The first time I talked to Elvis, the main character in this week’s @LatinoUSA episode, I was sitting in his wife Wendy’s living room on Long Island with @MaxSiegelbaum. We wanted to tell a story about how U.S. immigration courts have changed under the Trump administration 1/

Elvis called from an immigration detention center in Louisiana. He and Wendy had come to the U.S. from Guatemala almost a year before after getting violent extortion threats. Since then, almost everything had gone wrong 2/

They were separated at the border. He’d been detained for almost a year as his court hearings got delayed. He only ever got to talk to judges over videoconference. At his last hearing, he had no lawyer. Asked if he wanted to appeal, he said, “what for? It would be useless.” 3/

What made Elvis’s story striking was that it was totally … ordinary. Max and @mazsidahmed and six reporters from @documentedny and @typeinvestigate had spent three months in 2019 observing NYC immigration courts every day, and everything that happened to Elvis was commonplace 4/

That first call was six months ago. Since then Wendy and Elvis opened their lives to us, telling us their love story and sharing audio from extortions and intimate family moments. We also got rarely-heard court audio from Elvis’s immigration hearings. 5/

We got to take an unusually close listen into what it’s like to navigate Trump’s immigration courts as a Central American asylum seeker at a time when more than 86% of Guatemalans’ asylum claims are being denied. https://www.latinousa.org/2020/05/13/mercyof/

Thanks as always to our magical editor @spalizac for spending many hours with me to make this shine. And the most thanks, of course, to Elvis and Wendy.