Visualizing Timelines

The routine recurrence of the first of these three practices over the course of each day at my field site underscored its importance. In every meeting I joined, my participants devoted space to temporal mapping exercises, whether by recapitulating the calendar of upcoming litigation milestones, reviewing each team member’s urgent priorities, or analyzing the dynamic pipeline of immigration policies to “game out” immediate, medium-term, and long-term advocacy objectives. My participants not only continually visualized timelines, but they also waded into weedy, self-reflexive discussions about how to visualize timelines more effectively. In July 2020, a series of these discussions helped refine a detailed, formal protocol for tracking time horizons. Anyone conducting initial screenings with prospective clients bore responsibility for tracking one-year filing deadlines, visa expiry dates, and hearing dates across shared spreadsheets and legal databases. They bore responsibility for flagging the attention of the managing attorney if she failed to swiftly review client documents. If the prospective client proceeded to the intake stage and underwent an additional interview, that interviewer assumed responsibility for deadline management and remained responsible for it until the case’s subsequent assignment to a lawyer.

The stories that my participants told about their work revealed that they paid meticulous attention to case timelines not out of self-imposed perfectionism, nor out of reverence for the law’s rituals, but, rather, out of a perception that their failure to do so would cede power to the government actors charged with migration control, positioning those actors to enact temporal violence on clients. A staff attorney, Layla, exposed why lawyers consider proactive attention to timelines so crucial when she recounted the story of a family that entered the United States via the southern border without visas, intending to seek asylum. In October 2019, the family—which included a pregnant mother and her children—presented themselves to US immigration officials, who paroled them into the country. But DHS mysteriously never filed the family’s notices to appear (NTAs)—the legal document through which DHS formally initiates the removal process in which defensive applicants assert their asylum claim. Layla, thinking that perhaps this apparent oversight meant she could file the family’s asylum applications affirmatively with a USCIS Asylum Office (and thus spare them the more adversarial removal defense process), waited until the family’s one-year asylum filing deadline approached to see whether DHS would file the NTAs. At that point, still with no action from DHS, she began to prepare the family’s asylum applications for timely affirmative submission to USCIS. Suddenly, as if on cue, DHS filed the NTAs. Most importantly, the officer scheduled the hearing to occur after the family’s one-year filing period. Layla identified this as a common trick performed by DHS to get applicants to miss their eligibility cutoff: anyone who assumed—reasonably—the first hearing to be the appropriate time to articulate their asylum claim would automatically disqualify themselves for relief by missing the one-year filing deadline.

At the time, not wanting to mistake cynicism for certainty, I gently pushed Layla on whether she earnestly believed that DHS maneuvered strategically timed court dates to make time work against applicants. Layla affirmed emphatically that the tactic is one routinely observed by lawyers. Later that day, by coincidence, yet in alignment with Layla’s comments, a listserv notice appeared in my volunteer email inbox providing details of a successful class action lawsuit filed in June 2016, Mendez Rojas v. Wolf, which claimed that the US government “did not provide sufficient notice that asylum seekers generally must file their asylum applications within one year of arrival in the United States and that the Government did not provide them with an adequate mechanism to comply with that deadline.”Footnote ⁵ A practice advisory addressing the Mendez Rojas settlement affirmed that “many asylum seekers spent months—and, in some cases, years—interacting with DHS officers as part of reporting requirements, believing that they were complying with all necessary steps to pursue their cases, while never receiving any notice from DHS of the one-year deadline” (National Immigrant Justice Center 2021, 2). Mendez Rojas made clear why asylum attorneys zealously visualize timelines: if they fail to do so, they may produce opportunities for government officials to work time against unknowing applicants. Advocates therefore adopt a defensively anticipatory stance, orienting themselves vigilantly toward the future.

As a legal volunteer, I soon assimilated my participants’ wariness of the state agencies involved in immigration enforcement and began to defensively dwell in the future. It manifested in small ways—for example, for weeks, I routinely entered a new client’s A-number (their unique noncitizen identification number) into the Automated Case Information web page of EOIR in the event that EOIR posted the client’s next hearing date there. For some time, no updates manifested, until one day: “I think to check [the client’s] A-number … in case there’s been an update and in fact there has: he now has [a master calendar hearing] scheduled.” My satisfaction in that moment arose from having proactively elicited from EOIR crucial information that the agency may itself have failed to timely—or ever—convey to the client, placing him at risk of a missed court appointment. Prior to the date’s appearance, I had felt considerable worry knowing that, if I forgot to continually check the EOIR page for updates, we might miss a crucial procedural event if the court failed to give the client notice of the hearing. Indeed, lack of notice is a common reason that asylum seekers fail to appear for court hearings, leading them to unfairly receive in absentia removal orders (Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project and Catholic Legal Immigration Network 2018). Although the threat of temporal violence here seemed most likely the result of inadvertent technical disorganization, EOIR’s baked-in unpredictability and lack of transparency nevertheless had the effect of weaponizing time against those seeking relief.

Attorneys relate to the future as they do to insulate asylum seekers who would not otherwise know to anticipate legally significant time horizons. Lawyers’ tendency to visualize timelines in this way affirms Griffiths’s framework in that the habit protects against the temporal violence of “frenzied time” and “temporal ruptures”—either or both of which a miscalculated timeline could catalyze. But the habit also demonstrates that these two temporalities—though abrupt in their effect—do not emerge spontaneously. Rather, they have a creeping prehistory: a preceding period of time that appears insignificant but during which lawyers perceive state actors—or, alternatively, the underlying design of the bureaucratic system—to create the conditions for surprise. Even during stretches of apparent stillness, asylum lawyers find that government agencies organize themselves to weaponize efficiency against asylum seekers down the line by failing to adequately inform them of upcoming temporal benchmarks.

Getting Ahead of Deadlines

My participants’ awareness of the looming threat of temporal violence makes itself apparent in their second core practice: their tendency to proactively operate ahead of deadlines. Supervising attorneys’ guidance to pro bono teams embraced this approach as they urged volunteer lawyers to file clients’ documents well in advance of the implementation date of new restrictive asylum regulations. In one staff meeting, my participants discussed an impending change to employment authorization policy that severely curtailed asylum seekers’ ability to work legally. Liz, the managing attorney, articulated her rationale for proactively filing Employment Authorization Document (EAD) applications for every eligible client well ahead of the policy’s implementation on August 25, 2020. As captured in my field notes:

Liz’s explanation suggests that strict temporal rules operating alongside finnicky procedural requirements give government agents latitude to apply harsh substantive policies to more people. Liz urged staff to submit the EAD applications well before the deadline because she anticipated that USCIS would categorically reject EAD applications filed on time on the basis of minor issues that under better political conditions may simply have warranted a request for additional evidence. These rejections in turn may not have permitted applicants enough time to correct their applications and refile before the deadline, thus leveraging temporal rigidity to translate minor clerical glitches into opportunities to subject more people to state violence.Footnote ⁶ Liz’s fear of that nightmare scenario compelled her to file the EAD applications with enough time to allow for swift modifications and resubmission following an outright—and impliedly unfair—dismissal by USCIS on the first attempt.

In another context, as we prepared to bring a case before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), my supervisor, Carrie, anticipated the distress we would experience if we failed to account for the Immigration Court’s (that is, the court responsible for the original denial) narrow timeline:

Court transcripts are lengthy, and the arguments within BIA briefs must orient themselves exclusively to what appears within a transcript’s pages. Accordingly, without proactive planning on our part, the courts’ internal protocols and timelines made it difficult for us to comply with the temporal rules they imposed on practitioners.

Similarly to when they visualize timelines, lawyers anticipate Griffiths’s “frenzied time” when they get ahead of deadlines, seeking to avoid harmful temporal pressures; however, it is more accurate to say that they internalize these pressures, hurriedly rushing themselves along to outpace direct harm from state institutions. In this way, if all goes well, advocates insulate their clients from those instances of temporal violence with substantive repercussions—missed deadlines triggering disqualifications, hastily prepared appeals leading to BIA denials, and so on. Yet attorneys themselves still endure a frenzy, albeit self-enforced. Melanie Griffiths, Ali Rogers, and Bridget Anderson (Reference Griffiths, Rogers and Anderson2013, 20) describe “frenzied time” as “a fast, frenetic sense of time in which little can be anticipated or planned for”; resisting this characterization, attorneys in practice lean in aggressively to the space they do have for anticipation. That lawyers’ only way to preempt weaponized efficiency is to internally reproduce its urgency demonstrates the extent to which state agencies exert control through temporal violence—in this case, through the mere specter of temporal violence. Moreover, lawyers are acutely aware of the government’s outsized control in this domain. Their verbalized preoccupations about deadlines explicitly attest to time as “a major dimension and resource upon which some agents and agencies deem appropriate to exert power” (Cwerner Reference Cwerner2004, 73).

Slowing the Machine

Asylum lawyers’ proclivity to act proactively feeds into a third tactic. Asylum lawyers’ efforts to buy themselves more time foregrounds most starkly the way in which they reconfigure their own behavior to defend against the potential harms of the forward drive of state procedures. The cascade of major new restrictive asylum regulations that pummeled lawyers over the summer of 2020 set the backdrop for numerous examples of this as lawyers scrambled to delay—if not prevent—the enforcement of new policies against their clients. For example, asylum advocates collectively mobilized to challenge a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), issued on June 15, 2020, which sought to eviscerate the US asylum protection regime by heightening the standards for asylum eligibility. The NPRM eliminated eligibility for those fleeing gender- and gang-based violence, weakened due process rights, and empowered adjudicators to more swiftly deny asylum applications, among other things. In response to the proposed reforms, asylum lawyers defensively leveraged a window of opportunity created by the Administrative Procedure Act, which ensures a thirty-day comment period during which members of the public can submit responses to any NPRM.Footnote ⁷ At the close of the thirty-day comment period, the government bears a legal obligation to review every comment submitted. Thus, as DHS and EOIR attempted in one swift, fell swoop to obliterate a well-established infrastructure of protections, the advocacy community poured itself into slowing the whole thing down by flooding the agencies with an overwhelming wave of public comments—in effect, crowdsourcing to jam the gears of the machine.

Liz emphasized to her team that everyone—staff, interns, volunteers, pro bono attorneys, and anyone else we could recruit—should individually submit a comment. Liz explained that comments delay regulations because the government must read through each and every one before finalizing and implementing the new laws, giving advocates more time to develop a countervailing litigation strategy. She encouraged her staff to make comment submission a required assignment for interns because “the more we get the better.” “No excuses; we all have to do this,” asserted one advocate at a virtual training, hosted by another nonprofit legal organization, on how to submit public comments protesting the NPRM. The leaders of the training implored their colleagues to infuse their comments with as much detail as possible from their own professional experiences since more unique comments would defy the algorithms the government uses to batch similar comments together and accelerate the review period. If agency officials collapsed too many similar comments together, the speakers warned, it would undermine our efforts because “the whole point is to slow them down.”

Although the temporal rules of the policy-making process give the impression of a neutral procedural superstructure refereeing how advocates and government policy makers interact, the sweeping content of these reforms as well as lawyers’ constrained response to them reveal an imbalance of power. The proposed reforms threatened to roll back, within a matter of months, protective legal precedents developed over decades of persistent advocacy. Under these conditions, temporary delay frequently constituted advocates’ only immediate hope for resistance to substantive restrictions. In other words, while DHS and EOIR enjoyed the power to act with abrupt decisiveness against long-established standards, asylum advocates could not effectively defend against such change without first innovating to buy themselves more time. Here, advocates had virtually no way to anticipate the proposed changes and could only react under pressure after the fact. Notably, since this example describes a system-wide administrative process rather than that of a single person’s case, it shows that the temporal tensions of the asylum system operate at multiple levels, structuring policy advocacy as well as individual casework.

Whether striving to slow down the gears of the machine or to anticipate and outrun its unforgiving pace, asylum lawyers adapt their practices to respond to government actors’ periodic weaponization of efficiency. Speed enables state agencies to exert control over legal advocates—both indirectly, as when it threatens their clients’ interests (for example, interfering with their due process rights or circumscribing their eligibility for rights) and directly, as when it defines policy backslides that threaten the underlying protection principles of the asylum system. Lawyers recognize efficiency as a mechanism of state migration control. In weekly meetings and in external presentations, lawyers lamented new policies that condoned the quick pretermission of asylum claims without a hearing and that required asylum seekers to make their full case during a single brief initial screening interview. During the NPRM training, an asylum attorney from another organization critiqued sharply the government’s insistence that its policy reforms emerged from a desire to make the asylum process more efficient. As the lawyer pointed out, the government made little effort to balance efficiency with due process concerns. Moreover, the very complexity and the sheer extent of the proposed rules’ impact created so much confusion around previously settled legal issues that procedure under the new regime could not possibly proceed swiftly without sacrificing the quality and stability of protection. Given these practical implications of the proposed regulations, the attorney concluded, the government clearly wanted simply to deny as many claims as possible as early as possible. “This,” she asserted, “is what it meant by ‘efficiency.’”

Rejecting State Underperformance

In court, asylum lawyers witnessed government agents engage in delays or obstructions that the lawyers interpreted as seemingly willful or at least senseless. Although the pandemic precluded me from attending immigration court myself, my participants routinely recounted their court experiences during staff meetings or in personal exchanges. Staff attorneys often delivered colorful narratives of asylum victories, highlighting the government incompetence they overcame along the way to success. These success stories often hinged on a clear binary structure, with the state—most typically personified in the DHS attorney, the adjudicator, or both—framed as a villain and the attorney presented as its heroic foil. In this way, the ritual of sharing out legal victories—especially those in which state actors reportedly created obstacles to protection—became an opportunity to affirm shared understandings of the asylum advocate ethos. Lawyers affirmed their identity, values, and habits by setting them in direct contrast to those of the government.

One asylum win involved an applicant held in detention for almost five months who finally obtained release after his lawyer overcame DHS’s needless extensions of his detention. A member of the legal team uplifted her colleague’s victory to the entire staff, describing how the latter traveled all the way across state lines donned “in her PPE [personal protective equipment]” only to find that “the judge, appearing in person, did not wear a mask.” “Worse yet,” the DHS attorney had somehow not received the evidence that the lawyer had hand served. Due to this fumble, the judge postponed the hearing by three weeks, during which time DHS required the asylum seeker to remain detained. Fortunately, his lawyer “had of course, put together an irrefutable case,” such that the client ultimately won asylum at the rescheduled hearing (underscoring the senselessness of those three additional weeks of detention). This victory tale presented the staff attorney’s professional prowess (her reliable compilation of an airtight argument) against the unexcused and concretely harmful disorganization of DHS. It further implicitly elevated her moral status by contrasting her undeterred dedication to thorough coronavirus protective measures against the judge’s refusal to even wear a mask.

Layla invoked similar juxtapositions when she recounted a frustrating experience at an August 2020 hearing at Adelanto Detention Facility. Layla made it all the way through the direct examination of her client only for the DHS attorney, who was participating remotely, to state that her computer would not load properly and that she could not therefore conduct cross-examination “without prejudicing her ‘client’” (this “client” being the government, Layla pointedly clarified). “No mention of how this would prejudice our client, a real person, who had to remain locked in a jail during a pandemic for three extra weeks,” Liz wrote when announcing to the team Layla’s eventual victory at the rescheduled hearing in September. The client, who had by then spent over seven months in detention, finally won release the day before Adelanto cancelled all hearings due to a coronavirus outbreak at the facility. Over a minor—and presumably preventable—technological issue, the DHS attorney had not only denied the client’s liberty but also inadvertently placed him at an acute risk of contracting the virus. Here, Layla’s preparation and performance at trial set her apart from the floundering DHS attorney. And in deriding the DHS lawyer’s reference to her own “client,” the team sharply underscored the inhumanity of their adversary, utterly illegible as an entity warranting legal protection—especially compared to their own very human, very vulnerable client.

When an assignment at my field site required me to read through hundreds of pages of pro bono lawyers’ notes from court, they corroborated this picture of stark government ineptitude precipitating friction and stalling proceedings. The notes attested to DHS attorneys appearing wholly unprepared for cases, not having read the case documents. They described DHS attorneys preoccupied mid-hearing with their phones or email. They reported DHS attorneys making legal and factual errors—for example, misstating the client’s nationality and having to get hints from the judge before finally landing on the correct nationality. The chronic carelessness of government advocates stood in sharp contrast to the hours of preparation and meticulous attention to detail that I witnessed in the habits of public interest asylum lawyers preparing for trial.

Lawyers contended with moments of underperformance by state actors not only in the midst of hearings but also throughout the wider hum of activity taking place around hearings. A poignant example of this occurred in the context of two parallel court cases concerning the release of detained immigrant families during the pandemic. The first case focused on the release of children and the second case encompassed the families in full. The judge in the first case ruled in favor of the children’s release, ordering the government to comply by July 17, 2020. But because ICE refused to release the children and parents together (and since the judge in the first case did not have jurisdiction over the families at large), this seemingly positive decision placed the detained parents in the position of choosing by July 17 to either release their young children alone or keep their families together in detention. Advocates at my field site expressed not only outrage over ICE’s unwillingness to relieve the parents of this choice by agreeing to release the families but also exasperation that the judge in the second case declined to act with more urgency to reach a decision ahead of the July 17 deadline, which could have resolved the conflict. By vocally acknowledging disappointing behavior on the part of other legal actors, advocates implicitly affirmed their own values and professional commitments.

In other situations, poor coordination on DHS’s part further delayed asylum seekers’ release from detention following their victories in court. One client won release on bond from Adelanto but did not actually depart the facility until two weeks later in part because ICE had closed half of its Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Offices due to the pandemic, hamstringing attorneys’ attempts to pay the client’s bond. When the BIA dismissed one of Liz’s cases, it delayed sharing the judge’s written decision, which Liz required for her appeal to the Ninth Circuit. When Liz called the BIA to inquire, the clerk said they could not provide any information over the phone and that Liz would have to wait until the decision arrived by mail. Liz asked them to fax the decision, but they refused. Liz bridled: “I’m like, lady, I need the document for my deadline for the Ninth Circuit!” Liz’s frustration notwithstanding, the courts’ exercise of temporal control squeezed her from both sides, blocking her progress even as it held her under pressure to meet the next court deadline. Although these instances largely reflected incompetence and bureaucratic realities rather than willful obstruction, this did little to diminish the tangible temporal harms they enacted on people navigating the system. These situations left lawyers little space to resist temporal violence other than through their verbalized disappointment.

Pushing beyond Ineffective State Communication

Another dimension of the state’s selective inefficiency reared its head in the chronic failure to communicate key information to stakeholders in an effective or timely fashion. State agencies’ consistent failure to communicate around procedural issues compromised any hope for streamlining the asylum process. As much as asylum lawyers stretched themselves to keep up with the unrelenting pace of bureaucratic procedures, they also regularly contended with delayed, last-minute, or nonexistent announcements about significant operational shifts on the government’s side. Again, it became apparent that the state’s insistence on efficiency often went hand in hand with its selective inefficiency: lawyers must uphold a high standard of timeliness precisely as government actors reciprocate with sluggishness.

This dynamic showed powerfully within the context of immigration courts. Tweets from “Fake EOIR,” a Twitter account parodying EOIR and popular amongst immigration attorneys, capture the patterns of communication that lawyers cynically expect from the courts: “Surprise! All individual hearings are now rescheduled for tomorrow. Hearing notices are in the mail,” read one Fake EOIR tweet from July 2020. Another widely retweeted Fake EOIR quip: “As previously announced, some courts have resumed hearings, some never stopped hearings, some will be opened and closed and opened again on an arbitrary basis, and if anything gets lost in the shuffle while this is happening, it’s the respondent’s fault.” The reality of asylum lawyering is tragically not far off from the sinister world conjured by the Fake EOIR account. The real EOIR continued to list certain hearings on its calendar even when it had postponed those hearings. As court dates approached, my participants prepared for their hearings while simultaneously devising fallback plans in case of a last-minute cancellation.

Notably, delinquency on the part of government agencies pushed lawyers to sleuth out critical information on their own when possible—in effect, externalizing the costs of information sharing to advocates (compare Longazel Reference Longazel2018). The need for this additional labor coercively expands the investigatory work that asylum lawyers must perform. It also demands that lawyers undertake efforts to develop both domestic and cross-border advocacy networks since they must increasingly share local insights to inductively piece together the thrust of emergent, but unannounced, state policies. Throughout the pandemic, my participants largely relied on unofficial rumors about when courts may or may not close or reopen. In one meeting toward the start of stay-at-home orders, an attorney reported that court clerks had said the courts might close and that someone had seen a closure sign posted at the courthouse but that they still lacked certainty because the court offered no formal announcement. In mid-May 2020, Liz heard on a call that DHS attorneys had received directions to prepare for imminent re-openings, prompting our team to proactively make plans for the resumption of hearings, but, of course, in the end, most courts did not restart hearings until late September 2020.

Detention centers similarly failed to communicate about their shifting court protocols and left it up to advocates to make educated guesses as to what rules would govern. To account for the pandemic, Adelanto Detention Facility developed new criteria around who would be allowed to enter the facility but did not share these new criteria with lawyers. In advance of one detained docket hearing, Carrie tried in vain to get answers about the new protocol. The most she could decipher was that the facility may turn away anyone who had recently traveled overseas. Since Carrie had recently returned from a work trip to Mexico to advance MPP-related advocacy, this meant she might be blocked from attending the hearing. Unable to confirm this, however, Carrie resigned herself to “driving six hours into the desert at 6 am tomorrow only to maybe not be let in.” If the Adelanto detention officers did not let her in, her remaining option would be to beg them to let her participate in the hearing by phone from outside the facility.

My participants saw in the courts’ poor communication the potential for heightened confusion and stress for their clients, and they accordingly made an effort to disseminate reliable information themselves. Particularly toward the start of the pandemic, lawyers feared that the government’s failure to deliver timely and unequivocal updates on court closures would leave asylum seekers doubtful about whether to appear for hearings. One lawyer pointed out that people likely would not feel safe not showing up to court simply because a friend of a friend who happened to be a lawyer told them about the closure. Another noted that asylum seekers may show up to a court only to find it closed, leaving them unsure what to do next. Since EOIR had failed to resolve this confusion for the public, lawyers took up the additional work of devising ways to get accurate information out to immigrant communities swiftly via social media, community education, and other channels.

Working around Standstills

Finally, my fieldwork revealed the extent to which lawyers contend with the government’s selective tolerance toward systemic standstills. People lobbying in support of more restrictive asylum policies often frame the US asylum system’s profound backlogs as a worrisome loophole that gives fraudulent applicants the ability to legally remain in the United States for long periods. Yet my observations demonstrated that backlogs often serve the interests of restrictive migration policy while producing harmful precarity for immigrants. Asylum lawyers had to place whole areas of their professional portfolio on hold while they waited for the government to lift procedural suspensions. Most notably, in the context of the Remain in Mexico program—a program that required asylum seekers seeking entry to the United States via the southern border to wait indefinitely in Mexico to present their US asylum claim—lawyers waited and waited some more for the government to announce the recommencement of MPP hearings. But, eventually, even as hearings in US courts restarted, it became clear that the Trump administration had no plan to restart MPP hearings anytime soon.

The whole initial premise for the MPP itself stood on the idea that the US asylum system could not handle more incoming applicants. The migrant camps that developed on the Mexico side of the border made visible the extent of the underlying procedural delays. But in the view of progressive immigration lawyers, under cover of the pandemic, the government delayed the resumption of MPP hearings beyond any reasonable time frame—in this way, further exacerbating backlogs to deny people their day in court. Moreover, the program’s paralysis left lawyers utterly unable to provide meaningful legal support to would-be asylum seekers waiting in MPP. In one staff meeting, Liz identified the “heartbreaking” circumstances facing those “who are stuck in Mexico with no end in sight” as a concern that “[kept her] up at night.” Ultimately, lawyers elected to work around this situation: they adapted their priorities to attend instead to adjacent populations they could realistically assist immediately, such as those who had already filed their cases and now sought to appeal a decision. Here, advocates adjusted themselves by shifting their short-term attention to a new client base while still drawing upon their legal toolkit—in this case, appellate representation.

The government’s long-term suspension of processing could also push lawyers to reconfigure their purpose within the context of a blocked case. Where standstills made meaningful legal progress virtually impossible, attorneys necessarily related to their clients in new ways: the day-to-day work of those cases became more about compassionately witnessing or accompanying clients than about actively advancing their legal interests. In an effort to help clients cope with the stress produced by the seemingly unending delays, lawyers sometimes undertook legal work at clients’ direction, even knowing that a particular avenue would unlikely lead to a change in circumstances. Their efforts amounted more to an emotional labor of affirming hope and resistance than to a legal labor that could actually change the client’s material circumstances. For example, I once helped Layla prepare humanitarian parole and nonrefoulement interview applications for a client stranded in MPP—two Hail Mary-type mechanisms for winning entry into the United States that, at the time, had a practically nonexistent success rate with adjudicators. Layla emphasized to me multiple times—I suspect because she wanted to manage my expectations—that she had little to no hope that these petitions would actually get the client across the border. But she wanted to do something for him because he contacted her desperately every day, reiterating that he did not feel safe in Tijuana. Layla explained that he regularly called her to say that he was getting in line to enter the United States, and every time she replied the same: “I don’t think that’s going to work out for you, but do let me know if you make it in.” Rather than leave her client alone to habitually practice this likely futile—but completely understandable—insistence on justice, Layla affirmed his attitude by embracing an ethos of persisting against all odds over the conventional logic of her technical legal training (compare Longazel Reference Longazel2018).