By PhotoNinja Ari
ICE is increasingly hunting for people in and around courthouses after they attend their immigration hearings. They wait outside courtrooms, ready to pounce the moment someone emerges from their hearing.
ICE exploits a vulnerable moment in a person’s life: Just when they think they are safe to walk out of court and go home, the threat of detainment looms. This can drive people to skip court dates, which can impact their immigration status. It’s a cruel catch-22 that tears families apart and causes undocumented folks to live in fear. One way to help out is by organizing court support networks.
What Is Court Support?
Court Support is a type of mutual aid that involves accompanying people to immigration court and assuring they are not alone throughout the process. We keep them company and intervene when ICE lurks nearby. It also involves getting to know people, listening to them, and supporting their need to feel safe as this scary situation unfolds. Sometimes the process can provide comfort, which is actually quite a lot. Just knowing you’re not invisible; that you won’t be kidnapped and disappeared without a crowd protesting, can provide some peace of mind throughout this shitty era of escalating state-sponsored violence against immigrants.
Grounded in Abolitionist Values: Solidarity, not Charity
This isn’t charity — it’s abolitionist mutual aid. Court support uproots the logic of surveillance, detention, and coercion. We’re building a world based on mutual aid, solidarity, and consent.
Imagine a world without immigration detention. Immigration detention is a scam after all, designed to funnel taxpayer money into the hands of private prison corporations like GeoGroup. If we don’t stand up for undocumented people, our own communities will be next. Those who profit from the prison industrial complex will keep finding new groups to target for mass incarceration until we put them out of business. Fighting to abolish ICE detention keeps all of us safer.
Court support is actually working!
Since the court support movement in SF began, the number of people who have been abducted after their court hearings has been drastically reduced here. ICE is far less likely to act if people with cameras and glitter are standing by. We’re the DIY paparazzi, shedding light on ICE atrocities by exposing their kidnapping ring. They may be hiding their faces, but we aren’t letting their crimes stay hidden.
Why It Works—And Actually Saves People from Abduction
- Visibility as protection: ICE is less likely to snatch someone right after court when there’s a crowd. Being watched de-escalates their tactics.
- Emergency intervention: If ICE tries to swoop in, the support team documents, witnesses, raises the alarm, calls legal help, and sometimes blocks them. This creates delays that can derail snap arrests.
Tip: Be sure to get enough volunteers to cover all the court dates and times. You want to avoid leaving a gap in which ICE could slip in and kidnap people. As long as there are always people there ready to document and pay attention to what is happening, ICE is far more likely to get camera-shy and back off.
From the Detention Watch Network’s #CommunitiesNotCages toolkit: “Abolitionist mutual aid is about forming non-hierarchical networks that respond directly to the needs of those under ICE terror, working in solidarity with those inside and impacted communities outside.”
Learn more and find tips for how to start a Detention Watch Network in your community here: detentionwatchnetwork.org