M texted me from the adjacent bedroom at 8 AM: “Wake up.” In the kitchen, he combed out his beard and ate a banana, which his people’s warriors ate to feel full, he told me. I pointed to a stray hair that stuck out of the side of his neck. “I keep meaning to pluck it,” he said.

We arrived at 26 Federal Plaza just after 9 AM. M was wearing clean sneakers, khakis, and a brown suede jacket over a blue button-up. In Mauritania, he had opened a men’s clothing store, a career he hoped to return to here. (His poetry, he said, would never make any money.)

The security guards working the entrance on the west side of the federal building are aggressive to the point of cruelty. They speak loudly at all times, somewhere between a raised voice and a shout. They are for the most part only willing to speak English, though many of them can speak other languages. When somebody doesn’t understand what they are saying, they repeat the English word louder and more quickly. One guard, trying to pass through the metal detector in the wrong direction, yelled at a woman in a state of half dress who had just passed the right way through the metal detector. Her arms were full of the clothes and bags that she had just run through the scanner. The guard approached her quickly, yelling in rapid succession, “Move Move Move MOVE MOVE MOVE MOVE!” The woman did not speak English, and he had boxed her in, so she had to back out through the metal detector to make way for him, with all of her things in her arms, at which point the alarm went off and the guard on the other side of the detector yelled at her, “What do you think you’re doing?!”

M and I walked through the main atrium, where small clusters of men in plain clothes stood with their phones out. This was also new. Unlike the security team for the building, who are mostly Caribbean, South Asian, Arab, or Eastern European immigrants or Black Americans, all the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents I saw in the atrium were white, of medium height and build, and many wore plain baseball caps. They were all men and they stuck out because they displayed an exceeding level of stillness and homogeneity in a room with a flow of people from all over the world, people who were always in motion and who mostly looked different from one another. I could see that one man in each group was holding a stack of papers with headshot photos. M had been seeing the messages and videos circulating in WhatsApp groups about ICE rounding up migrants at the courts. I’d also begun receiving messages from people telling me that their friends had been taken by ICE. Friends were forwarding blurry photos of ID cards, with messages reporting that this or that person has a nearby bed in the shelter and hasn’t returned in three days. A minor had been arrested and my friend was on the phone with the kid’s mom back in Guinea, who hadn’t stopped crying for three days. M said, “I don’t care what they do to me. Only God decides.” He was both lying and telling the truth.

I didn’t point out the agents to M, since my experience in immigration court has so far been that displays of conviction are important to the judge, and that if you hesitate too much or phrase something incorrectly, whether because you are nervous or don’t understand the question or you are in fact lying, it could bring decisive consequences.

M’s hearing had originally been scheduled to be on the twelfth floor, which is a windowless set of hallways. We wandered around looking for his courtroom and around every corner we found the same plainclothes groups, but on this floor I saw an occasional woman and/or nonwhite person. In the end we learned that M’s case had been moved up to the fourteenth floor, also a windowless set of hallways, also peopled at every turn by small clans of plainclothes agents.

The waiting room was filled with about forty people: single men, couples, parents with kids, grandparents with their adult children and grandchildren there to do the translating. Most of the people in the room spoke Spanish from the Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The rest of the room spoke Creole from Haiti, French, Pulaar from Mauritania, and Pular from Guinea. I did not see any lawyers.

For a while, it was quiet in the waiting room. One hour passed, and then two, and people began casting glances, then asking questions, cracking jokes. The Spanish speakers laughed at the differences between their dialects and as they did so a baby who liked making eye contact was passed around so everyone could coo at her in their own ways. The gravity of the room was centered on a tall, handsome Dominican man with scars on his face. He wore a Lakers jersey and he was accompanied by a blonde American who seemed to be his girlfriend and who was learning Spanish.

At one point, a tall man in a blue suit came in to distribute papers. I was suspicious at first that he was trying to get everyone to sign a document agreeing to dismiss their cases, something I’d heard was happening, but he was passing out know-your-rights explainers from Make the Road, a migrant aid organization. The papers detailed, in two pages of dense text, what a case dismissal is and how it leaves you vulnerable to arrest by ICE when you step out of the courtroom. It was better than nothing, but if I were waiting for my own asylum case, I don’t think the document would have been very helpful to me. And anyway, if you didn’t already know the logo, I’m not sure why you would decide to trust this man.

My attention, which had been drifting away from my conversation with M, was brought back when he said, “You don’t understand at all,” an accusation he often levies when we talk about Mauritania. This time we were discussing Peul Mauritanian poets who wrote in French. I had argued that because the more urgent struggle for Peuls was against the hegemony of Arabic in Mauritania, they were less concerned about using French to critique the oppression of Peuls at the hands of the Arabophone White Moors, even though it was the language of their former colonizer.

M explained that this was simply the language they had learned in school.

“But they speak Arabic, too!” I retorted.

M usually finds my takes on the cultural struggles in Mauritania too determined by a simple American understanding of race. He often reminds me, “It isn’t just the Arabs who have slaves, everyone does! But a Peul would never have an Arab slave.”

If I say something he agrees with, he responds by making a clicking sound with his mouth closed, which is a sign of concurrence among all Mauritanians, and says, “Now you understand.”

Master hearings are the first meetings that an asylum seeker has with their judge in immigration court. Usually, after one to three master hearings, the judge will schedule the final meeting, known as an individual hearing.

At Federal Plaza, master hearings are done in batches, with all the Spanish speakers going to the courtroom together, all the Pulaar and Pular speakers together, all the Bangla speakers together, and so on. The groups go in the order of interpreter availability, and today the Pulaar interpreter was the first to appear. M was called back with a man from Guinea, A. I followed M, and a man with a clipboard stopped me, saying that I wasn’t allowed in the courtroom if I wasn’t representing anyone.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that. It’s strange because I’ve come to dozens of hearings in this building,” I told him.

“It’s always been that way,” he told me.

“It’s strange, I’ve accompanied people for master hearings with this judge before,” I told him.

“Well, if there isn’t enough space you can’t come.”

I gestured toward M and A, the only two people he had called, and said, “Of course. Thank you very much. I think there’s enough space.” He let us all back together.

Entering the courtroom, I noticed the judge, the clipboard man, and another medium-build plainclothes white man with short hair. He was wearing a Jurassic Park T-shirt, seated in the back. He had the same papers with headshots, lists of names, and alien registration numbers scattered around him, and he had his phone out, which was usually not allowed in the courtroom.

The judge expressed frustration that the respondents had not yet found lawyers.

A went first. The judge asked a series of questions that are often confusing and misleading to people who don’t have a lawyer. “Are you a citizen of the United States?” Many people hesitate, worrying that they have misunderstood the question. Why would my judge be asking me if I am an American citizen during my asylum hearing? Doesn’t she know why we are here? “Is there a country other than the United States that you want to be returned to?” Is it a trick? Does one have to give a country? Could one say Canada or France, just in case things don’t work out in the United States?

The questions must be asked by the judge to establish whether or not the accusations made by DHS are accurate: that the respondent is indeed a foreign national without status in the United States, and that they are eligible for removal proceedings to their country of origin. But when one is before a judge in a new country with a set of unfamiliar laws and without legal counsel, and one has already answered all these questions on the asylum application that the judge has in front of her, biographical questions are potential accusations.

After these questions, the government attorney, or assistant chief counsel, spoke up for the first time in A’s hearing: “Your honor, we move to dismiss the case being that the situation has changed and it is no longer in the Department’s interests to pursue prosecution.”

I wasn’t allowed to speak or offer legal advice to M in the courtroom, so without looking down for too long, I wrote in my notebook: Ils vont essayer de terminer ton case — tu vas dire NON. Tu as besoin de temps pour trouver un avocat.

I placed it down on the bench between us, keeping my eyes straight ahead, and slid the notebook toward M. We had already rehearsed his response, but the language was confusing and the judge stumbled over her words. I wasn’t sure how the motion would be translated in Pulaar, or if he would recognize it from the practice that we had done in French, where I’d cycled through terminer, abandonner, soumettre une demande de non-lieu, and renvoyer to express “motion to dismiss the case.”

The notebook hadn’t caught M’s attention, so I pushed it closer toward him. I pressed it against his leg gently, worried that I would elicit a visible reaction from him and call the judge’s attention our way. He picked up the notebook and put it in his lap, casting his eyes down to read the note.

Ten feet in front of M, A was still seated in the well of the courtroom. The judge asked the assistant chief counsel, “Have you filed this motion before today?”

“No, your honor.”

“Have you informed the respondent of your plan to issue this motion or made a good faith effort to contact the respondent?”

“No, your honor.”

The two would repeat this process for the rest of the day, for the thirty or so people whose cases followed. “Have you informed the respondent of your plan to issue this motion or made a good faith effort to contact the respondent?”

“No, your honor.”

“No, your honor.”

“No, your honor.”

The assistant chief counsel spent the rest of the hearings typing on her laptop, never looking at the respondents.

The judge explained through the interpreter that the government was asking to dismiss the asylum case, and that the respondent had the opportunity to say whether he wanted the case dismissed or not. A hesitated. “I don’t understand,” he said through the interpreter.

There were two problems. The first was that the request was incomprehensible. A’s fate hinged on his answer to this question, but without understanding its implications it didn’t necessarily stick out as more or less consequential than many other potential land mines in the hearing.

The second problem was that the court doesn’t always distinguish between Peul dialects: the interpreter was speaking Pulaar from Senegal and Mauritania, whereas A’s Pular was from Guinea. Many times, he had to ask the interpreter to repeat himself.

The judge’s approval rate for asylum cases is nearly 70 percent, higher than the average of New York State, which itself has some of the highest approval rates in the country.

She got tripped up trying to explain to A what was actually happening, which would have been the role of an immigration lawyer, had A found one. “If you accept the dismissal — scratch that from the record — if you reject the dismissal — scratch that — if you do not understand what is being asked, or if you do not know the answer, you can ask for more time to speak to a lawyer.” She repeated the last line, leading him to the answer while still tiptoeing around the injunction against giving legal advice. “If you do not understand what is being asked of you, you can say that you need more time to speak to a lawyer.” The judge did not have to do this, and many do not.

A said, “OK,” and the judge denied the motion to dismiss the case. In immigration courts across the nation and down the hall, other judges were granting the motion.

The judge said, “The assistant chief counsel has not followed due process as outlined in the Immigration Court Practice Manual. Furthermore, the respondent clearly does not understand the motion.” The judge set a date for A’s next and final hearing in 2026 and dismissed him.

M’s case went the same, except for the moment when the motion to dismiss the case was brought forth. M speaks the same dialect of Pulaar as the interpreter, and he had spent years studying the grammar of the language. He said confidently, “I don’t want to abandon my case. I need more time to find a lawyer.”

When the judge dismissed M, we went back to the waiting room, which was still filled with the Spanish speakers who would have their hearings next. I tried to quickly explain in very limited Spanish that the lawyer opposing them in the courtroom would ask the judge to dismiss their case. “El abogado para el gobierno quiere anular tu asilo. Puedes decir, ‘No. Quiero continuar con buscando asilo.’ Porque si tu dices ‘sí,’ ICE puede” — here I made a gesture with my hands as though I was grabbing someone — “atraparte.” I looked to the Dominican man in the Lakers jersey for help and he nodded, then turned back to the crowd of faces to explain again. I wasn’t sure if everyone understood because the man with the clipboard had already returned to call the Spanish speakers to the courtroom and was yelling at everyone to be quiet.

I turned to leave with M, but he had left the waiting room. He wasn’t around any of the corners. Four plainclothes men were standing at the elevators, laughing. I took the elevator down and didn’t find him. I tried to call him, but there was no reception in the building. Did they take him when I had my back turned? He would have yelled for me, I thought. I paced for a moment and then decided to go back upstairs. I was pressing the elevator button when M appeared in the hallway. We burst into laughter.

He saw my face and said, “You told me you weren’t scared. You lied to me!”

When we left the federal building, M’s phone buzzed with messages and missed calls from his friends, cousins, and uncles in the US, wondering how his hearing went. He kept laughing. “Look how many people are asking about it!”

We took the 6 train up to Harlem, facing each other. Far from the courtroom, we talked loudly, triumphantly, saying anything we wanted over the screeching wheels.

When we got off, we passed by a CVS to get melatonin and multivitamins. M had been losing weight because he wasn’t sleeping well and wasn’t eating enough. He put the pills in his bag and walked me back to the train before going to the mosque to pray.