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From Futuro Media, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa.

Our most recent episode was co-reported with Documented, a nonprofit news site that covers immigrants in New York City from tenants' rights to health care to ICE arrests.

They brought us the story of Wendy and Elvis, a Central American couple, navigating a complicated and punishing asylum system, shaped by policies put into place by the Trump administration.

And Wendy and Elvis' story is just one that reporters and journalists from Documented have reported on.

In 2019, Documented sent six journalists into the courts to observe the human impact of restrictive immigration policies.

For three full months, they sat in New York City's immigration courts from the time they opened until they closed, five days a week observing hundreds of hearings.

Today, the two co-founders of Documented, Max Siegelbaum and Mazin Sidachman are here to talk with us more about that project and what their work has revealed.

Max and Mazin, welcome to Latino USA.

Thank you. It's nice to be here.

Hi, thanks for having us.

All right, so tell me how you get started with this idea to basically observe every single minute of the immigration court system.

So people would say that they would never let you in, but you guys actually did it. So what was your aim? And why did you do it? Max.

So we had been covering immigration courts since we started publishing, which was in the summer of 2018.

And we had watched since Jeff Sessions was attorney general back then and we had watched him issue policy decision after policy decision that had serious detrimental impact to the people who are passing through the court system.

And we knew this through data and we knew it anecdotally. You know, we just knew it was generally harder to ask for asylum and just being the court system.

So what we didn't know is what it looked like.

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