On my first day in the office, I was told that almost everything in our binders that were compiled a month ago had been subject to adjustments. What I came to understand, over the course of the long trainings in conference rooms, was this: the immigration court in the United States is almost entirely a self-contained system. Immigration judges are appointed by the Attorney General who is appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. Immigration court is one of the few places in the United States where defendants are not provided with representation, and indeed, most people appearing before the court have no access to a lawyer. The system is therefore subject to drastic change depending on the whims of the executive branch, Dispatches from Immigration Court which has complete control over the system. Immigration defense law was a brutal fight even before Trump became president—now, it is closer to a bloodbath.

If you are the kind of person who is even marginally politically aware, it should become increasingly clear that the immigration system is (and has always been) inhumane. Even in the asylum process, the primary focus of my summer internship, refugees fleeing the most vivid and horrific types of violence and persecution are made to re-live, over and over again, the most traumatizing moments of their life in front of a judge and lawyers, and then be cross-examined by DHS agents whose goal is to argue that the defendant should be sent back to their country, no matter how valid their claim is. Under both Democratic and Republican leadership, prisons have been built, families have been separated.

However, recent measures instated by the Trump administration exhibit a concerning trend towards complete dehumanization. The word ‘alien’ has been reinstated on all immigration paperwork. Fees will be added to asylum applications. Temporary Protected Status for countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti have been repealed, pending court cases. ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ has been built. There are now quotas for each ICE office to meet in regards to how many ‘illegals’ they can deport. The mass deportations and detentions have proceeded with impunity and with little to no transparency. ICE officers do not show identification nor have they been required to, empowering groups of people dressed as ICE agents to begin taking people off of the streets. Pay attention to the wording here—what is an ‘alien’ in relation to a human? What is an ‘illegal’ in relation to a ‘citizen’?

In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking SS bureaucrat, was held on trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt was sent to report on the trial for the New Yorker, generating a series of controversial essays that were eventually combined into a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem; A Report on the Banality of Evil. In reading it, one is struck by the fact that the first intentional step of the Nazi regime towards genocide was the deprivation of nationhood from the Jewish people. At the time, then, there were no longer ‘Danish Jewish people’ or ‘German Jewish people.’ There were only ‘Jews’, without nation, without state—making it all the easier to transport and ‘exterminate’ these populations—and further othering them. The trap of the construction of legality is this: if you are labeled as ‘illegal’ or ‘stateless,’ then it is startlingly easy to subordinate you to a lower category of humanity. To make you disappear. To cast you as subhuman. “The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, “normal” knowledge of murder and lies.” How drastically and rapidly has our morality changed, without our noticing it? How have people, bit by bit, been convinced to support that extra-legal police force that is ICE, to support their kidnappings and torture?

There have been multiple reports on the detention centers that already existed prior to the Trump administration, where people were kept with minimal levels of food or water, in freezing rooms with no privacy and the lights constantly on, preventing them from knowing what time it was or how many days had passed. How drastically and rapidly has our morality changed, without our noticing?

The immigration court in Chelmsford Massachusetts looks like a Protestant church. There is a lack of pomp and circumstance makes the ridiculous nature of the circumstances all the more clear. Strip away the mahogany, the tall ceilings and the shining marble that normally accompany courts and what do you get? A little man sitting at a wooden desk in a potato sack of a robe, arbiting the judgement of God or the law onto the quivering bodies in front of him.

Everyone has a Master Calendar hearing, which should mean that the judge will schedule another hearing and send them on their way to find a lawyer. This, however, is Trump’s America. The lawyer explains it to them all in the waiting room like she is giving a sermon. Do not let them terminate your case, she intones like a chant. They will put you in expedited removal proceedings. This will deport you no matter what paperwork you have in the system. They all bob their heads up and down. Clutch their forms a little tighter to their chests. The week before, migrants were arrested the second they walked out of their hearings. The immigration judges claimed not to know what was happening outside of the court, even though they could hear the handcuffs snapping shut.

“What have you been doing for the two and a half years you’ve been here then?” says the judge, in response to the motion for removal. The man explains in stuttering Spanish that he has gotten married, and his green card paperwork is pending. I can only see his white shirt and his tightly wound shoulders. “Please, just another month” he says, face tilted down towards the desk underneath him. “Two years, and you haven’t contacted a lawyer. I’m going to have to agree with the motion for removal.” The man reserves the right to appeal. A date is set for a week from now. “I hope you have a lawyer by then, Sr.—” says the judge. The lawyer runs her hand over her face. She tells me she’s never seen someone with a pending application be put into expedited removal.

There are two types of immigration proceedings in the United States—affirmative proceedings, usually processed with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and removal proceedings, which take place in immigration court. This has created a popular imagination of the good immigrants and bad immigrants. By tying people’s status in this country to legality, we have essentially created a system under which a certain kind of life or existence is not legal. Whether practical or not, this has created a system under which general human rights have caveats and restrictions.

In the asylum process, this manifests itself in the restricted categories for seeking asylum: Race, Religion, Nationality, Political Opinion, Membership in a Particular Social Group, or the Torture Convention. I pick up the phone. A ghostly voice tells me it needs help. Of course, I say, and the clock begins. She was born five months before me. She gave birth last month. As I ask her questions, I can hear a man talking behind her on the line. A long silence stretches. I ask her why she is afraid to return to her country. The gangs, she replies. They have killed people in her family, and she knows she will be killed if she goes back. I close my eyes. Not an asylum claim, technically. To be afraid of being killed because of general violence, according to the United States, is too general.

I pick up the phone. They threatened to rape me every day, she says. The gangs would come to my door, tell me what they were going to do to me. I stopped going to school, stopped leaving the house. There was no one to protect us. No one could protect us. Not a case of direct harm. Nothing to suggest that she was a target of specific violence rather than general violence. Not nothing, but difficult. I pick up the phone. They stopped us on the way to the hospital, she says. I was with my son. They robbed everyone, and they killed and raped people outside. I rub my eyes. No reason why they were specifically targeted.

A man calls from a detention center. I’ve been here for a month, he tells me. I don’t know what’s happening or how to get out. I can’t do this anymore. I just want to go home.

These are the people you are being told are here to steal your jobs. These are the people who are ‘undocumented,’ who are ‘illegal,’ who are ‘robbing us of national resources.’ These are the people they want you to believe had any other choice but to come here, fleeing for their lives. The establishment of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migration will not be restricted to those who enter without a status. America, it is clear, is a place to be ‘bought’ into—an idea reserved only for those who capitulate to the limitations imposed on our humanity. When visas are revoked on the grounds of anti-American protest, when the Supreme Court refuses to rule on birthright citizenship, when the Trump administration seeks to revoke the passports of naturalized citizens, it is not a new battle. They came first for the people without status—the rest of us are not removed from their fight.

I pick up the phone. The woman’s voice breaks on the third word. The world is not alright, that much is clear. Her husband was detained by ICE. I don’t know where he is, she says. I just need someone to help me. I look at the lawyers—DUI on parole. I give her another number and tell her I’m sorry I can’t help. I am crying a little when I hang up the phone. The man in front of my apartment building just sat down. I try not to disturb him, but he gets up and opens the door for me. He has that apologetic smile, the same smile that drags its way across my mother’s face as she has to ask the teller at the bank to repeat himself for a second time. My bones are rattling with the day, with the smiles, with the yes sirs, with the woman who would mouth the answers to the questions the judge asked her husband before he had the chance to say them.

A man starts crying on the paralegal’s shoulder at immigration court. His eyes are red from stress. Nobody told him that they hadn’t filed his Notice To Appear yet—he doesn’t have a court date. He hadn’t told anyone that he was coming to court. He didn’t want them to be worried. He thought he was getting deported.

“It’s the law.” I can imagine the judge saying, in his potato sack robes. It is the escalating law, the escalating banality of evil. It was the claim Eichmann made, sitting in his glass box. “Evil cannot be radical,” Arendt says. Indeed, the dissolution of our state will not be radical. It will consist of the legality of awful things. Eichmann’s main argument against the charges levied against him was that he was only following the law—that the genocide of the Jewish people was perfectly legal. Following orders, following the law, this is what makes evil on this scale possible. Today alone, almost four mass raids of workplaces by ICE have taken place. Today alone, a man died of injuries suffered in one of these raids.

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

As we are increasingly encouraged to see the construction of ‘illegality’ as normal, there must be an insistence on the idea of an absolute humanity. We have been told, over the course of our lives, that our Americanness guarantees us more human dignity than others. This must not be true—it cannot continue to be true, if we want to stand in the way of the impending train of fascism that seems to be barrelling down the tracks. People are already disappearing off of the streets. How long will it take until we are compelled towards action? How long will it take until we, as people, refuse to take part in the degradation of others?