign national will be detained while he or she waits for a longer “individual hearing.” The students watched the proceedings from an observation room in the court. The observation room is separated from the court room by a glass partition and seats in the observation room face the judge’s bench. The detained foreign nationals appeared in court in orange prison jumpsuits, often without an attorney. Immigration Judge Walter Durling presided over the docket and an attorney from the Department of Homeland Security represented the government. .
Judge Durling’s legal assistant, who is a law student at Widener Law Commonwealth, is Dwight Quichua. Quichua is an extended division student who attends law school in the evenings, and is a candidate for graduation in the spring.
Quichua said that he does have an interest in pursuing immigration law after graduation, and his experiences as a legal assistant in the immigration court have helped him to focus his interests and to gain a greater understanding of immigration law. “I have a passion for immigration law,” he said.
For some of the law students, this was their first experience with immigration court, and it proved to be an eye-opening and moving experience.
“It was surprising and somewhat difficult to watch some of the more sympathetic deportation proceedings, one of which stuck with me even on the drive home. This case involved a young lady who was ordered to be deported and had come to America for opportunity, as her family back home was very poor and opportunity was limited,” said 2L law student Gregory Seiders. “The judge was sympathetic and even told her he wished there was something he could do.”
Margaret Nollau, a 2L law student, found that observing the immigration proceedings helped the material she was studying in class come to life.
“I understand the material better now because I have seen the proceedings play out in court. Instead of visualizing what the process looks like, I now have memories to attach to the information,” said Nollau. “It will help me in the future as a lawyer because I will know exactly what to expect in an immigration proceeding and can prepare accordingly.”
Professor Family makes it a point to remind her students that law is more than just theory; that it also makes huge real-world impacts.
“Immigration law is all about people, so it is important to inject humanity into the course,” she said. “Part of that happens in the classroom, where we consistently discuss the law’s effect on individuals, but a field trip to immigration court is an even more powerful way to observe the interaction between law and people’s lives.”
