THE ARTIST IS PRESENT

As ICE continues mass detainments and deportations, artist Isabelle Brourman has spent months inside the New York City federal immigration court. She spoke with KEZIAH WEIR about the scenes of brutality and emotional strength she's documented, in rooms where cameras aren't allowed

- By KEZIAH WEIR

The family—man, woman, baby—arrived on the 12th floor of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on a warm day in August. The 41-story edifice of bureaucracy, better known as 26 Federal Plaza, is one in a herd of government buildings sprawled across an eerily unpopulated quadrant of Manhattan, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge and a straight shot up the center of the city from where gold leaf glints on the Statue of Liberty's torch.

When the family entered the waiting area, Isabelle Brourman, the only sketch artist permitted in the court, was sitting inside the adjoining courtroom that would host the immigration hearing for which they'd come. "It's kind of like the last bastion of the American dream," she says of the process by which undocumented immigrants seek asylum and naturalization. But these hearings, a preliminary step in that long road, became a gamble of the highest stakes when the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency responded to President Donald Trump's "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" executive order by deploying agents to immigration court hearings and executing unprecedented detainments regardless of the fact that hearings often adjourn with judges telling respondents to return for another hearing in a year or so. Brourman sketched at 26 Federal Plaza for the first time in June and, when we spoke in September, had been there nearly every day for more than two months, arriving at 8:30 a.m. and leaving in the afternoon.