A Remote Chance

As more immigration hearings are held via teleconference, thousands of detainees never get their day in court.

- Lauren Markham

TESS FELDMAN STOOD in an empty San Francisco courtroom, facing a three-footwide television screen. “Good morning!” she shouted toward a camera connected to the TV. “Can you hear me?”

A stunned-looking man in an orange prison jumpsuit appeared on screen. An inmate at the Mesa Verde Detention Facility in Bakersfield, California, nearly 300 miles away, he was facing deportation and weighing his legal options. His father had been murdered back in Oaxaca, Mexico, he told Feldman, and he was afraid to return. That made him a potential candidate for asylum, but he worried he would sit in a cell for months as his case wended through the courts. “That takes a long time, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Feldman said. She checked her phone for the time. “I’m so sorry, but we only have one minute left to talk.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and walked offscreen, shoulders slumped.

Twice a month, Feldman, a senior immigration attorney for a Bay Area legal nonprofit, serves as the counsel of the day for detainees at Mesa Verde and other facilities. She has two hours to interview approximately 18 inmates—six minutes each. Because Mesa Verde is a five-hour drive from San Francisco, home to one of the nearest major immigration courts, almost all these detainees will never actually go in person, but will instead appear before judges—and meet their pro bono lawyers—via video teleconference.

To detainees and their attorneys, video teleconference, or vtc, is an ad hoc solution and a valuable timesaving measure. As of 2015, nearly one-third of detained immigrants in the United States appeared in deportation hearings via tele video. In 2017, there were 114,000 hearings that used vtc, a 185 percent increase since 2007.