In the second part of their immigration deep dive — and the final episode of Season 2 — Gwen and Marc move from the machinery to the person standing inside it:
• Why representation matters more in immigration than anywhere else in the federal system — represented asylum seekers win at several times the rate of unrepresented ones, and unrepresented detained respondents face denial rates around ninety percent
• The Sixth Amendment gap: immigration removal is classified as civil, not criminal, so there's no right to appointed counsel. If you can't find a lawyer and the pro bono organizations are full, you represent yourself against a trained government attorney through an interpreter
• How detention structurally degrades the case before the hearing happens — bond decided in a ten-minute video proceeding, evidence that can't be gathered from inside a facility, and the same docket clock running whether you're preparing from a lawyer's office or a monitored phone booth
• The constitutional floor that most people assume exists and doesn't: plenary power from the 1889 Chinese Exclusion Case, Thuraissigiam's holding that someone apprehended twenty-five yards inside the border has essentially no due process right to judicial review, and a 2025 executive order testing whether that logic extends to anyone anywhere in the country who can't prove two years of presence
• Why you don't have to disagree with the doctrine to be troubled by the outcomes — strict or generous, the law is supposed to apply the same way to the same facts, and the data says it doesn't
Next season: judicial review. What happens when this finally gets to court — and why it's not the rescue mechanism people imagine.