ICE arrests green-card applicant at San Diego immigration court check-in

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Federal agents arresting people at routine immigration court check-ins is a neat bureaucratic trick: turn compliance into self-incrimination, and transform a courthouse into a trapdoor.

Newsweek reports that Jelver Efrain Medina Trujillo, a 53‑year‑old Guatemalan national who has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, was detained at a scheduled check‑in at an immigration courthouse in San Diego in early February. His partner, Xochilt Lopez, a U.S. citizen, told Newsweek he has no criminal record and had long pursued legal status. She said he was asked to stand by a door and was detained by a Homeland Security Investigations agent who did not explain why; another agent reportedly questioned the detention.

DHS, in its own statement to Newsweek, said Medina Trujillo has been unlawfully present for 13 years. The agency claimed ICE used prosecutorial discretion in 2013 to dismiss his case so he could adjust status because he planned to marry a U.S. citizen, but that he “failed to ever get legal status.” Lopez said they never married, citing cost, despite a 23‑year relationship and two children.

The factual dispute matters less than the mechanism. Immigration courts are already structurally odd: they are administrative tribunals within the executive branch, not Article III courts, with limited procedural protections and heavy caseloads. When the same enforcement apparatus that prosecutes also uses the courtroom as a hunting ground, the state gets a two‑for‑one: it pressures attendance while harvesting attendees.

Game theory does the rest. If showing up increases the probability of immediate detention, rational defendants stop showing up. The state then cites non‑appearance to justify harsher coercion — warrants, surveillance, detention quotas — and the system spirals into a self‑fulfilling breakdown of compliance.

Medina Trujillo is now held at Otay Mesa Detention Center, according to the ICE detainee database cited by Newsweek, and has a hearing scheduled for February 26. Lopez described conditions as cold with poor food and disrespectful staff — the standard ambiance of an institution designed for warehousing rather than adjudication.

For anyone who still believes “follow the process” is a strategy, this is what it looks like when the state can rewrite the payoff matrix unilaterally: process becomes a lever, not a safeguard. The courthouse door remains open — it just no longer leads where people think it does.