Empty Justice: Ethnographic Court‐Witnessing in Authoritarian Times

ABSTRACT This article investigates the operations of United States immigration courts ethnographically, examining how law, politics, and bureaucracy converge in the everyday production of immigration adjudication. Based on over 500 h of observation in 36 courtrooms across 11 immigration courts, we document how life‐altering deportation decisions—often in absentia and lasting only minutes—are rendered through routinized procedures that obscure judicial ambivalence, the politicization of immigration, and bureaucratic pressures. While legal scholarship has emphasized patterns in judicial outcomes, and anthropology has traced how law shapes immigrants' lives beyond the courtroom, few studies ethnographically analyze the affective arrangements inside immigration court. We develop a novel, multi‐sited methodology by mobilizing a national network of undergraduate students trained and supervised by faculty to conduct ethnographic court‐watching. This approach produces rich qualitative data on tone, demeanor, and “off‐the‐record” exchanges, while also democratizing research through pedagogical innovation. We argue that immigration courts are best understood not only as legal institutions but as affective arrangements: spaces where judges, attorneys, clerks, interpreters, federal agents, and respondents are entangled in performances of authority, credibility, and fairness under conditions of bureaucratic and political constraint. We conclude by reflecting on the risks of conducting ethnography under escalating authoritarianism. Surveillance, suppression of dissent, and the targeting of students and scholars render research itself precarious. What does it mean to observe and analyze courts when the very act of knowledge production is marked with vulnerability and threat?