By Luna Ramirez Castellanos
At 9:10 AM, a line wraps around the Ted Weiss Federal Building; the quiet crowd is pressed against the towering facade. Farther down the road, NYPD officers and two Federal Protective Service cars are stationed. A security guard paces around the line; handcuffs and a gun are visible in his back pocket. From time to time, he pushes to move into line: “Hey! One line. Make it to the side of the building.” Amidst the chaos, an Argentinian priest hopes to bring calm to those awaiting their hearings: “No tengan ningún miedo. ICE no está acá.” [“Don’t be afraid. ICE is not here”] Rev. Eduardo Fabian Arias goes to court every day.
He tells me, “Lo que está instalado aquí es el miedo.” [“What they have instilled here is fear”]
Later that morning I experienced that fear.
Inside the building, we were immediately approached by a security officer who warned us [you] “might have to leave. The courtroom size is too small to host you.” A few moments later, I sat down in the waiting room— a volunteer asked me to help her translate for a respondent. As the security officer noticed me speaking with them, he approached us: “The only thing I ask for in MY waiting room is that you remain seated. I retrieve a couple of phrases from his rant: “Everybody notices” that we are students and what we are doing is “frowned upon.” It ended with a warning:
“Be careful”.
The immigration system functions under the Executive; with judges appointed by the Attorney General, there is little room for independent supervision. Immigration Court can therefore be a black box, and most often, the only way to hold it accountable is to be there and to report back. Journalism acts as the public’s check and balance.
Though Immigration Courts are open to the public, harassment and violence directed at observers is pushing many out the door. Fear-mongering against the press reduces public scrutiny of institutions. The Guardian’s piece reminds us that this is happening worldwide, and at an alarming rate. In Germany, the figures are daunting: only last year, 218 refugee shelters faced “politically motivated” assaults, many of which were orchestrated by far-right political movements.
Read against “The New Censorship”, a term pops up: legal authoritarianism. Constant campaigning against the free press and critical journalists plays a key role in eroding democratic institutions. Populism is both a divisor and homogeniser; while pushing for a distinction between “real people” and “corrupt elites”, the populist leader hopes to create a mono-intellectualist culture. Criticism directly challenges the populist-imposed media’s role as a mirror to what the “real” people want. Indeed, Jan-Werner Müller reminds us “populists are not anti-elitists as much as they are anti-pluralists—only one way of thinking is allowed” (p. 25). In A Faith Under Siege, Rostyslav Pavlenko, Member of the Parliament of Ukraine, makes a similar appeal regarding the Russian government: “They condemn the values of freedom; they condemn the values of free speech”. Mykhaylo Brytsyn, Evangelical Pastor, commented on the same rhetoric. His Church, which had been persecuted during Stalin’s terror, was accused of hosting German spies. 80 years later, in 2022, they were now being accused of hosting American ones. Marc Mcdonel, a Baptist Missionary in Ukraine, experiences the same delegitimisation: he is labelled as a CIA agent, solely because of his origin.
“Democracy has been the main source of legitimacy for journalists in modern societies” (p. 39). But democratic institutions are changing. By utilising an exploitative definition of democracy, which the book defines as “direct, majoritarian, [and] expressive”, populist leadership is pushing an “illiberal democracy”.
If this is the case, how do we bring these institutions back under the magnifying glass?
