A man in line for the elevator bank at the federal immigration court in San Antonio, Texas, on a morning in mid-July told the security guard that he had an attorney. “You’re special,” the guard replied, with genuine surprise.
Upstairs, inside Brittany A Rodriquez’s courtroom, the young judge with stark blond highlights gave an asylum seeker a month-and-a-half to turn around an application for protection or be ordered deported. Another person who told her “I don’t have a lawyer, I only have God” was given until September to find legal representation, or the judge indicated she would move forward with the case regardless.
On Rodriquez’s docket that day was a 49-year-old Cuban man who had his hearing moved up by an entire year, out of the blue; a six-year-old Mexican girl and a three-year-old Cuban boy who may have been appearing in court alone – it was not clear; a 22-year-old Venezuelan woman and her two-year-old son; and dozens of other people whose fates in the United States rested on her decisions.
Rodriquez had been on the bench for only about a month, appointed after a career in immigration enforcement. She and the federal attorney whose role it was to argue against the immigrants – the role she herself had filled for almost six years, up until May – quickly read through a list of people, 15 in total, who had missed their hearings. Now, they could be ordered removed from the US “in absentia”, without being physically present to find out.
Suddenly, Rodriquez found five more no-shows on the list. “I didn’t even do that whole last page,” she said casually. “I think these are all ‘in absentias’, too.”
This quiet yet life-altering scene epitomizes the newest frontier in the second Trump administration’s deportation push, where people are being scheduled for mass hearings in immigration court at the last minute and those who don’t make it are receiving removal orders almost by default.
That, in turn, sets them up for arrest and repatriation whenever they stumble into the midst of immigration agents – or, increasingly, run into local and state law enforcement personnel from departments that are cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, during something as benign as a traffic stop.
“There’s people that are walking around, going about their business, without realizing that they have a removal order on their record,” said Katie Fleming, director of public education and engagement at the Washington DC-based legal non-profit Acacia Center for Justice.
Donald Trump has ranted against due process for immigrants and asylum seekers since his first presidential administration, when he repeatedly complained about their right to defend themselves in immigration court and said the US needed to “get rid of judges”.
“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” Trump tweeted in 2018, adding the following day: “Hiring many thousands [sic] of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go.”
Eight years later, Trump has upended the immigration courts so completely that critics allege many thousands of people are now being denied justice. Adjudicators have taken on roles as so-called deportation judges, while their agency, the executive office for immigration review (EOIR), has become an integral part of the White House’s mass deportation strategy instead of a last defense against wrongful removal.
“They abandon the real mission of the agency, which is to provide fair hearings and due process to as many people as possible, and instead sort of run it as an adjunct of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] enforcement, with the only real objective to be being [able to] enter as many removal orders as you can, as fast as you can,” said Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration judge.
EOIR’s primary responsibility is, in its own words, “to adjudicate immigration cases by fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly interpreting and administering the Nation’s immigration laws”. Yet it falls under the Department of Justice, not the US’s judicial branch, raising serious, chronic concerns about its independence from executive policy priorities, while its nearly 3.2m-case backlog has long caused headaches for both Democratic and Republican administrations.
An unnamed EOIR spokesperson said: “The Executive Office for Immigration Review prioritizes the timely completion of all cases and makes scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish. Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible. As it continues to add new immigration judges, EOIR will continue to make scheduling adjustments to ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner.”
Now, the undermining of due process in US immigration courts has come not in one fell swoop, but with a series of policy changes since the start of the second Trump administration that has dramatically eroded the tenets of a fair court system – notice of hearings, transparency, judges’ discretion, meaningful appeals, the opportunity to be heard – seemingly to prioritize speed and the administration’s hard line on immigration, experts said.
The result of these new practices has been to reduce people’s ability to receive individualized determinations based on the merits of their cases, cutting them off instead at earlier stages of the legal process and serving them up for deportation.
“All of these different policy changes and practices and tactics are intertwined, right?” Fleming said. “They’re all part of the same story, which is instead of functioning as an independent court system where there are independent adjudicators evaluating claims one at a time, we’re seeing the courts incorporated into a much broader enforcement strategy.”
Many of the second Trump administration’s policies that have hamstrung access to justice in the immigration courts are occurring at the earliest steps in a case, during what’s called a master calendar hearing. These court dates are often a person’s first few appearances and have typically been mostly administrative, with about 20 cases scheduled at once.
Usually, the judge recounts – and an interpreter at times translates – people’s rights and responsibilities, explains the civil immigration charges against them, asks whether they want time to find a lawyer, gives them a list of free legal organizations, checks that the court has an up-to-date address for them and sometimes confirms the facts in their charging documents – where they’re from and how they entered the US, for instance.
But over the last year-and-a-half, federal officials have debuted tactic after tactic that, as far as critics are concerned, have weaponized these hearings. Last summer, ICE attorneys started asking to dismiss thousands of cases on the spot, so they could immediately place the same people into a more fast-tracked deportation process that often bypasses the judge’s role completely. By January, more streamlined efforts to quickly deny asylum applications without an individualized hearing began to surge, too.
Then, the first signs of a new tool to close as many cases at once came in March, in San Francisco, where master calendar hearings were being scheduled with little time to prepare – a test run for what was to come nationwide, researchers discovered.
By the end of May, they started noticing master calendar hearings across the country scheduled for unusually large numbers of people, with a single judge in a single session on a single day. Notice of the hearings, if given at all, was short and sent out in English; a lot of the people didn’t have attorneys; and many of them were being ordered deported without ever going to court through removal orders in absentia, when they failed to appear.
“These are kind of ways to skirt you getting a final hearing where you can actually present evidence for the relief you’re seeking in immigration court,” said Brandon Marrow, who created bklg.org, and who is researching what the federal government has now labeled “mega master” calendar hearings.
Officials have set a threshold of 100-200 scheduled cases and 150 total people per session for these mega masters, while disproportionately and intentionally singling out those without lawyers. Even hearings that don’t meet the definition for mega masters have often been much larger than they were historically, and at much shorter notice for the respondent.
These accelerated court dates make it harder for people to find lawyers if they don’t already have one, as their timeline shrinks from months or years to mere days. Free representation is difficult to come by, with legal clinics across the country already overwhelmed by their caseloads, while private attorneys require immigrants to have saved up for what often amounts to thousands of dollars in fees.
Ironically, having a lawyer would allow for faster proceedings, Schmidt said.
“If somebody came in with a lawyer, I could probably do a fair master calendar in about two minutes,” he recalled. “It actually took much longer to do hearings, masters, without lawyers if, you know, if you really wanted to give the person a fair opportunity to be heard.”
For the mega masters especially, there are almost always more people scheduled than the number who ultimately attend – which usually means at least some proportion are then being ordered removed in absentia. The number of respondents who are not detained appearing for masters hearings this June rose 28.6% compared with June 2024, while the number of in absentia removal orders soared 183.6%, according to researchers at bklg.org.
“Their case isn’t being heard on any level, and if they filed an application for relief, if they filed an asylum application, if they filed all the evidence – if they’re not in court, the court will deem that application abandoned,” Fleming said.
The reasons why people aren’t attending their hearings are manifold, but two stand out: lack of notice and fear. Schmidt remembers how often mistakes cropped up when he was a judge, where addresses had the wrong street name or city, and where notices were returned to the court instead of reaching their intended recipient.
“The clerical staff was spread pretty thin, and filing change of address forms wasn’t one of their top priorities,” he said. “There’d be stacks of them sitting on credenzas, waiting to be filed, which told you something about the reliability of the system.”
In recent months, the median potential notice period, or lead time immigrants who are not in detention have had ahead of master calendar hearings has plummeted, falling to just 42 days in June. With notifications still sent through the mail, attorneys fear immigrants are not learning of their hearings until it’s too late, a concern supported by existing data.
When Christopher Cusmano, an immigration judge in New York, oversaw a master calendar hearing with 73 people and a median lead time of 169 days, on 27 May, he issued seven removal orders in absentia. A month later, on 25 June, more than three-quarters of the 95 people on his docket, who had a median lead time of just 24 days, received in absentia removal orders, according to data provided by researchers at bklg.org.
In Kansas City, Judge Jayme Salinardi considered two dockets in early June. The first – where 93 people had a median lead time of, at most, 15 days to be alerted that their court date had changed – resulted in 56 in absentia orders. The second, where 96 people had a median lead time of 196 days, ended with just nine, research by bklg.org further found.
Even if people do receive sufficient notice of their hearings, many are terrified to go near an immigration courthouse after arrests there last year. Since at least 1996, both immigration judges and what is now DHS have recognized that the presence of immigration enforcement officers in the courts can have “a chilling effect on the respondent’s ability to present his or her case”. But once the second Trump administration took office, EOIR officials quickly dismissed that shared understanding as “contrary to logic”.
What ensued were high-profile mass arrests, where ICE agents stalked the courts’ hallways for their targets, whom they then hauled to detention centers across the country. A federal judge has since blocked that policy, but enough people had already been affected to sow fear and distrust among immigrants who otherwise would have likely attended their hearings.
In total, judges issued 53,808 removal orders in absentia in June, constituting a majority of overall case completions for that month. More than 13,000 of those removal orders came from master calendar hearings with a hundred or more people scheduled, where the median lead time was 45 days or fewer.
“These absentia numbers are completely unlike anything that’s been seen before in the immigration courts,” said Joseph Gunther, a researcher with bklg.org. “Certainly, compared to before, a lot of things are happening that are completely unprecedented.”
Even if people attend their hearings, courts under pressure to issue removal orders are at times rushing proceedings, experts suggested. In Minnesota, Fleming recently witnessed a judge order a detained person deported because their application had not yet arrived – despite the fact it was written punctually in detention then had been misdirected in the mail.
Once people are ordered deported, reversing course can be a feat, even if the reason is something as obvious as never receiving notice of their court date. Generally, immigrants would have to file what are called motions to reopen, which typically carry a $1,065 filing fee and are “challenging applications,” Fleming explained, adding: “They require evidence and legal argument.”
“It can be very hard to get an attorney to drop everything and represent someone on a complex motion to reopen,” she continued. “So it puts them in a very vulnerable legal position” – one where ICE could arrest and deport them, as quickly as in a single day.
Meanwhile, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired or have resigned or retired since Trump’s second inauguration, many of them being those with higher rates of granting relief or who had experience defending immigrants.
Their replacements have increasingly been recruited by the administration, won over by rhetoric such as: “Apply today to become a deportation judge” who will make decisions that will “define America for generations”.
In June, fewer than 2% of all completed cases across all hearings ended with an immigrant winning relief, such as asylum or another legal pathway through the court.
“When you send out ads recruiting deportation judges, I think you’re probably not going to get people whose primary concern is understanding immigration law or making sure that people are fairly treated or, you know, resisting government overreach,” Schmidt said.
On the same day as Rodriquez’s morning docket in San Antonio, the clerk for another judge at the courthouse, appointed under the first Trump administration, spoke quietly to her colleagues and was overheard by the Guardian saying: “We don’t have that many attorneys” for all the immigrants appearing before them.
Among the lawyers who did attend, many asked for more time to work on their clients’ cases, as at least some of them hadn’t even been able to review the record yet.
That judge, Rifian Newaz, reached the list of no-shows at the court that day and paused for a long time, clearly painstakingly reviewing everyone’s files. One person didn’t get proper notice of the hearing, he said. Another was just a child, whom he then moved to the docket for unaccompanied kids, to give a second chance.
When the hearing concluded, he had still issued 26 new in absentia removal orders.
