Below is the full text of a Boston Globe article from 08/29/2025.
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They suddenly began showing up regularly, on the third floor of Suffolk Superior Court in downtown Boston — person after person asking, in a spectrum of languages, where they were supposed to be for immigration proceedings.
The answer: Not there. The immigration court is a few blocks away, in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building. It’s the right floor, but the wrong building.
That’s what Melissa Doris, an assistant clerk magistrate in Suffolk Superior Court who typically works in a civil courtroom on that building’s third floor, found herself repeatedly telling people. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, her first language as an immigrant herself from Panama. When that doesn’t work, she does her best to use hand signals.
“These are people who are participating in the process, who have court dates and want to get to those court dates,” she said. “Why wouldn’t we help them do that?”
So Doris decided to print maps, outlining the locations of the similar-looking, stone-coated buildings by City Hall Plaza. With a few hundred dollars in funding from the trial courts system, she made them up herself, using a copyright-free map of downtown Boston and an Internet translator to spell out directions. It has notes in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Vietnamese, noting their locations at the moment in the state Superior Court, as well as the federal immigration court nearby.
It’s a dated map of downtown, probably from the mid 2000s — what is now the TD Garden is identified as the FleetCenter — and it doesn’t appear to reflect the surface roads that eventually replaced the old Central Artery overpass. But the streets around the courthouses are the same, and so it works.
“It’s good to have something visual where you can just say, ‘you’re here, and you want to go there,’” she said.
Doris said she’s given out a few dozen maps so far from her courtroom, and she’s given copies to other clerks.
Doris said she doesn’t know the exact reasons for the surge in people looking for immigration proceedings — and she did not want to weigh in on political matters — but it’s come after the re-election of President Trump, who returned to power in January after campaigning on promises of an immigration crackdown.
And he’s followed through on it, ramping up deportations and enforcement, including several operations in the Boston area. Immigrants, those living here with documentation and also those without it, who have been interviewed by the Globe over the past few months have voiced concerns that they will end up detained or deported.
It’s caused a scramble of people trying to sort out immigration cases and firm up legal status.
John Powers III, the head clerk magistrate for civil business in Suffolk Superior Court, praised the idea for the maps, saying it falls in line with the responsibility of a court clerk: to assist people trying to navigate a tricky legal system with little idea of where to go or what to do.
“We can’t provide legal advice, but we do all we can to provide people information,” he said.
“There are not a lot of resources to go around, but we’re doing the best we can.”
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter.