Photojournalist documents arrests outside of immigration hearings

Sep 1, 2025 6:40 PM EDT
Sam Lane

... My name is Victor Blue ...

I have been working on immigration coverage pretty much since I kind of started my career over two decades ago. I got my start in Central America. I was able to kind of gain a real understanding of the context and the communities and the dynamics that people were leaving to emigrate to the United States ...

I spent the better part of July and little over the first week of August attending court every day. Early in the morning, there's a long line of immigrants who arrive for their court appointments. The agents are waiting outside. The agents usually are carrying a kind of sheaf of papers.

They include a photograph of their target, the person that they're looking for. When the immigrants leave the courtroom, if they're on that list of targets, they kind of quietly ask them to come with them, maybe take them by the elbow and kind of lead them, maybe not. Oftentimes, they don't even need to. The immigrants just go with them into the area, the bank of elevators or a stairwell, and then kind of head down to the 10th floor detention center.

That was the thing that was most surprising to me. Of course, we have seen footage of kind of aggressive, violent, kind of tense detentions, but the vast majority of them are kind of deceptively quiet. They haven't really realized yet that whatever decision the judge has made really doesn't matter at that point ...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/photojournalist-documents-arrests-outside-of-immigration-hearings