In a crowded immigration court, seven minutes to decide a family's future

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

67% : He had 26 cases listed on his morning docket in Arlington Immigration Court -- 26 decisions to make before lunchtime about the complicated future of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
57% : While Congress and the White House make promises about the future of undocumented immigrants, this is the place where decisions must be made -- day after day, case after case, in one of the 57 overwhelmed immigration courts across the country.
52% : At a time when Congress and President Obama have signaled an increased willingness to reform the immigration system, they insist on urgency by repeating a series of skyrocketing numbers: 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, at least 50,000 more trying to enter every month, 21,000 agents patrolling the borders, $18 billion spent each year on enforcement and about 1,000 people deported each day.
50% : Undocumented immigrants try to prove they deserve to remain in America by bringing their versions of America with them to court: wives carrying family photo albums; babies wrapped in American flag blankets; pastors, bosses, neighbors and community soccer teams, all of whom fill the courthouse and sometimes kneel in the hallways to chant or to pray.
50% : Unlike criminal defendants, undocumented immigrants are not guaranteed a lawyer, and the 40 percent who appear in court without representation are several times more likely to be deported.
47% : His clients were not the perfect face of undocumented immigration but the complicated heart of it -- not college graduates, or victims of violent crime, or active military members, or breast-feeding mothers, or "dreamers," or members of any one of the small groups for which Obama has created patchwork immigration solutions.
45% : They paid taxes, joined a church and raised three kids, now 19, 15 and 9.

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