sitting in a hearing room

I'm not sure it does any good to have strangers sit in a courtroom in the JFK building while bond hearings and removal decisions happen (removal is what deportation is called). Maybe it's comforting to people ("respondents") to have supporters, but some of them have people they know there, and most of the ones today were appearing by video from the Bristol house of correction, so they couldn't see us anyway. The one person who was present(in shackles) had come from out of state. Apparently Boston is one of the few federal immigration courts functioning during the shutdown, albeit much reduced in staff, so some people are coming from a distance. The guy we were there to support lives in Connecticut, and was nabbed at Bradley after visiting someone by plane. His family members and lawyer have been driving for hours back and forth to see him. He has a green card, but somewhere, some time in the past he was caught with a bit of marijuana, so now he is probably going to go. But short-term, this judge didn't have jurisdiction (legal technicality I didn't get), so something else will happen in a couple of weeks. We sat for a bunch of other people before it was his turn. People who will be sent back to Guatemala or Romania or El Salvador or the Dominican Republic for tiny offenses, including just staying longer than six months after coming as a tourist, at least officially. Somebody with a suspect driver's license and a OUI. Someone who knows someone who left heroin in his apartment (so he said). If you volunteer to go back, you are responsible for buying the ticket (within a month). If you don't volunteer, you are removed, and that takes away some of the rights to try again for legal status. If you are sent away by our government, you get to choose a destination country (because the DOJ acknowledges that some people might be afraid to return to the places they left behind). It seems to me that it might be an empty promise - what if some frightened person originally from Guatemala chose Spain, for example - would Spain have to accept? I doubt it.
So, as usual, I feel that I learned a lot, that we probably didn't do anything to keep our person in the US with his family, and that everybody should be required to sit quietly in such a room at least once, before offering any opinions about our immigration and deportation policies.

Fictionally, the CW network has taken another anti-ICE stance. Supergirl this whole season has been about how much we benefit from having aliens (literal, but used as a metaphor) and how terrible it is that people hate them. The new "Roswell, New Mexico" is the second series based on the YA novels by Melinda Metz. The previous one aired from 1999-2002, and I watched most of it, although the writing went downhill after the first season. The new one is set about ten years later. The characters have the same names as the previous ones, and the premise is the same - there were three kids in stasis pods in the 1947 crashed ship, who woke up in the early 1980s. [edit - if they're 28 now, they must have woken up in the 1990s] Teenagers feeling alienated was a pretty straightforward concept, plus the SF stuff. The pilot last night had specific scenes of ICE trying to get people at a traffic stop in New Mexico, and one of the second tier regular characters is an undocumented person who has lived in the US for decades. Not even bothering with metaphor, much, but the literal aliens also worry about their treatment if they are discovered.