868: The Hand That Rocks The Gavel
This American Life
This American Life
4.6 • 88.8K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A group of immigration judges, who almost never speak to the press, describes the dismantling of our immigration court system from the inside.
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- Prologue: Zoe Chace gives an eyewitness account of what has been happening at 26 Federal Plaza, an immigration courthouse in New York City. (5 minutes)
- Act One: The judges walk us through how different their jobs have become in just the past few months, because of sweeping policy changes by Trump’s Department of Justice. (26 minutes)
- Act Two: It gets extremely personal for the judges. Also, the story of one person who got pushed through the new immigration court system this summer. (23 minutes)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. |
| 0:05.3 | If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. |
| 0:11.5 | From WBZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. |
| 0:15.1 | This summer, three people from our show, Zoe and Nadia and Angela, spent weeks at immigration court in New York City, |
| 0:23.4 | witnessing this extraordinary thing that you might have read about or heard about happening in the |
| 0:27.9 | hallways there. And there was one group at the center of that thing that nobody ever got to |
| 0:33.8 | hear from. They would not talk to reporters until now when they've been talking, |
| 0:39.9 | to us. We had them on today's show. We're going to get to them in a few minutes. But first, |
| 0:44.9 | Zoe Chase now joins me in the studio. Zoe, let's first describe what you witnessed at the courthouse. |
| 0:49.6 | Okay, so we visited the courtrooms at 26 federal plaza downtown. |
| 0:54.7 | And it's basically just a bunch of very old-looking courtrooms. |
| 0:59.0 | Normally, immigrants are coming in and out, going for their hearings. |
| 1:02.2 | In this place, it looks like it hasn't been redone since the 90s. |
| 1:05.8 | And now you take the elevator, you get to the 12th floor. |
| 1:10.5 | The door's open and it's just crowded. |
| 1:13.3 | Like three or four different kinds of law enforcement, ICE, DHS, the FBI. |
| 1:18.1 | I saw the diplomatic security service. |
| 1:20.8 | Whatever that is. |
| 1:21.6 | Don't know. |
| 1:22.4 | Plus reporters, a lot of photographers, activists, lawyers. |
| 1:26.8 | Everyone's kind of huddled around one courtroom door, like a celebrity is going to come out of it. |
| 1:32.4 | And the feeling of it, it's tense, and then it's boring. |
... |
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