The children do not know that they are in immigration court. One of them keeps running around in the background of the Webex screen, then coming up to the screen, where her parents are sitting at the dining room table. Every time the girl comes up to the camera she is smiling—that smile kids have that is almost laughter.
But her parents know where they are. When she comes up to them with her bright eyes, they do not smile back. Her father puts a hand on her shoulder, gentle but tight, as though holding onto her so that she cannot run off. Immigration court is a wind that rips through lives, that threatens to tear this man’s hand off his daughter’s shoulder while she smiles. And he knows it. He holds on tighter.
I am covering immigration for the summer at a paper in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Four days ago, I emailed the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), part of the Department of Justice, and asked to attend the court of immigration judge Matthew Andrasko. Normally, I could show up to the court without announcing myself. But Andrasko does not seem to have a courtroom. All of his immigration hearings, as best as I can tell, are conducted on Webex.
On my screen are about two dozen people on the edge of something. Today they will move one step closer to their future—to a more stable one in the United States, or to what they know is much more likely. Deportation.
“Excuse me everyone. Thank you for your patience,” a man says in Spanish on the Webex call. Andrasko is 15 minutes late. “The hearing will begin soon,” the man says before muting himself.
A chorus of responses come crackling through. “No hay problema.” “Todo bien.” What else could they say?
Immigration judges are not like other judges. As employees of the Justice Department, they are appointed by the attorney general. They can therefore be treated like other Justice Department employees, which means the president can fire them at will. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump has fired at least 130 immigration judges. As the purge escalated, many more judges resigned or retired early—perhaps in protest, perhaps to go out on their own terms. In their place, Trump has appointed scores of what the government calls “deportation judges.” To facilitate packing immigration courts with judges who will help Trump cleanse this country of Brown immigrants, in August 2025, the government removed the requirement that immigration judges have years of relevant experience. Many of these new judges have no immigration experience at all. Hundreds spent their careers as military lawyers.
In short: There is no longer any pretense that these arbiters of the fates of our most vulnerable neighbors will be honest, fair or qualified. They are there for one thing only: to deport, and deport fast.
Andrasko was appointed as a permanent immigration judge on May 21, 2026. He was one of 77 judges appointed that day, the most ever on a single day. He became a temporary immigration judge in October 2025 and before that was an attorney advisor for the Air Force, as well as an assistant district attorney and public defender. He also served in the Army and Air Force Reserves, and reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. According to EOIR’s announcement, he continued working for the Air Force while he was a temporary immigration judge from October 2025 until April 2026. He seems to have stopped working as a military lawyer once he became a permanent judge at the Portland Immigration Court.
The day I went to immigration court, I had recently published an article revealing that all four of the Portland Immigration Court’s judges had started their positions there less than a year ago, and that Andrasko was the newest of the four. (There has since been more turnover at the court.) I wanted to see what a deportation judge’s hearings looked like. So I emailed EOIR, and, the next week, found myself on Webex.
Unlike a physical courthouse, virtual immigration court offers a small window into each person’s life. I see bookshelves, walls of photos and doorways into other rooms and the rest of their lives.
I love walking around a city at night and looking up into the lighted apartment windows above me, the slivers of life in each glowing square. Seeing all of those lives moving above unfurls within me the feeling that we are all in this together—this life. Seeing the little windows of Webex immigration court gives me the opposite feeling. It does not connect the people in the windows to one another, or to me. Instead, it demonstrates just how alone these people are in the colosseum of the U.S. immigration system. At least in a courtroom, they can give each other comfort with their presences. They can affirm to one another that at least for now, they are still here.
Andrasko joins the call—he has a green screen background, so we do not get a slice of his life—and calls the court to order. A mustachioed man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a well-tailored suit repeats Andrasko’s words in Spanish. At first, I think he is the immigrants’ lawyer. But when Andrasko begins hearing individual cases in a breakout room, I realize that he is only a translator. Nobody in the call has a lawyer. They face the brunt of the deportation judge alone.
The first case is the couple with the daughter. She nuzzles into her mother’s arm, no longer smiling. I do not know whether she now knows she is in immigration court. But she can tell from her parents’ nervous tone that whatever is happening, it is serious.
Do you understand how hard it is to plead with the government to let you remain in your home when the government does not speak your language? It is excruciating to watch Andrasko speak, in what sounds to me like a patently condescending tone, then watch the translator repeat his words in Spanish, then watch the parents respond to the translator, who responds to Andrasko in English, and so on. Assume that you cannot speak Dutch. Now imagine playing telephone in Dutch.
This arrangement would perhaps be fine at a restaurant. But Andrasko is asking them about specific immigration documents they should have received, and why they did not fill them out. The fact that they did not fill out these documents may spell the end of their time in this country. Of course, they may just as likely be forced to leave for no reason at all. My Spanish is good enough to understand the basics, but not the details of the parents’ explanation. The father sounds increasingly frightened as Andrasko presses him. I think he is saying they recently moved and never received the document. I cannot be sure.
I have been covering immigration, but the humans swirling in the immigration system have been only tangential to my reporting. Now, I cannot stop looking at this girl on Webex, who is looking up at her mother. Will she be able to grow up in Portland, as I did? Will she have to worry about her parents disappearing any day? Does she worry already? When she hears a car racing down her street at night, does she think it is la migra? It is my job as a journalist to answer questions. But I cannot answer these questions.