Very bad things can happen to people in immigration court. The court can order people to be held indefinitely, as long as the government thinks it can find a country that will take them. The court can send people to countries they haven’t seen since they were in preschool. It can send them to countries they’ve never set foot in before, even if those countries are in the middle of a civil war. These results are in addition to immigration court’s usual, everyday practice of breaking apart families by sending people away from their spouses, children, and communities.

With consequences this serious, you would think that process in immigration court would be substantial, filled with all the procedural safeguards the American legal system can offer. You would be wrong. Instead, the people whom ICE is snatching off the street are thrust into immigration court, a sham in which three-year-olds represent themselves, not all the hearings are fully translated, and the judges and prosecutors both have the same boss: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and, ultimately, President Donald Trump.

When most people think of “courts,” they usually think of courts that fall within the judicial branch of the federal government. Immigration courts, however, are part of the executive branch; they are housed in the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a division of the Department of Justice. The judges are Department of Justice employees, and prosecutors represent the Department of Homeland Security. The setup is the same at the first-tier appellate level, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is also housed within the Department of Justice.

From there, noncitizens can appeal their cases to the federal courts of appeals, where the judge is an Article III judge. But the prosecutor they face is still employed by the Department of Justice—the employer of the judges in the immigration courts below.