Exiling New Yorkers

Prepared by David C. Brotherton
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

I am a sociologist studying the rise of deportations among the legal resident immigrant population of New York City. The phenomenon of forced repatriation for non-citizens has grown exponentially since the passing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 and the Patriot Act of 2001. The following article is based on field notes taken during a recent deportation hearing for a Dominican-born man who had been living and working legally in the United States for twenty seven years. I was called upon to be an “expert witness” based on my knowledge of Dominican deportees, whom I had been researching since 2001. I went to the hearing accompanied by a colleague intending to interview family members on film for a future documentary. The day’s events turned out to be too harrowing and we decided against the intrusive use of the camera. I am currently writing a book on the lives of Dominican deportees in Santo Domingo and the families they have left behind. I have changed the names of the subjects due to a pledge of confidentiality.

We arrive at Eastern Correction facility in Ulster County, New York State, a fortress-like maximum security prison built for human disposables around the 1920s. The building is impressive in its colossal, symbolic might, peering over the Catskills like some hungry ogre. Nearby is the Ulster correctional facility which houses the immigration court. I enter its doors through a reception area and undergo the usual inspections by its security personnel. As we walk back and forth through the security scanner while our bags, coats and shoes pass slowly through an x-ray machine, the guard in charge emphatically announces:

“No keys, pens, cell phones, or pills, just some papers needed for the court for those who are testifying.”

Meanwhile, lounging on two rows of padded black plastic chairs, seven guards are hanging around relaxed, friendly, and chatting while observing the events, perhaps this is the end of their shift or they are awaiting the beginning of it. The guard in charge returns to the business at hand.

“You’re here for the Delgado trial?” directing his question at me.

“Yes, and this is my assistant,” I responded motioning to my colleague who is standing at my side.

“They only said one of you was coming. We only have a permission slip for one person. We’ve already had twenty one of them come in. That’s the most we’ve ever had here for a court appearance. Usually it’s three or four but twenty one! That’s almost more than our entire staff here sometimes,” he adds with a wry smile. “Isn’t that true guys,” he says, addressing his fellow workers. “Sometimes we only have seven people here on duty and there’s this family with twenty one of them!”

“Well, I guess they’re all here to support him,” I retorted.

The guard glances up, raising his eyebrows, “I suppose so. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. So you’re the expert witness are you? You do a lot of this? I mean, you know a lot about this deportation thing?”

“Yes, I do a lot of it,” I reply, “I spent a year in the Dominican Republic seeing how deportees are living. It’s very difficult for them, very difficult. There are no jobs, the cops blame them for everything. They don’t have a chance.”

The guard looks at me straight on, shakes his head and says, “Crazy isn’t it? I mean, they’ve already done their bids and then they get this at the end of it. I guess they’ll have to come right back over here again won’t they. You know, they’ll have to get in any way they can and just hope they don’t get caught cuz you know its another three years in the federal pen if they do.”

“Yes,” I said, somewhat taken aback at the guard’s sympathy and candor, “that’s what some of them do but then there’s a lot that stay over there and try to make it.”

Finally, he finds the permission letters, hands us each a visitors’ badge and escorts us to an office positioned next to two security gates. There our hands get stamped with a special ink that can only be read by a special machine.

“There’ll be another guard here in a minute to escort you,” says our man-in-charge, “Here she comes now.”

Standing on the other side of the double gate is a tall, well-built Hispanic female who nods at us then signals to someone in the security office. Suddenly, the gate on her side is electronically opened and she enters into a sort of no man’s land, between both gates. The gate behind her abruptly closes immediately followed by the gate in front of her opening. After several minutes of this security ritual she is standing next to us.

“You got everything?” she inquires.

I nod my head affirmatively, a little bemused at the question.

“Let’s go then,” she continues and gestures to a guard to open the gate again. Our escort is affable and jovial and we quickly strike up a conversation as we traverse the grounds.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask.

“Ten years,” she answers, “Came from Bedford Hills.”

“Yes, I know it.  It’s the prison for female inmates,” I reply, “Did you like it?”

Her pace slows slightly as she turns her head toward me, as if for emphasis.

“The women? Oooh! they’re crazy,” she answers, elongating the word ‘crazy.’ “Compared to the men, pure crazy.”

“And here? How are the inmates here?” I respond.

“Here, they’re fine, no problem.”

We reach the immigration court via a path that passes between several inmate dormitories. For a prison (or a distribution center for recently adjudicated inmates mainly coming up from Rikers Island which this is) the accommodation looks relatively cheery and clean. The surroundings are bucolic with snow-capped hills providing the backdrop and the sound of a rushing stream breaking the silence. Of course, I can’t help thinking how ironic it all is, the inmates so unfree while this beautiful wintry nature appears as free as a bird.

At the entrance to the immigration court building another guard greets us, inspects our visitors’ badges, and checks our names against a list. He then escorts us to a room where those asked to testify must congregate and wait to be called. While waiting, I talk to Mr. Delgado’s father, mother, niece and fourteen year-old son. The father and mother are clearly agitated, talking almost manically about the need for their son to come home and to put an end to this tragedy. They talk as if they are trying to wake up from a nightmare.

 “He should never have pleaded guilty,” he says in a heavily accented Dominican Spanish, “the lawyers said if he pleaded guilty he would only do 3 years. He never said anything about being deported. He said he might have to do 15 years if he didn’t plead guilty. My son didn’t do anything. He’s a good boy. He’s always lived with his mother and father. How can they do this to us? All he wanted to do was play baseball. When he couldn’t play anymore he started to drink. He started to get depressed. But why does it end up with this. Oh God, Oh Maria, we are good religious people, we go to church. He was raised a good boy. Why this?”

The father continues in the same desperate vein, speaking rapidly. He is not willing to accept what is happening or what might be about to take place. The mother is the same. She starts to pray and calls upon God to help reunite her with her son.

“I am an old woman, I have terrible blood pressure, I cannot take the stress. My heart, my heart can’t take it. I love my son. I don’t want to see him taken away. He’s my baby, my son, I can’t stand it, I can’t.”

The niece then starts to explain to me about the background to the case. She recounts how her uncle got into a physical altercation with someone in a bakery when he was drunk and how the owner of the bakery called the police two days later when her uncle returned to buy something.

“There was no evidence, nothing,” the niece intoned, “they couldn’t produce anything that he stole, nothing. There was no weapon. It was just this guy’s word and my uncle was drunk. My uncle is a good man. He wouldn’t hurt anyone. They forced him to do this, to say that he was guilty. You know how they do. We are a vulnerable people. We are Latino immigrants, when the lawyers tell these things to us we believe them. When they say that you’ll do fifteen years you believe them. To us they are the law. We are always afraid, always. That’s why he’s in this mess. It’s crazy. What kind of justice is this?”

Suddenly a guard appears, “A Doctor Brotherton? Is there a Doctor Brotherton here?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I said, and bid my farewell to the family while following the guard to the appeals court.

Inside the court room seated along the back and the front side walls are the rest of Mr. Delgado’s family members, including his five sisters, his seven year old son, his nieces, nephews, and brothers-in-law. It’s an example of the central importance of family in Dominican life, especially when this micro-community is under such pressure.

The judge beckons, “Dr. Brotherton please stand here and raise your right hand.”

“Do you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?”

“I do sir,” I said.

“Please take a seat,” said the judge.

The lawyer for Mr. Delgado looks at me, smiles and begins his cross-examination. He first asks me to describe who I am and what I do. He then asks a series of questions that revolve around whether or not deportees are likely to be tortured by the Dominican government or whether the police will torture them with the complicity of the government. I did my best to paint a picture that fitted this scenario but I couldn’t honestly say that torture is something deportees should expect. Rather, I said that in the present climate where deportees are being scapegoated then it follows that the police who are often authoritarian and out-of-control will abuse them. It also follows that many will land back in prison, after being put in preventive custody. Given the nature of the Dominican prison system, its appalling lack of resources and the normalization of brutality that goes on inside, it is likely that such deportees will suffer physical and psychological harm. The judge then countered that this was not the same as torture. Physical abuse and beatings by the police do not meet the criteria, he said. What was torture? It was the government-sanctioned use of extreme pain to extract information from a subject. It was the pulling out of people’s finger nails, the attachment of electrodes to people’s testicles, and the extraction of teeth without anesthetic. That was torture.

“As I have said, time and time again, Mr. Crichter (Mr. Delgado’s lawyer), you fail to make the case that deportees will be tortured at the behest of the Dominican government. Rather, you assert repeatedly that, in general, harm will come to these deportees. I have no doubt that the country we are sending them to is a bad place. I have no doubt that the deportees do not wish to go there and that life will be difficult for them. I have no doubt that for some of them it will lead to serious harm. But that, according to the law of the United States, is not the same as torture. If I were to allow such evidence, if I were to agree with you that that is torture, this appeal will simply be turned down at the next level, which is the Board of Appeals in Washington. They have done this to me already. I had a gentleman here who was going to be sent back to Barbados with full-blown AIDS. The man desperately needed his daily cocktails. His lawyer argued that if he were sent back there would be no chance that he would continue to be treated and therefore be kept alive. I agreed with him and I ruled that in such a case we would be sending this man to his death. The Board of Appeals disagreed with me and sent him to what I am almost certain was his death. That, Mr. Crichter, is the law of this land.”

The judge’s words unintentionally exposed and explained the depth of cruelty and injustice that characterize these policies. Here was one of the firmest believers in American law condemning its lack of morality and rationality simply by recounting the evolution of a case that he had just tried. I’m not sure how this was received by all who sat there but for me it was absolutely clear that poor Mr. Delgado will assuredly be spending much of the next twenty years in a country he hardly knows.

“If you wish to stay here and watch the rest of the proceedings Dr. Brotherton then please do so,” said the judge.

“Thank you, judge. I would very much like to observe the rest of the hearing,” I answered and took my seat in the middle of the court room.

“Who is your next expert witness Mr. Crichter?” boomed the judge.

“I want to call Hector Delgado, the father of my client, judge,” said the lawyer.

The next hour and a half proved to be the most dramatic demonstration of the barbarity of laws conceived by humans to control, condemn and abuse other humans in a so-called democratic society that I have ever witnessed. The seventy-five year old father entered the room escorted by a guard. He stood in the witness box next to the judge who asked him if he spoke English.

“No, señor,” he answered, whereupon the translator, a dark-skinned, middle-aged Latina seated in front of me to my right, began to translate word for word, exclamation for exclamation, the statements of the next two experts in this hearing.

The lawyer for the defense began to ask Mr. Delgado about how many times he had returned to the Dominican Republic during the last ten years. Mr. Delgado answered that he used to go regularly while his parents were alive. His father lived to be 95 and his mother 104, he proudly stated. But when they died in the late 1990’s he would go less and then when his son got locked up in 2003 he hardly went at all. The lawyer then asked him about what he thought his son would be facing in the Dominican Republic. Mr. Delgado answered, “Nothing but crime and delinquency…nothing but hardship, problems, injustice.”

“Do you think your son will be tortured when he goes back?” asked the lawyer.

The father stood there and wondered for a while. He tried to grasp the real meaning of the question that in the eyes of the court, by saying yes this was the only way he could get his son to stay in this country. Finally, he said,

“Yes. He will face torture.”

“How do you know, Mr. Delgado?” asked the lawyer

“Because that is the kind of place my country is. It is a place where the police kill people for nothing, absolutely nothing. They don’t care about anybody, especially the deportees.”

“Have you seen the police kill anybody?” asked the lawyer.

“Yes, I have,” answered the father.

“Can you tell us about it?” asked the lawyer.

“In the neighborhood where I used to live in Santiago I saw a jeep full of police come up and pull out their rifles and go boom, boom to some guy. He fell dead. I couldn’t believe it. ‘I said to a neighbor what are they doing?’ ‘The police have just shot a guy,’ the neighbor said. I didn’t want to stay there. I moved away immediately.”

The father then makes a gesture with his hands as if he’s pushing away the words he’d just uttered, as if brushing away a memory.

“So you actually saw the police kill someone?” said the judge.

“Yes, I did. I saw them kill this man and then bundle him into the back of a jeep and drive off. That’s what the police do in my country. That’s why I am so afraid to let my son, my only son go back there. I want him to stay here, judge. Oh God, Oh Maria, I want him to stay here with his family. Please, please, give him clemency. We are all known in our neighborhood. We have been here for thirty years. America has been good to us. We love America. We had nothing when we came here. My son drinks and gets depressed. The police, the police, they find him and bring him home. They say, “Mr. Delgado, look after your son. We found him drunk again. He’s got to take care of himself.”

At this point Mr. Delgado starts to visibly shake. The people around the room are now howling in tears. The sisters, the brothers-in-law, the seven year-old son, and the defendant, nobody is immune from the rising tension that has been created by the questions and by the desperation in the father’s creaking voice.  The guard picks up a box of tissues and starts to hand them out. First one, then another, then literally dozens of tissues are being issued to the audience who cannot control their grief and sorrow. The judge then turns to the defense lawyer.

“Mr. Crichter, was all this necessary? Did you have to put this father through this? I am a man probably the same age or even older than Mr. Delgado and I have a son like Roberto. I feel for this man but he is unable to answer your questions in the way you would like. He has not been able to state factually that his son will face torture by the government when he returns and that is the crux of this case. So why do you put your witness through this? Why are you putting this family through this? Your job is to present a case to me, Mr. Crichter. You cannot help it if you don’t have a case and I am afraid you don’t have a case. We have been here now for four hours. Normally, this hearing would last one hour. But with all the family members here who have traveled so far from New York to see their brother, their uncle, their son and to support him, I have decided that this trial has to play itself out. There is no other way. But, I must tell you that I find it disagreeable and unnecessary to put people through such emotional turmoil and pain like this.”

“I’m sorry, judge,” says the lawyer, “I am just trying to show the court the probability of what faces my client. I have to work with what I have. I am just doing my job to the best of my ability.”

“Do you have any questions counsel?” the judge asks the lawyer representing the government.

“No, judge,” comes the reply.

“Mr. Delgado, please take a seat,” instructs the judge in a pleasant but firm manner.

The father walks somewhat bewilderedly back to the center of the room and sits down a couple seats to my left. I look at him and smile but he fails to respond.  His face expresses a mixture of disbelief, frustration and anxiety. How can this be happening to him at this stage in his life. He has gone through countless hardships to raise his six children. He left the country of his birth in 1972, seven years after the Revolution, in the middle of the bloody Berlaguer dictatorship with his entire family. He never had another child in the United States. He has managed so far to keep all his family together. Everyone was doing so well with the exception recently of his son. His daughters got married, they had beautiful children, lots of them. He still lives in the same house as when he moved here in that fateful year…and now this. How could he prepare himself for this moment when the very country that he has believed in all these years, that gave him an opportunity to be somebody, to live decently, to experience joy and happiness, how can this country do this to him, to his son? It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense.

“Who do you want to call now?” the judge asks of Mr. Delgado’s lawyer.

“I want to call the mother of Roberto Delgado,” the lawyer replies.

“Are we going to see the same thing, Mr. Crichter.? Are you going to put her through this too? Does she know what torture is? Have you schooled her? Have you?” asks the judge.

“Yes, I think so,” says the lawyer diffidently.

The mother is brought into the court room by the guard. She looks very tense, as if she is just holding it all together. On entering the witness box she goes through the ritual with the bible and sits down. The defense lawyer begins the questions.

“Do you follow what is going on in the Dominican Republic Mrs. Delgado?”

“Yes, I try to,” she says.

“How do you do this?” asks the lawyer.

“Through listening to the news, through friends,” Mrs. Delgado replies.

“What do you think faces your son if he is deported to the Dominican Republic?” asks the lawyer.

“Delinquency, nothing but delinquency. Nothing good can come of this. I know he will face terrible things, I know this. My country will harm him, I know this.”

“Do you think your son will be tortured if he is returned?” asks the lawyer

The mother just sits after the question is translated. She looks apoplectically at the audience. God knows what’s going through her mind, the question is too pointed, too harrowing to be answered.

“Do you understand the questions?” asks the judge.

Again, the mother just looks at the audience and begins to pat her chest. She then begins to talk, as if channeling something from another universe.

“Yes, I believe something terrible will happen to him. I believe the police will hurt him. I can’t bare to think about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to think about this evil. Can I say something? May I say something?” the mother asks the judge.

“Yes, you may,” replies the judge as he looks down at his feet as if to communicate “here we go again.”

The mother then gets to her feet and raises her hands in the air as if praying in a Pentecostal church.

“Oh God, Oh Jesus, Oh Maria, I pray to you, release my son from this trial. Oh Judge, please forgive my son. Please have the power, the pity to allow my son to go free. Allow him to come back to his mother and father, that’s all we ask. He’s a good boy. He doesn’t mean ill to anyone. What use is this to take him away from us and his children. Please, please I beg you….”

The mother continues for several more minutes beseeching the judge to release her son. The family members are again sobbing uncontrollably, men and women alike are howling in grief. Even one of the guards, a bulky African-American man, is beginning to break down and I see tears start to run slowly down his cheeks. The mother suddenly stops, turns away from the judge and looking glassy-eyed, collapses into the chair and closes her eyes. There is now pandemonium in the court room and the judge orders one of the guards to call a nurse. After about three minutes the mother comes around, having feinted, and is holding her chest and breathing heavily. One of her daughters runs over and holds her head, stroking her hair gently and whispering softly that “everything’s alright,” which is about the furthest thing from the truth right now.

At this point a nurse comes into the room with another guard and between them they get the mother to her feet and take her outside and place her in a chair. They are joined outside by someone who looks like a doctor with a stethoscope round his neck. The mother does not return to the room and we find out later that she is taken to the hospital where she is diagnosed with having suffered a mild heart attack. The judge looking exhausted and exasperated turns to the defense lawyer.

“Now what, Mr. Crichter? Now who are we going to have? Please don’t let’s go through this again. It is not helping your case. It is not helping Mr. Delgado.” But his questions are misdirected. It is not the family that doesn’t have a case or the lawyer, but in a humane society it is the U.S. government that is on the wrong side of the ethical, rational divide and everyone in the court room knows it. I would wager that even the guards would agree that this inflexible policy leading to mass social exclusion and family fragmentation, targeting mainly black and Latino communities, is senseless. There are no winners only losers and it is costing the U.S. tax payer hundreds of millions of wasted resources.

“I would like to call Jessina X…., the niece of Robert Delgado,” answers the lawyer, somewhat chastened by the flood of undermining comments from the judge and, of course, by the inability of most of his witnesses to speak to the almost impossible subject of torture.

The niece enters the door led by a guard and confidently strides to the witness box. I had spoken to her earlier, and she had told me that she had recently graduated from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I asked her about the case and though she was better informed than I was about the history, she had very little knowledge of the Dominican Republic except through the occasional holiday and neither did she know too much about the finer details of the 1996 immigration act or the subsequent anti-terrorist acts all of which were playing a role in the expulsion of her uncle. After swearing the oath and taking a seat the questions begin once more.

“Do you understand what is facing your uncle, Roberto Delgado?” asks the defense lawyer.

“Yes, I do. I have read about cases like his on the internet and I have tried to do some research around the subject.”

“So you know that the only way we can halt your uncle’s deportation is through proving the probability of torture when he arrives there?”

“Yes,” says the niece, “I understand that this is his only chance.”

“So, what do you understand by torture?”

“Well, for me, it is the application of extreme forms of pain and punishment to someone in an attempt to get information and just to terrorize someone. This punishment can be physical, it can come from beatings but also from the denial of food to someone. It can also be psychological and emotional,” the niece makes an impressive statement and surprises me at how cool, calm and collected she can be under the circumstances.

“Thank you,” says the lawyer. “So, do you think that this form of torture will be facing your uncle when he goes back to his homeland? If so, why do you think this will happen?” asks the lawyer, who is now beginning to regain some of his composure.

“Well, let me see,” says the niece. “I can’t say for certain that this will happen to him but I do know how Dominican society feels towards deportees and I do know how violent and brutal the police are. I can tell you that Dominicans think of deportees as less than human. They are nothing to them and are blamed for everything that goes wrong in the country. And if they are thinking this then you can imagine what the police are thinking. The police simply treat them like dirt. They beat them, kill them, torture them, they do whatever they like to them.”

“How do you know this?” asks the defense lawyer.

“Because when I’ve been back there for holidays, when I’ve been staying in the capital, I hear what people say about them and I have had dealings with the police just driving around,” answers the niece.

“Now hold on here,” says the judge. “None of this means anything. This has nothing at all to do with the conditions of torture that need to apply in this case. For a start, your definition of torture is all wrong. As I’ve said before, it is about pulling finger nails, taking out teeth, attaching electrodes to testicles…that’s torture. Not all this talk about being denied food and psychological punishment, that’s not what we’re talking about under this law. And as for giving testimony on the probability of torture, you’ve proceeded to talk about how bad the police are and how nasty the people can be toward deportees but that’s irrelevant, absolutely irrelevant. You have to be specific, factual. Mr. Crichter, once again I must ask you, have you prepared your witness?”

“Yes, judge, as much as I could. I am just trying to show that…”

“I know what you are trying to show, Mr. Crichter, and I am trying to keep this trial focused and it is proving impossible.” The judge then turns back to Ms. X…

“Ms. X., do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, judge. I understand what you are saying but do you understand what I am saying. I think I understand what torture is and maybe it doesn’t satisfy the needs of this court and maybe I have it all wrong but I don’t think so. It is this court that has it all wrong. If you want to know what torture is, this is torture. What you are doing to my uncle is torture. Look at it here! Look at what the laws are doing! It is tearing up our family. It is tearing my uncle away from his children, his mother, his father and his loved ones. What justice is there in this? I have done my research. I have studied criminal justice and I don’t see any here today. There is torture, yes, and it is here. This is torture but there is no justice.”

“Thank you, Ms. X.,” says the judge. “I understand your feelings, you may step down. Who do we have next, Mr. Crichter?”

“I would like to call the son of Roberto Delgado, Roberto Junior.”

The new expert witness enters the door somewhat hesitatingly with his head bowed led by a guard. He is a handsome boy with long, thick black hair.  He stares at his father who looks back at him with great intensity and tears in his eyes. The judge is kindly toward him and gently asks him to take a seat after being sworn in. The judge turns to the lawyers and says:

“Mr. Crichter, I am allowing this witness but only for very few, specific and direct questions. Do you understand? I want no repeats of what has gone on before.”

“Yes, judge,” says the lawyer, “I understand.”

“Mr. Delgado, do you understand what might happen to your father?”

“Yes,” says the boy, “he’s going to be deported.”

“And do you understand what is meant by torture?”

The boy looks at the lawyer and slowly looks down at his feet. After a while, he shakes his head. The judge says, “you have to say something Roberto. You cannot just nod for

the court.” The boy returns the judge’s look.

“No,” says the boy, “I don’t understand.”

The lawyer now looks down at his feet and shakes his head. It is interesting how bodily gestures are starting to mimic one another.

“Ok,” says the lawyer, “ok, that’s enough. You may step down Roberto. Please step down.”

The boy looks up and turns to the judge. The judge says gently, “Its ok, just take a seat.”

The boy goes to the middle of the room and sits behind his father. He cups his head in his hands and begins to sob, silently, his shoulders and upper body motioning up and down rhythmically, but there is no sound. As I look around, I see his little brother staring at him with tears running down his cheeks and his eyes swollen and red. It is heart breaking for me, as I think of my own children and how they would be reacting if I were to be taken from them. The process is simply insane, insane.

“Now, we have had all the witnesses, is that right Mr. Crichter?” says the judge.

“Yes, that’s correct, judge,” the lawyer answers.

“I have allowed this court all the time it takes to come to some kind of judgment. Up till now I see nothing that alters the opinion of the court that Mr. Delgado will be deported. He will be returned to his homeland after completing his sentence which, I believe, has five months more to run. Now, Mr. Delgado, before I fill out the forms confirming your deportation do you have anything more to say?”

“Yes, judge, I do.”.

Mr. Delgado stands up and looks around the room, tears are in his eyes and his face too is swollen from the strain and the crying.

“I want to tell you and my family that I am no thief. I’ve never taken anything from anyone in my life, not even a pair of nail clippers. What happened to me was wrong. It was a miscarriage of justice. I agreed to a plea for something I didn’t do. I thought I was gonna get a short sentence and then be released. I thought if I didn’t do that I was gonna get 15 years, that’s what they threatened me with. No-one told me I was gonna get this. Ok, I have a temper and I can get violent. It happens when I drink and I’d been drinking when all this happened. I don’t remember much about it except the guy gets the better of me and I go home. That’s about it. But I didn’t steal nothing from nobody. All I wanted to be was a baseball player, that’s all. I got a scholarship to some university but it didn’t work out. I didn’t get picked up and so I got depressed. I get very depressed and I start to drink. I know I need treatment for this but I don’t need jail and I don’t need to be torn away from everything I love. This is my life here. I’ve been here since I was a kid. This is all I know. Here’s my family right here. I don’t have no family where you wanna send me. What am I gonna do there? Where am I gonna live? How am I gonna see my children again? Where’s the justice in all of this?”

“Why, Mr. Delgado, didn’t you become a citizen like your sisters? Why?” asks the judge.

“Because I can’t read or write, judge. I knew if I took the test I wouldn’t be able to write down all those names of the states. I wouldn’t be able to write down the answers to all those questions that they were gonna ask me, that’s why. I got a scholarship to a college when I was a kid, somewhere in Oklahoma, to play baseball but they never taught me to read or write. It’s as simple as that.”

The words that come out of Mr. Delgado’s mouth are astounding. It’s as if this whole theater is an exercise in different levels of humiliation. I was thinking how much courage it took for him to make this statement. The bitter truth of his situation reveals itself in his suffering that happened long ago, not just in the last few years. The marginality of his race and class, the cynical, mass packaging of the American Dream, the shattered hopes of the parental immigrant generation, the children left fatherless, resentful and traumatized, these are all the truths embedded in his final plea. Only this time there was no bargaining. The decision was non-negotiable. Mr. Delgado didn’t even bother to ask for an appeal. At this moment he was a broken man. The unassailable logic of the immigration laws won the day. They had gotten their man. He was ejected with seemingly due process in the American way through the court system. Of course, objectively, the odds were massively against him from the beginning, but the appearance was maintained, as the judge often remarked, “this trial will play itself out.”  As we exit the prison I turned to the translator who had performed so magnificently throughout, never wavering in her concentration for a second.

“Do you do a lot of these hearings?” I ask her.

“Yes, all the time. I’ve been doing them for years,” she answers.

“It was quite a day, wasn’t it?” I follow up, rather inanely. “I bet these kinds of scenes are quite unusual aren’t they? I mean, the intensity of it.”

She looked at me a bit puzzled and then, in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner, she retorts:

“No,” she said, “They are quite common. I work under these conditions very frequently. It is a very emotional job. I try to keep calm and professional, to be of maximum service.”

On the drive back to New York City, my colleague excitedly and vividly recounts how he experienced the day’s extraordinary events. After a while he begins to focus on a single, seemingly undeniable conclusion:“What kills me about this country is its self-representation. How it continually tells the world that it’s the freest, the most democratic place on earth and yet its practice is totally the reverse. What’s the difference between what this country is doing and what the Soviet Union was doing? Tell me, what’s the difference?”