This Artist Painted Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Now She’s Documenting His Immigration Crackdown.: In June, Isabelle Brourman took a sketch board and her press pass to immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City. She’d heard that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were arresting people after their hearings, and she wanted to document it. Court security wouldn’t let her inside. Brourman, a 32-year-old mixed-media artist, tried to explain who she was. She’d built a reputation by then—first at the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard defamation trial in Virginia, and then at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, working alongside court illustrators who sketch for news outlets when photographers aren’t allowed inside. Unlike her peers, Brourman doesn’t render her subjects realistically: Her style, which she’s described as “Tasmanian-devil glamour,” includes swirling lines, bold colors, and snippets of dialogue that capture not just the content of proceedings, but the emotions. So unusual was her work that she grabbed headlines herself, earning profiles in the New York Times and even catching the president’s eye: After his trial, he let her paint him at Mar-a-Lago. But at 26 Federal Plaza, security remained unimpressed. “They were concerned I was a protester,” she told me, and they turned her away. Undeterred, Brourman eventually found a way inside and set to work convincing the immigration judges to let her stay. I recently caught up with her after a long day at court to ask what she’d been seeing—and what it was like meeting Trump on his turf. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How does the environment in immigration court differ from scenes you’ve documented before? Oh, my. The other trials surrounded very high-profile public figures, and that dictates what kind of spectacle it is. The spectacle in 26 Federal Plaza has more to do with the ICE agents. There is an anonymity to the respondents that I’m documenting, and so you’re covering almost like ideas and bodies of people and forces, rather than specific characters. I’ve been lucky enough to document a lot of warmth in… https://ift.tt/V2TbzN3