Inside Witness is a comic drawn and narrated by Stephen and Clio Reese Sady. The setting is a family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, a place where migrant families are housed while awaiting approval for humanitarian relief claims. The comics combine an eyewitness perspective of a courtroom with the voices of the families. Many families, who predominantly come from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, continue to be haunted by the memories of trauma in their homelands.

The “heroes” of the comic are a group of volunteer lawyers who provide counsel as families wend through the asylum process. They work gathering stories ranging from experienced brutality and hardship–domestic abuse, threats of gang violence, political or ethnic conflict–to build their legal claims.

The real story isn’t in this place, it’s in the journey that the migrants trace in their imaginations: alternating between the present and past, assembling stories to justify their petition for relief, navigating the inside of a cage designed to offer “refuge.” The migrant figures don’t want to be trapped within the confines of the sketched frames, but the scenes they articulate thread together into a long testimony, and they begin writing their way outside the walls.

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