Immigration revolution begins with courts, detention, and fear

immigration revolution – On July 4, voices from inside and around the U.S. immigration system describe a country that has moved from asylum to punishment—where detention, political pressure on immigration judges, and deportation policy are experienced as control. Palestinian activist

When Leqaa Kordia walked back into a community hall on March 22, 2026, the moment was meant to be relief. The reality had been a year of detention.

Kordia. a Palestinian activist. had spent a year in ICE detention as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Palestinian student activism. The welcome home rally in Paterson. New Jersey came after three court orders to release her—and after she describes a punishment that followed her insistence on speaking out.

In her account, what happened inside an ICE jail didn’t just break time. It rewired her body. She says she was thrown into ICE confinement after exercising her First Amendment rights, and that during 368 days in custody—far from her “dying homeland in Palestine”—she suffered her first seizure ever.

Kordia links her health collapse to “stress. medical neglect. dehumanization. lack of sleep and lack of proper nutrition” in ICE confinement. She says she is now diagnosed with epilepsy, a seizure disorder she will carry for life. “My body has become a permanent record of the cruelty of the American immigration system,” she wrote.

Her story connects to an account of wider violence that she says the U.S. enables. Kordia says Israel killed 200 family members in Gaza with U.S. weapons, and that their names still echo in the sky. She says she lives with fear that she could be sent to Israel. where Palestinians like her face arrest. detention. violence. and death.

The system, she argues, is built to punish those who refuse to be silent. She says immigration enforcement isn’t about keeping the country safe, but about control—separating families, destroying communities, depriving people of freedom, and making people afraid to speak.

Her demand is sweeping: abolish what she calls unjust prison systems entirely. including “no more private prisons” and “no more illegal administrative detention. ” which she describes as detention camps run by the Israeli military where Palestinian children. doctors. and journalists are thrown into torture camps. She also calls for “no more deporting people to their deaths.”.

The future, in her view, is a system that “values life and dignity over punishment and control.”

That same theme—what enforcement feels like on the ground—comes through in the work of people who have spent their careers around immigration courts and detention policy.

Denise Noonan Slavin, a retired immigration judge and former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, framed the question around a basic premise: immigration courts, she says, need independence.

Slavin describes the Trump administration as doing “everything it can to destroy the immigration court system.” She points to two cornerstones of any court: judicial independence and due process. “Crucially. immigration judges are executive branch employees who can be fired. ” she said. arguing that judges can be pressured into decisions that match political direction.

She says the administration has coerced immigration judges—under threat of losing their job—into becoming “deportation judges,” a term she says Trump himself uses.

Slavin says she and other judges warned legislators for years, including through work with the National Association of Immigration Judges, about how the immigration court system should be reorganized either under the judicial branch or as an Article I court under the legislative branch.

In her telling, those concerns were dismissed under the belief that existing law would protect independence. She insists that “just because the law protects judges’ independence does not mean that Trump has followed the law.” She says the administration has fired over 100 judges “without cause or recourse.” She also says other judges quit or retired rather than be forced to do “the wrong thing.”.

Now, she says, the pressure is shifting into asylum cases. Slavin describes the administration pushing immigration judges to “pretermit” asylum cases—dismiss them without a full hearing—despite what she calls the role hearings play in giving full facts.

She adds that many people in immigration court appear without an attorney and therefore can’t fully exercise their rights. “Some will say that immigrants facing deportation don’t deserve due process,” she said. “But due process is a safeguard that protects everybody.”

Slavin’s argument is built on the same idea Kordia brings from her own detention: a system that is supposed to decide cases can’t function as a court when the people deciding are subject to political control. “As things stand. it may still be called a court system. but it’s not acting like one. ” she said. concluding that immigration courts need independence from the executive branch.

If Kordia’s experience shows what detention does to a person’s body and family life, and Slavin’s account shows what pressure does to a court’s credibility, the next voices shift toward what comes after the shutdown. They don’t just want reforms; they want a reimagining of what the system is for.

Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, argues that the immigration detention system is newer than many people assume. She says the modern detention system was born in the early 1980s, when the U.S. government began systematically detaining Haitian migrants seeking safety and opportunity. She adds that soon after, the policy was expanded to a broader category of migrants.

While she acknowledges detention has existed in some form on and off since the 19th century. she says this new iteration grew into something far larger—helped by what she describes as the U.S. obsession with punishment and mass incarceration. She says “some half a million people pass through the detention system each year.”.

Shah points to “violent attacks on immigrant communities and the horrendous conditions in detention centers” under the Trump administration as laying bare what she calls the enduring harm of the system.

Her prescription focuses on ending detention and redirecting resources. She says ending detention isn’t only about freeing people and “tearing down walls. ” but creating a world where immigrants and non-immigrants alike can thrive. She lists what she says should replace detention: investing in education, housing, climate resilient infrastructure, and healthcare.

She also addresses the money directly: “When taxpayer dollars are invested in what we care about. we have more than enough resources for everyone to live a fulfilled life.” She concludes that ICE’s immigration detention system does not need to exist. and that communities across the country and people currently detained are organizing to end it and build a better future.

That “world without detention” is also a question of how the country defines community versus punishment. John Washington. a journalist and author of “The Case for Open Borders. ” “The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond. ” and the forthcoming “How To Close A Camp. ” argues that social change isn’t won by playing defense.

He says the country needs a positive vision grounded in freedom of movement for all people and human rights regardless of where people are born.

Washington describes how the long congressional search for “comprehensive immigration reform” has, in his view, turned into Democrats capitulating to the right on key issues. He argues it also assumes the system responds to a real problem—when, in his account, “the system is the problem.”

He says the idea of borders as fixed, natural things is mistaken: “Borders aren’t fixed, natural things. They are tools, not facts.” He also says that 40 percent of the world’s national borders were drawn by just two countries in the past century.

When Washington turns to detention, his version of history is just as direct. He says immigration detention’s logic—locking people up and controlling movement—has existed in North America for centuries. pointing to the reservation system as one example. But he says immigration camps as they exist in something close to their current form appeared in the late 1800s.

He argues that both parties have built up the camp system in recent decades, and that Trump has grown it “at an unprecedented pace.” In his view, detention is a “linchpin” of mass deportations—so ending detention would limit the government’s ability to carry out mass deportation plans.

He also points to how camps persist through local bottlenecks: “Bureaucratic mechanisms like permitting and zoning are chokepoints, vulnerable to local community pressure.” He says pressure can work, citing that it “as we’ve seen over and over this year.”

And then he makes the case for an organizing blueprint. Washington says change requires connection with two groups: immigrants with precarious status or no status at all—those targeted. marginalized. and held behind bars at camps or scapegoated outside them—and “our neighbors.” In his formulation. “The opposite of a camp is community.”.

He argues camps can be shut down and replaced only when people work with neighbors: “Rely on them, be reliable for them, and organize with them.”

The enforcement and due process questions raised by Slavin, the body-level harm described by Kordia, and the abolitionist endgame described by Shah and Washington also align with concerns about how much of today’s deportation agenda is rooted in legal tools already on the books.

Austin Kocher, a political and legal geographer and research assistant professor at Syracuse University, says much of what the administration is doing is legal—but that doesn’t make it fair or compatible with the country’s values.

Kocher asks whether Americans support deporting a mother of three who is nursing a baby at home because she was pulled over. He asks whether Americans support tearing apart families that have been in the United States for decades because of a paperwork issue from years ago. He also questions support for putting someone behind bars for months and deporting them to a country where they have never lived because they crossed a border at age 2.

Kocher says many people support the agenda but that they should be honest about what it is. He points to the government’s own data. saying “the vast majority of people being deported. or who are stuck in detention. ” do not have criminal convictions at all. He says less than 1% have serious, violent criminal convictions.

In his view. Congress has avoided fixing fundamental problems in the immigration system. leaving it to presidents to balance enforcement discretion with humane pathways. Kocher argues the Trump administration has thrown that balance out. aiming to deport as many people as possible regardless of whether they have broken laws.

He places emphasis on the scale: he says punitive fines and the ability to hold people in detention are “legal,” drawing on laws and policies from decades when deportations were far smaller. He contrasts what he says was a deportation rate of 5,000 people per year with 400,000.

Kocher lays out a political divide he believes must be corrected from both sides. He says people on the left should accept “there is going to be some enforcement. ” and he says people on the right must understand that trying to deport everyone is “just un-American.” He ends by saying Congress must act. and that it should revisit immigration laws every year so the system responds to the real world.

The argument that community action can outpace fear runs through the stories as well.

Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, says immigration politics has long been governed by lies. He points to the mid-1980s as the last time the country attempted “fixing” immigration in a way that he says wasn’t only about punishing immigrants and militarizing the border.

He describes Republicans and Democrats in Congress, along with Republican President Ronald Reagan, agreeing on a plan to give equal rights to a generation of immigrants who sought to pledge allegiance to the U.S. flag. Alvarado calls that 40 years ago, adding: “Immigrants haven’t changed.”

He argues immigrants are still human beings motivated by family and community, paying taxes and asking for little in return. He says immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born U.S. citizens, and he argues the country accepts labor more readily than it accepts “humanity.”

For Alvarado, what changed is the reach and power of the lies—especially since 9/11. He says white nationalist and other anti-immigrant extremists repeated claims about immigrants and helped elect “the most anti-immigrant president in modern history.”

He says the country is now walled in by fear, and that “Internment camps are a surging for-profit industry” while a “federal police force roams the streets in ski masks.”

His answer isn’t political class reform alone. “What or who will save us from the lies?” he asks. He says it won’t come from that political class and that hope is found in communities across the country where people work together with what he describes as truth.

Alvarado says immigrants have been fixing things themselves “one job at a time. one neighborhood at a time. and one family at a time.” He describes organizing to protect people from immigration raids. protesting outside ICE prisons. picking up children stranded at schools. pushing for better laws. and imagining a better world.

He repeats a line that becomes a refrain: “Only the people save the people. Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.”

That phrase fits with Father Fabian Arias’s account of what accompaniment looks like at the edge of the courtroom.

Arias, pastor of Saint Peter’s Church, frames his work through scripture, citing the Gospel of Matthew: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was in prison and you visited me.” He says those words shape his ministry.

He describes accompanying immigrant brothers and sisters every day in immigration courts, where he says he witnesses fear, uncertainty, and often the pain of family separation. He says his presence is meant to communicate that “You are not alone; God walks with you.”

At Saint Peter’s Church. Arias says the church developed a legal clinic where attorneys provide free legal assistance to immigrants. He adds that every week the church distributes food and clothing to more than 850 families. He says he has also served as legal guardian for more than 200 unaccompanied immigrant youth.

Arias says he will never forget the pain of mothers and fathers entering immigration court not knowing whether they will be able to embrace their children the same evening. Yet he also emphasizes resilience, saying even amid suffering, “hope remains alive.”

His call is for a conversion of the heart: a movement “from fear to encounter. and from suspicion to solidarity.” He closes with his own interpretation of the familiar scripture command: “Love the stranger. for you were strangers yourselves.” He says many people were strangers at some point in their family histories and hopes the country learns to see one another as members of “one human family.”.

Putting these accounts side by side doesn’t require a grand conclusion. The sequence emerges from the facts themselves: Kordia ties seizure and lasting injury to ICE confinement while saying she is the target of punishment for speaking; Slavin describes judicial independence being eroded by the firing of over 100 judges without cause or recourse and pressure on immigration judges to behave like “deportation judges”; Shah traces the detention system’s modern growth from the early 1980s through mass incarceration patterns and says half a million people pass through it each year; Kocher points to government data showing less than 1% of deportees or detained people having serious violent criminal convictions; Washington argues detention is a linchpin for mass deportations and insists the only way to shut down camps is through community pressure.

What changes on July 4, in this telling, isn’t just the calendar. It’s what people believe immigration policy is for—and what they think must happen next.

Kordia’s demand is to abolish unjust prison systems entirely, including administrative detention and private prisons. Slavin’s demand is structural: independence for immigration courts from the executive branch. Shah’s demand is a budget and values shift toward education, housing, climate resilient infrastructure, and healthcare instead of detention. Kocher’s demand is legislative urgency, with Congress revisiting immigration laws every year. Washington’s demand is organizing with neighbors so camps can be replaced by community.

In the end, the people who spoke for this July 4 reframed the same question through different lives: whether the United States is prepared to treat immigration as asylum—or whether it is still choosing control, punishment, and fear.

United States immigration ICE detention immigration courts judicial independence deportation policy July 4 Leqaa Kordia Denise Noonan Slavin Detention Watch Network Austin Kocher Pablo Alvarado Father Fabian Arias