Immigration attorneys say some courts are holding over 100 case hearings daily
An immigration law attorney whose career has spanned over two decades said he has never experienced a hearing like the one he had in Annandale, Virginia.
“Normally, these master calendars will have 10 people, maybe sometimes 15, but usually in that range. The judge opened the hearing and said well, we have 100 cases on today's docket,” attorney Joseph M. Perez told ABC News.
Master calendar hearings are when immigrants in deportation proceedings first appear before a judge and are informed of their rights and the charges they may be facing. It’s a crucial first step in deportation proceedings that can occur on an individual basis or in groups of a few people.
But in recent weeks, attorneys like Perez said they are seeing as many as 100 people slotted for the same time with little to no notice in advance, prompting them to call these hearings “mega masters,” which they say could be a new tactic by the Trump administration aimed at deporting as many people as quickly as possible.
Multiple attorneys told ABC News that, in some cases, scheduled master calendar hearings are being abruptly canceled and consolidated into larger proceedings.
On Monday, attorney Briana Carlson represented a client in Virginia at one of the hearings and the judge announced she had 80 cases on the docket, she said. Her client’s hearing had originally been scheduled for July.
“He was scheduled for a hearing in July, which we knew about, but we were preparing an application for relief, and so my paralegal happened to check the portal for that relief, and that's when she found the new hearing date that had been advanced to today, which no one received notice of,” she said.
Carlson said that when she reached out to an immigration court in Sterling, Virginia, for a different case that had also been rescheduled, a clerk notified her that the court had received a nationwide directive to advance master calendar hearings if they’re scheduled in July or later.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency within the Department of Justice that oversees immigration courts, did not deny the existence of the directive, and in part, said the agency “prioritizes the timely completion of all cases.”
“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,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
NPR was first to report on the so-called “mega masters” hearings.
Reports of the massive hearings across the country have prompted the American Immigration Lawyers Association to issue guidance to lawyers, urging them to constantly check their online calendars to see if their cases have been rescheduled.
Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, Practice and Policy Counsel at AILA, says there’s growing concern that the Trump administration is placing individuals who do not have attorneys in these consolidated hearings in an attempt to force them to miss a hearing, which can automatically trigger a final order of removal.
“The goal is for people that are not showing up, they're going to get an in absentia removal order, and that is going to help the court kind of clear their backlog, as we know, is one of the main goals of this administration,” Dojaquez-Torres said.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration proposed a rule that, if approved, would increase the fee for migrants ordered removed in absentia from $5,130 to $18,000. Critics of the fee increase say it’s an attempt to force undocumented immigrants to self-deport.
In the notice announcing the proposed rule, the administration said the fee is meant to help reimburse ICE for the costs of immigration enforcement.
Perez said that the shift to larger master calendar hearings is shortsighted.
“They want to accelerate things, but there's also existing scheduling orders. Scheduling orders are issued by every court; they lay out how the case is going to proceed, what days you have to send the documents for. They're advancing these cases to a date upon which you do not have enough time to comply with the scheduling order, so they really haven't thought about the whole thing here,” he said.
