Victor Blue:
It became obvious pretty quickly this new administration was going to have a quite a different posture towards immigration enforcement.
I spent the better part of July and little over the first week of August attending court every day. Early in the morning, there’s a long line of immigrants who arrive for their court appointments. The agents are waiting outside. The agents usually are carrying a kind of sheaf of papers.
They include a photograph of their target, the person that they’re looking for. When the immigrants leave the courtroom, if they’re on that list of targets, they kind of quietly ask them to come with them, maybe take them by the elbow and kind of lead them, maybe not. Oftentimes, they don’t even need to. The immigrants just go with them into the area, the bank of elevators or a stairwell, and then kind of head down to the 10th floor detention center.
That was the thing that was most surprising to me. Of course, we have seen footage of kind of aggressive, violent, kind of tense detentions, but the vast majority of them are kind of deceptively quiet. They haven’t really realized yet that whatever decision the judge has made really doesn’t matter at that point, that the agents have their marching orders and that they are going to be detained.
I remember watching that young woman enter the court. When she walked out and was initially stopped by the agents, her face just fell and she immediately began to cry before they were able to completely slam the door of the stairwell.
I was positioned to make a picture, and she kind of looked back at me. I think that her expression there, the fear and the kind of realization that the journey she’d been on had in large part come to a close was dawning on her.
For much of the time that I was going into the courts, there was a real reluctance on the part of the agents to detain parents of young children. That’s definitely changed over the course of my time in there. And now it’s not uncommon at all to see the detention of parents of young children, to see the family separated right there in the hallways.
And, of course, that’s an unbelievably wrenching experience for the families, right, to have their family pulled apart right there in front of everyone.
My goal as a photojournalist, I’m not there to demonize or to celebrate anybody in this dynamic. I’m there to further understanding. We know that it affects the agents. They tell us that it affects them. Many of them tell us they don’t like what they’re doing. We have had some tell us it’s the worst job they have ever had.
It almost feels kind of like a historical anomaly to have a front-row seat to it, to be able to go in day after day after day with this kind of unprecedented immigration enforcement. And I think that in the end is really going to be the value of our coverage, right, that we didn’t just show up for the most sensational kind of moments that were there day in and day out, to kind of show folks the volume of what’s happening.
And even if an arrest is quiet and isn’t particularly sensational and isn’t a particularly impactful photograph, every one of those arrests represents a real crisis for a family, a real crisis for an individual immigrant, a real break in their journey towards hopefully a better life and their journey towards joining the society that they have fought so hard to be a part of.
