1. Introduction: From Personal Experience to Research

Growing up in Los Lunas, New Mexico – just south of Albuquerque – it was apparent early on that access to justice is not an abstract concept but a lived experience shaped by public policy and legal institutions. Policy structures shape where families live, what resources they can access, and how far they must travel to meet basic needs. Early experiences reflected these dynamics: a mother explaining why she had to search beyond the district for houses that were “worth it enough” for her to clean, and a father helping build houses that remained inaccessible to families like their own. Even before possessing the language to describe them, uneven distributions of infrastructure, investment, and opportunity were visible. As the child of immigrants, law and policy also entered daily life in quieter ways. At age thirteen, citizenship documents were translated for a parent because immigration hotlines lacked reliable Spanishlanguage assistance. At the time, this appeared as a family responsibility rather than an institutional failure. In retrospect, it reflects how systems meant to provide support often assume access to language, time, and legal knowledge that many families do not have. For much of my early life, while these conditions were lived within, they remained largely uninterrogated. It was not until undergraduate study – and more specifically, participation in a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF REU) – that the distinction between experiencing inequality and studying it became clear. Coursework in justice, political philosophy, and law, and sociology, provided the vocabulary to describe the structural forces long present in everyday life. The NSF REU offered something different: a methodological framework which emphasized listening to communities rather than speaking for them.

Fieldwork conducted in the Paseo del Norte region (El Paso, TX; Las Cruces, NM; Ciudad Juarez, MX) focused on, broadly, how access to justice is constructed through immigration and courtroom processes along the U.S.-Mexico border. This article argues that access to justice is not inherent within legal systems but is actively produced and constrained through legal institutional practices that determine whose knowledge, narratives, and identities become legally legible. In doing so, it engages with socio-legal scholarship on legal consciousness, which examines how individuals experience and interpret law in everyday life, and extends this work by showing how such understandings are not formed outside institutions alone, but are actively shaped within courtroom interactions themselves. At the same time, the study situates these processes within the context of crimmigration, where the merging of criminal and immigration laws intensifies the consequences of legal interpretation and amplifies existing inequalities. It advances three central claims: first, that legal rights don’t operate automatically but must be translated, argued, and made visible within legal infrastructures and courtroom interactions shaped by unequal distributions of knowledge and power; second, that courtroom practices construct identity and credibility in ways that can reproduce inequality under the appearance of neutrality; and third, that community-based participatory research (CBPR) reshapes not only how these processes are studied, but what counts as legal knowledge itself.

Drawing on court observations and sustained engagement with community members, this study traces how legal processes often reduce individuals to administrative categories, suppress narrative complexity, and rely on performances of neutrality that obscure structural inequality. These findings also reshape how research itself is understood – not as something that is detached, but an ethical practice that carries responsibility toward those whose lives are shaped by the legal institutions being studied. In this sense, courtrooms are examined not only as legal sites, but as spaces where access to justice is actively produced and contested, and where research participates in determining what becomes visible as legal knowledge.

2. Literature and Conceptual Framework: Community-Based Participatory Research and Ethnographic Approaches

The article proceeds as follows: first, it situates the study within socio-legal scholarship on legal consciousness, procedural justice, and crimmigration; next, it outlines the CBPRinformed methodology; it then presents empirical findings from courtroom observations; and finally, it reflects on broader theoretical and ethical implications of studying law through participatory research.

Central to this study is the concept of crimmigration, which describes the growing convergence of criminal and immigration law in the United States. Scholars such as Juliet Stumpf argue that this merger has transformed immigration enforcement from a primarily administrative process into one increasingly governed by criminal logics of surveillance, punishment, and exclusion. (Stumpf, 2006) Building on this work, César Cuauhtémoc Garcia Hernandez shows how immigration violations are progressively criminalized, expanding the reach of the penal system into domains once considered civil. (García Hernandez, 2021) Rather than operating as separate systems, criminal and immigration law now function in tandem, producing what scholars describe as a hybrid legal regime in which noncitizens are subject to intensified scrutiny and diminished procedural protections. This convergence is particularly significant in border regions, where enforcement practices blur the distinction between civil immigration violations and criminal offenses, shaping how individuals are processed, interpreted, and judged within legal institutions.

While research often favors quantitative analysis due to its ability to provide objective, measurable data, it is a well-established understanding in many fields that numbers and graphs alone may not provide the full story. Most importantly, as Joel Best enlightens us, “numbers do not exist independent of people; understanding numbers requires knowing who counted what, why they bothered counting, and how they went about it.” (Best, 2004) This is crucial, as society often relies on external information to make sense of reality, while rarely questioning how that information was produced or whose experiences were prioritized in the process. As Best puts it, “although [it] may seem painfully obvious, it tends to be forgotten or ignored when we think about…statistics.” (Best, 2004) As a result of this trend, individuals experiencing the statistics – whatever they may be – first-hand are commonly framed as objects of research with little importance beyond that role. Consequently, both the development of theory and the conclusions from it are left vulnerable to bias and misrepresentation. Research, therefore, for one “must involve the participation of representatives of the affected populations as our partners.” (Schensul et al., 2014) Only through doing so can we form a meaningful and more complete connection between legal theory and lived experiences.

Ana-Maria Cîrstea and Janina Pescinski argue ethnography is a long-term “intimate” engagement, observation, and dialogue with communities, allowing researchers to understand how social realities are experienced, interpreted, and navigated in everyday life. (Cîrstea & P., 2024) As a result, rather than treating people as data points, researchers must recognize them as producers of legal knowledge whose perspectives are essential to understanding social conditions. Acting as a “camera with a zoom lens that can both capture the wide context of structure and narrowly focus on agents in a way that shows their interactions within that structure.” (Fitzgerald, 2006) When paired with CBPR, this approach moves beyond observation alone and toward shared responsibility in legal knowledge production. As relationships are formed with those living in the community, researchers become better equipped to support changes in access to justice at the community level. Communities are able to guide the research in ways that’ll be most meaningful for them, while still contributing to broader academic and policy discussions through ongoing information, resource, and skill sharing. In this way, the who, why, and what behind the data remain visible throughout the research process, rather than obscured behind statistics alone.

3. Methods: Learning to Research With, Not On

This study is based on long-term interactions with community members, advocates, and legal actors in the Paseo del Norte region as well as ethnographic observation of courtroom proceedings. Over the course of approximately six months, the researcher attended roughly 25-35 hearings across civil and immigration-related proceedings. These hearings were selected to represent variation in case types, procedural stages, and participant roles, while access was limited to publicly available sessions and proceedings in which observer entry was permitted under court policy. Furthermore, approximately 15-20 semi-structured interviews were conducted, supplemented by informal conversations and collaborative meetings with community members, advocates, and legal service providers. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on their direct involvement in immigration-related legal processes and community support systems, and through snowball sampling in which initial participants referred additional voices with relevant lived or professional experience. Interviews and observational practices were discussed with community members to ensure relevance, cultural sensitivity, and ethical integrity. Data were documented through detailed field notes and reflective journaling, with all sensitive information anonymize and identifying details altered or removed to minimize risks to participants and the researcher.

Rather than treating communities as sources of information to be extracted from, the research design emphasized the co-production of knowledge and sustained attention to how presence, voice, and narrative authority shape what is rendered legible, credible, or dismissible within legal and academic settings. Reflexive engagement was central throughout the project, linking positionality – particularly the researcher’s identity, institutional affiliation, and prior experience — to processes of access, interaction, and interpretation. Thereafter, field notes were analyzed thematically to identify patterns emerging from sustained field engagement, dialogue with community partners, and attention to how legal processes structure unequal access to justice. Data collection continued (and still continues) until thematic saturation was reached, as recurring patterns became consistent across interviews and observational fieldwork. This methodological orientation made it possible to examine how access to justice is mediated by uneven distributions of knowledge, institutional familiarity, and trust, while also foregrounding the ethical implications of research practice itself. Overall, the method functioned not only as a technique of data collection but as a site of ethical negotiation, where participation, accountability, and reflection are inseparable from observation and analysis.

4. Findings: Observations and Insights from Fieldwork

At the outset of the NSF REU, the research focus was intentionally broad. The cohort began by studying immigration in the U.S–Mexico border context through readings, group discussions, and early conversations with scholars, former program participants, community advocates, and legal actors. These engagements introduced immigration as a complex social, political, and humanitarian field rather than a single legal problem. This initial framing began to shift, however, through two key experiences that redirected analytical attention. The first was meeting with an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) policy advocate, which revealed how uneven and fragile access to legal knowledge and protection is in practice. This conversation raised more questions than answers — most notably, how long limited awareness of available legal resources and educational efforts had persisted despite close proximity to the communities they were designed to serve. Initiatives such as “Know Your Rights” education and legal defense support existed, yet familiarity with them remained limited. While many resources are accessible online or through outreach efforts, individuals must first know where to look, feel safe enough to seek help, and have the time and language access to engage with them. This revealed a gap between the formal existence of rights and their lived accessibility. This realization complicated earlier assumptions that legal rights are naturally encountered through everyday interactions with the system. In turn, this prompted a shift in analytical focus toward the courtroom, where legal rights are not merely stated but must be enacted, interpreted, and made visible in real time. The following section argues that access to justice in immigration-related contexts is not determined by the formal availability of legal rights, but by uneven conditions of legal legibility — where knowledge, credibility, and participation must be actively produced within institutional settings such as the courtroom.

This paper refers to this process as the production of legal meaning: the practical interpretation of rights and responsibilities through which access to justice becomes possible — or denied.

Rather than rights being something that is encountered once inside the system, they have to be translated, defended, and made legally legible in real time. It was here that the researcher’s focus on the courtroom solidified – not as a neutral arena of resolution, but as a contested space where meaning, intent, and humanity are continuously negotiated. This realization took concrete form during a courtroom observation on June 4th, 2025, where the case – a twenty-one-year-old woman charged with illegal entry and trespassing on a military reservation – initially presented itself as ordinary. However, illegal entry onto a military installation transformed what is typically a civil immigration matter into a criminal proceeding, situating the defendant immediately within a criminal legal framework. As a first-time observer, the tension and formality of the space was immediately apparent, as well as the disciplined rhythm through which testimony, objections, and judicial oversight unfolded. These observations highlight the highly structured nature of courtroom participation, where interaction is governed not only by legal rules but by tightly controlled procedural expectations.

Courtroom proceedings often rely on the appearance of participation — individuals are asked to respond, confirm, or comply — but within constraints that limit how fully they can articulate their experiences. Research on immigration-related court proceedings has shown that these environments are frequently overburdened and expedited, leaving little room for individuals to fully engage with their cases or understand the legal process. (Chishti et al., 2023) While procedural justice emphasizes the importance of voice, neutrality, and fairness, these conditions complicate what “voice” actually looks like in practice. Participation becomes less about expression and more about navigating institutional expectations — responding quickly, adhering to legal language, and fitting within procedural timelines not designed with the individual in mind.

Courtroom procedures are often presented as neutral mechanisms that ensure fairness through consistency, structure, and due process. However, socio-legal scholarship suggests that these same structures can obscure unequal conditions of participation; specifically, scholars such as Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego describe this as forms of “legal violence,” enacted not only through outcomes but through the everyday processes that individuals must navigate. Seen in this light, courtroom order and formality don’t simply produce fairness — they also discipline how individuals are allowed to speak, what counts as relevant, and whose knowledge is treated as credible. Limited time, technical language, and rigid expectations narrow the space for meaningful participation, suggesting that what appears as procedural fairness may simultaneously constrain the very voice it claims to protect. The convergence of criminal and immigration law further intensifies these dynamics. Migrant “illegality,” as Nicholas De Genova argues, is not simply a legal designation but a socially produced condition that renders individuals perpetually suspect. (De Genova, 2002) Within the courtroom, this positioning often precedes interaction itself, shaping the terms under which individuals are recognized and evaluated before they are able to speak. As the boundaries between administrative processing and criminal adjudication blur, immigration status alone can influence how individuals are addressed, interpreted, and judged. In this way, the courtroom does not simply evaluate claims — it participates in producing the very conditions under which certain individuals are treated as already suspect.

What was most unsettling, then, was how the courtroom structure enabled a shift from evaluating actions to constructing identity. During closing arguments, the prosecutor referenced the $500 found on the defendant at the time of her arrest, as well as her lipstick and makeup, concluding: “As a woman, that tells me something, that she’s privileged.” (Texas Tribune, 2025) In this moment, the courtroom became not only a site where legal rules were applied, but where we can see courtroom evaluation extend beyond legal evidence into moral and cultural judgement. Reflecting what socio-legal scholars describe as character adjudication: the process by which courts assess not only actions but moral worth, credibility, and deservingness through culturally coded cues. (Alfieri, 1995; Wojciechowski, 2024) In immigration-related proceedings, such assessments are often racialized and gendered, transforming everyday objects into indicators of intent, threat, or legitimacy. Rather than functioning as neutral arbiters of law, courtrooms become spaces where identity is legally constructed and constrained. (Alfieri, 2010)

Most strikingly reflected in a courtroom encounter observed with a federal judge’s remarks on June, 18th 2025, “Whether I allow a narrative is discretionary.”

Similarly, language such as “subject,” “group of aliens,” “observed,” and “illegal” was repeatedly employed by Border Patrol testimony, reinforcing hierarchical distance and institutional authority. (Sundquist, 2025) These discursive practices show how legal meaning is shaped not only through rulings, but through everyday language and interaction. Despite uncertainty in the prosecution’s evidence – particularly regarding visibility of signage, precise location markers, and recorded documentation – assumptions about awareness and intent persisted. The courtroom process moved forward as though knowledge of trespass were selfevident, even when the material basis for that knowledge remained unclear.

These assumptions, however, did not go uncontested. Throughout the trial, the defense repeatedly worked to interrupt this narrative of presumed awareness by questioning visibility, boundaries, and testimony reliability. Through sustained objections and cross-examination, the defense made uncertainty legally visible, emphasizing knowledge of trespass was neither obvious nor guaranteed. Uncertainty doesn’t naturally surface within legal proceedings — it must be actively produced into existence. Scholars such as Sally Engle Merry and Patricia Ewick argue that legal consciousness is shaped through everyday encounters with law. (Ewick & Silbey, 1998; Merry, 1990) Building on this work, these observations suggest that such encounters are not only experienced but actively managed, constrained, and translated within courtroom environments, where participation is mediated through legal language, time pressure, and institutional expectations. Additionally, this work reinforces the idea that courts operate on presumptions of legal knowledge and intent that disproportionately burden defendants who lack institutional familiarity or legal resources. (Chua & Engel, 2019; Ewick & Silbey, 1998; Merry, 1990) What appeared in this case as a procedural routine – the defense’s obligation to manufacture uncertainty – revealed how “due process” is experienced unevenly, depending on one’s ability to translate lived confusion into legally recognizable doubt. Absent this contestation, the legal process would proceed with its assumptions intact.

Taken together, these observations show that formal equality before the law coexists with deeply unequal conditions of legibility, where participation depends on institutional familiarity, interpretive authority, and the ability to convert lived uncertainty into legally recognizable claims. These moments reshaped how legal protection itself could be understood and shifted analytical focus toward the spaces where legal meaning is produced and contested. Conversations with advocates, defenders, journalists, and migrants continued, but different questions came to the foreground – about courtrooms, legal strategy, plea negotiations, and the everyday mechanics of navigating criminal and immigration law. Without changing who was consulted, attention shifted toward what was listened for. The legal system thus became the lens through which migration itself was re-examined.

4.3. Ethical Lessons from Participatory Research

These observations also raise methodological and ethical questions about how such experiences are documented and represented. The following section shifts from empirical findings to reflect on the responsibilities and tensions of conducting research in legally and emotionally charged environments. This shift was reinforced through conversations with public defenders, whose role extended beyond courtroom representation. One noted on June, 20th 2025, that “it is only because people like you reach out that I am able to contribute in some way,” describing part of their work as “educating the community” about the legal process and courtroom space itself when opportunities arise. Initiating such conversations, however, had become increasingly difficult amid current political pressure, fear, and professional risk – often limiting when and how much knowledge could be shared. This reveals how access to legal knowledge is not only institutional but dependent on fragile relational networks of trust and timing. A conversation with a community advocate on June, 30th 2025, further complicated this dynamic, describing a complicated relationship with researchers and organizations who often “come in, extract from us, and then leave” without ever including them in the process or outcome.

This critique becomes significant because it highlights how research itself can reproduce the same asymmetries of power observed within legal systems. In this way, the research process mirrors the very dynamics it seeks to study. Studying the courtroom is not only a matter of understanding legal outcomes, but of examining how legal knowledge itself is produced, circulated, and controlled in relation to the people who ultimately bear the consequences of those outcomes. Observing how legal meaning is negotiated reshaped how the researcher’s role was understood. What emerges here is a shift from documentation to participation, where research itself contributes to determine whose experiences become visible — challenging earlier assumptions that observation alone could capture legal processes and marking a turning point in how fieldwork was approached. The central question became not only how access to justice operates in practice, but how methods of observation, interpretation, and representation might either challenge or reinforce its effects. Instead of understanding law as a detached institutional structure, the researcher came to understand it as a lived and uneven process – and members of the community not as subjects, but as co-producers of legal knowledge. Co-producers whose insights shape what scholars pay attention to, what can reasonably be considered ethically and analytically legitimate questions, and ultimately, how the interpretation of the community itself takes form.

This responsibility extended beyond the formal boundaries of the NSF REU. Since completing the program, an IRB-approved follow-up research project was initiated, and the researcher began intentionally reaching back out to individuals previously consulted – public defenders, advocates, and community members – not to extract new data immediately, but to ask what had changed, what had not, and whether earlier representations still felt accurate.

Remaining reachable allowed the research relationship to continue beyond funding timelines and academic deliverables, treating participants not as completed sources, but as ongoing partners whose circumstances and interpretations evolve. At the conclusion of the program, the cohort presented its findings to faculty and community members who had contributed their time and knowledge. Rather than framing this as a final product, the presentation was treated as a provisional account – summarizing patterns observed, clarifying limitations, and making space for responses and critique. Participants were provided with copies of our materials, and followup communication was prioritized when new developments emerged. These practices were modest, but they marked a refusal of the academic norm in which communities function only as sources, never as audiences or collaborators in meaning-making.

This shift extended into methodological practice. Follow-up engagement, sharing findings, and inviting critique were not treated as add-ons, but as necessary interventions into extractive research norms. Notes and interpretations were shared when possible, inviting correction, clarification, and disagreement. While this did not eliminate the imbalance between researcher and participant, it shifted authorship from solitary authority toward partial negotiation, reshaping not only who was consulted, but how engagement occurred. Early conversations followed a more structured approach, guided by predefined themes, institutional processes, and desired outcomes. This often involved asking questions such as, "What policy would fix this?" or “Can you summarize your experience?” These questions inherently assumed coherence, closure, and usefulness to institutional agendas, reducing complex lives into digestible narratives or “impact statements” that could be mobilized for academic or policy purposes without necessarily serving those who shared them. Gradually, this orientation shifted. Questions became,“What do people misunderstand about what happens in court?” “What do you wish researchers would stop doing?” and “What feels risky to talk about?” Conversations came to be understood as spaces shaped by vulnerability, risk, and unequal power, requiring restraint as much as curiosity. This involved learning to listen more than to guide, allowing conversations to move toward fear, exhaustion, or family separation rather than redirecting them toward predefined research priorities. Consent was treated as ongoing rather than procedural, especially when conversations moved toward painful or legally sensitive experiences. Just as importantly, silence – moments when questions were met with pauses, deflection, or refusal – came to be understood not as absence, but as communication shaped by harm, surveillance, and uncertainty.

While these questions did not always produce clear answers, their intention was to shift authority over what mattered to the people living within the system itself. What became visible was how much knowledge is withheld not because it is absent, but because sharing it can be dangerous. These changes reflected CBPR not as a methodological label, but as a behavioral discipline: one that requires learning to slow down, relinquishing control over narrative direction, and recognizing that research presence itself shapes what becomes sayable. Taken together, these methodological reflections suggest that research is embedded within the same structures of power it seeks to analyze. The most significant shift was not analytical but ethical: from interpretation toward accountability, and from authority toward relational engagement.

5. Tensions and Limitations of Participatory Research

While the researcher’s approach to fieldwork was reshaped by CBPR, it did not dissolve the structural conditions within which that work took place. Instead, it made several tensions more visible – tensions that complicate any straightforward narrative of ethical or collaborative research. One of the most immediate was the exhaustion of community advocates and legal actors. Many were already navigating constant crises: emergency legal support, housing insecurity, diminishing networks, and shifting enforcement practices. Interviews often became another demand on already limited time and emotional capacity. Several participants described being repeatedly approached by students, journalists, and organizations seeking insight, testimony, or documentation, and while these requests were often well intentioned, they accumulated into a form of labor that was rarely acknowledged as such. CBPR did not absolve this burden, but it made clear that research participation itself can reproduce fatigue, even when framed as collaboration.

A second tension emerged between visibility and safety. Increasing public awareness about courtroom practices related to detention conditions and border enforcement can generate political pressure and material support. Consequently, exposure also carries real risks. For migrants, being seen can mean surveillance, retaliation, or legal vulnerability; as a result, many of the individuals most directly affected by the system remained inaccessible to the researcher, not because of unwillingness, but because contact itself could be dangerous. Their absence from data collection was therefore not incidental, but structured by the very legal and political conditions that were being studied. For advocates and legal workers, visibility can also bring professional consequences or targeted harassment. This tension not only structures what people are willing to share, but how – often indirectly, partially, or off the record. It was echoed in conversations with journalists, several of whom described how sustained reporting on migration in the region has remained limited despite its designation as a “migrant corridor”. Not to overlook the reporting that is being done, but restricted access, institutional pressure, and the normalization of crises narrow what becomes publicly visible. Together, these dynamics shape not only what can be safely said, but what can be known at all. CBPR emphasized consent and agency, but it could not resolve the fact that in a highly securitized environment, silence is sometimes a rational form of protection rather than simply disengagement.

A third tension involved time. This research unfolded within the bounded structure of a semester and a funded summer program, with deadlines, deliverables, and institutional expectations. Community members, by contrast, were living within open-ended uncertainty: ongoing cases, unstable housing, shifting policies, and cumulative trauma. Even when research questions were co-shaped, the tempo of academic work rarely aligned with the urgency of lived conditions. This mismatch underscored how universities benefit from crises they do not have to endure, producing knowledge on timelines that don’t reflect the rhythms of harm or recovery.

At last, CBPR highlighted the researcher’s unstable positionality. The researcher is a native of the area, influenced by comparable legislative frameworks, and linked by language, ancestry, and collective memory. However, the researcher was absolved of the same tensions of those living within the community, entering these spaces with institutional affiliation, academic legitimacy, and – most importantly – the freedom to leave. The researcher could document the courtroom and then return to campus: others remained within its jurisdiction. This dual position– simultaneously familiar and protected – granted access while also reproducing distance.

Cumulatively, these tensions suggest participatory research is not clear, comforting, or redemptive. It does not equalize power, eliminate risk, or resolve structural violence. However, what it does offer though is a more honest framework: one that acknowledges that ethical research unfolds inside constraint, asymmetry, and unfinished responsibility. CBPR does not remove these contradictions, but it refuses to ignore them – and in doing so, reshapes what accountability can realistically mean.

6. Discussion: Responsibility Without Rescue

This study has argued that access to justice is not intrinsic to legal systems but an outcome produced through courtroom practices that govern whose knowledge, narratives, and identities become legally legible. Through ethnographic observation and CBPR in the Paseo del Norte region, it has shown how legal rights must be actively translated, defended, and made visible in adversarial settings structured by unequal distributions of power and legal knowledge. At the same time, this article has demonstrated that how scholars study these processes is itself consequential: research methods shape what becomes recognizable as legal knowledge and whose experiences are preserved, flattened, or erased.

CBPR did not promise repair, protection, or justice. What occurred instead was a different kind of responsibility: not to save, fix, or represent others, but to remain accountable to how their lives are carried into research. This responsibility took material form through collaborative interpretation, ongoing consent, and continued engagement beyond institutional timelines. As field notes and analyses of courtroom encounters, legal narratives, and community testimony were drafted, it became clear that writing, in this context, was not a neutral act of description but a practice of selection and stabilization — one that determines which experiences are rendered durable and which remain unsaid. This responsibility also required building feedback loops rather than engaging in one-directional extraction, and learning to slow down in environments shaped by surveillance and legal risk. Moving cautiously, re-examining notes, withholding details, and accepting incomplete accounts became ethical decisions rather than methodological failures. CBPR thus reframes research not as detached observation, but as participation in the same processes of visibility and invisibility that structure legal outcomes. Not creating an impartial observer, nor an advocate capable of repairing injustice, but positioning the researcher as a participant whose presence carries consequences, whose writing has effects, and whose obligations don’t end when fieldwork concludes. These insights extend beyond the methodological stakes of this study to broader socio-legal scholarship, which often conceptualizes inequality as a matter of formal exclusion or rights deprivation. Instead, this research demonstrates that legal inequality is also produced through the everyday conditions that structure participation itself. By treating courtroom dynamics as lived environments rather than purely procedural spaces, it challenges frameworks that locate fairness solely in legal design rather than in legal experience. Efforts to improve access to justice, then, must move beyond expanding rights on paper and instead address how legal processes are encountered, navigated, and sustained in practice. In doing so, the study reorients legal systems away from the assumption of neutrality and toward and understanding of law as a social institution that actively organizes inclusion, recognition, and belonging.

These dynamics did not end with the conclusion of the fieldwork. In southern New Mexico, the legal system reappeared not only in courtrooms but in ordinary routines: a small business continuing as usual, unfamiliar trucks passed slowly along the road, and then the sudden arrival of marked and unmarked enforcement vehicles. There was no hearing, no public record, and no narrative to contest – only absence, quickly absorbed into daily life as an administrative fact. Policy metrics help solidify this disappearance. In El Paso alone, monthly migrant encounters fell from nearly 10,000 to less than 3,000 within a three-month period ending Fall 2025. (U.S. Customs & Border Protection, 2025) Framed as indicators of enforcement success and institutional efficiency, such figures obscure the human costs that interviews revealed: people leaving shelters, abandoning legal claims, and withdrawing from public visibility altogether as a strategy of survival. (De Genova, 2002; Menjívar & Abrego, 2012) On July 7th, 2025, one participant summarized, “Over two hundred people already left the shelter…we might as well do the same.”

Courtrooms reveal that rights do not simply exist; they must be argued into visibility. This research suggests that knowledge functions in much the same way: what becomes documented, cited, and remembered is shaped not only by institutions of law but by the practices of research that translate lived experience into scholarship. CBPR doesn’t resolve the inequalities embedded in legal systems, nor does it transform researchers into agents of repair. What it does offer is a discipline of attention and accountability — a refusal to treat legal suffering as data alone, and a commitment to recognizing how both law and research participate in producing visibility and invisibility. In this sense, access to justice is not only a question of legal entitlement but of the conditions under which participation itself becomes possible, intelligible, and sustained. Responsibility, then, doesn’t conclude when fieldwork ends or when a paper is written. It extends into the ongoing production of scholarship itself: in how representation, citation, and interpretation actively shape which experiences remain legible within legal and academic worlds, and which are rendered structurally absent.