Anastasia Schimanski has lived in the U.S. since the age of eleven, and faces likely persecution if she were forced back to Russia. Photograph by Matt Leifheit for The New Yorker

In immigration court, as in any bureaucracy, most of the time is spent waiting. Anastasia Schimanski; her mother, Olga; Anastasia’s girlfriend, Stephanie Avery; and Anastasia’s lawyer, Holli Wargo, were waiting in the federal courthouse in Hartford, Connecticut, in a small, windowless room marked “Pro Bono Room,” although theirs was not a pro-bono arrangement.

They were waiting for a hearing on Schimanski’s deportation case. She was originally “placed in removal proceedings,” as it’s called—a process that would determine her eligibility for deportation—back in November, 2012. By that time, she had lived in this country for twenty-one years. She came here with her mother in 1991, at the age of eleven. They came for a summer vacation, but that August, hard-liners attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev; Olga got scared, and they stayed in the U.S. longer. Then Olga met someone and married him, and they stayed permanently. They got green cards: Olga as the wife of an American citizen, and Schimanski as her minor child.

When Schimanski finished high school, she enlisted in the Navy. At around the same time, she began experiencing symptoms that were eventually diagnosed as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a degenerative condition that can cause chronic pain and deformities in the extremities. She never made it through basic training. Twenty years later, her Facebook page lists “honorable discharge from the Navy” as her sole professional accomplishment. Since the early discharge, she has had eighteen operations. She often uses a wheelchair, and when she is not using it, she walks with a four-pronged cane. She falls a lot.

With surgeries and with chronic pain came prescription painkillers. The story of Schimanski’s opioid addiction is a painfully common American story. Four years ago, she finally succeeded in switching to a methadone maintenance program; going without anything to dull the pain is not an option. Over the years, Schimanski has amassed a record of twenty-three arrests, including an aggravated-felony conviction, which stemmed from a forged check for forty dollars; she had swiped a blank check from Olga’s workplace. She was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison in 2004, of which she served ninety days; Olga paid her employer back.

The family had long believed the matter to have been settled and the punishment to have been served, but in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, Schimanski’s aggravated felony fell under the provisions of Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationalities Act, which lays out the grounds for deportation, including convictions for an aggravated felony. As deportations ramped up under President Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rounded up people with aggravated felonies, which is how Schimanski ended up in “removal proceedings” eight years after her conviction.

Schimanski did not serve in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, as one recent deportee did. She does not have children who are U.S. citizens. She has not led an illustrious or even a productive life. She does not have great promise or ambition. She lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with her mother, who works as an aide in a group home, and a service dog whose job it is to alert Olga when her daughter falls. Stephanie Avery, who works as a waitress at Denny’s, lives a half-hour’s drive away, in West Haven; they have been together for seven years and have discussed marriage and children, but Schimanski’s precarious status has made planning impossible. The only thing that entitles Schimanski to the compassion of her fellow-residents of the United States is her humanity.

It is humanity that immigration law is intended to protect. Judges are not instructed to look kindly on military veterans or brilliant students—they are supposed to prevent the deportation of human beings to places where they are likely to face persecution or torture. Schimanski’s lawyer was arguing that, as a lesbian, Schimanski would more likely than not be persecuted in Russia, probably denied medical treatment, and certainly denied access to methadone, which is illegal in Russia. Her original argument for a withholding of removal was denied in January, 2015; a subsequent appeal was dismissed in 2016.

Photographs of relatives in Olga Schimanski’s living room. Photograph by Matt Leifheit for The New Yorker

I learned about the case when Schimanski’s family asked me to serve as an expert witness, because I have written extensively about the persecution of and systematic violence against L.G.B.T. people in Russia. In looking into the possibility of testifying, I learned things that I’d never known about immigration court. As a person born outside the United States, in order to testify in immigration court I would have to furnish my alien registration number, even though I was naturalized twenty-nine years ago. Immigration court treats naturalization as a fiction: anyone who wasn’t born in the United States is Other. In the end, for unrelated reasons, I didn’t testify; instead, I was in court as a journalist, and this was why, as Wargo was getting on the phone with another potential expert witness (he couldn’t make it), she asked me to leave the Pro Bono Room. Olga stayed in the room with her, while her daughter and Avery went to the bathroom. I was looking over my notes in the immigration-court waiting area—which, with rows of gray-upholstered plastic chairs, looks like the waiting area in any bureaucratic office—when Avery ran in.

“They are putting her in handcuffs and taking her downstairs,” she screamed. She was crying and hyperventilating.

I followed Avery as she ran back to the elevator bank where Schimanski had been taken. Three men who, I later learned, were ICE agents were getting on an elevator with Schimanski. I asked the men why they were detaining her.

“I’ve seen you on MSNBC,” one of the agents answered, by way of telling me that I wouldn’t get an answer.

Then Schimanski was gone, and the four of us remained in the large waiting area. Avery was crying, repeating over and over, “Does this mean I’ll never see her again?” Olga was speaking Russian to me, trying simultaneously to explain and to understand what had just happened. She was convinced that it was somehow Wargo’s fault. Avery agreed. “I don’t understand,” she said. “She is not telling us enough. She is not explaining something. I don’t understand.”

Wargo didn’t exactly understand it, either. She knew that Schimanski had a D.U.I. arrest that technically gave ICE cause to detain her, but the timing was surprising. She had never had a client detained minutes before that client’s hearing was scheduled to begin.

Schimanski called from two floors below. Olga put her daughter on speakerphone.