50 people ordered deported in first day of San Diego ‘mega’ master immigration hearings
San Diego became the latest city where immigration judges are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of cases scheduled per day.
Written by Kate Morrissey, Edited by Lauren J. Mapp
The San Diego Immigration Court on Friday increased the number of cases heard per judge per day, joining cities across the U.S. that are holding what many are calling “mega” master hearings.
From New Orleans to New York, attorneys and journalists have noticed that the federal government has quietly filled immigration judges’ calendars with around 100 cases at a time. To do that, the immigration court reschedules cases that already have pending hearing dates, moving those dates to the near future.
“This isn't efficiency,” said Paulina Reyes-Perraris, directing attorney of Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “It's manufactured chaos that strips vulnerable people of due process and denies them a fair chance in court.”
She said the hearings target people who don’t have lawyers. Attorneys and immigrant rights activists are worried that people will easily miss the notices mailed to them in the short time frame given.
“[The court] has a long history of poor address tracking, lost or late notices, and outdated systems, yet the burden always falls on the respondent, never on the system that failed them,” Reyes-Perraris said. (In legal terms, people appearing in immigration court are called respondents.)
The Executive Office for Immigration Review did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Before 8 a.m., the waiting room at San Diego Immigration Court was already filling. A line of people needing to check in wrapped from the front desk to the windows.
“It's going to be a crazy day today,” one of the guards told the people waiting, asking them for cooperation.
Out of more than 80 people scheduled before Judge Catherine Halliday-Roberts on Friday, only about 20 showed up. Several said they'd received notices about the scheduling change about a week prior. Some were in court for the first time. Others had been before, and some had even had their cases previously closed, then reopened.
Even though only a fraction of the people scheduled had arrived for their hearings, the courtroom was packed. Guards told family members and legal observers that they could not attend the hearings. They could either wait in the waiting room, the cafeteria or the downstairs lobby.
As one woman carried her toddler to the courtroom for her case, a guard told her that only she could go to court.
“And the children?” she asked in Spanish.
“Children?” he responded.
“I have two children,” she said, motioning behind her.
“Do they have court?” he said.
She said they did.
“Then they can go in,” the guard told her.
The two children followed her to the courtroom, where the judge invited her to sit in the front because of her small child.
Speaking slowly and warmly, Halliday-Roberts held a group hearing in English with a Spanish interpreter for most of those who showed up. One woman from Indonesia did not understand what had happened in her case when she left the courtroom because she spoke neither language and was not given a separate hearing with Indonesian interpretation.
One woman requested to leave the U.S. voluntarily, and the judge granted her request. The judge reset most of the other cases of those who appeared for the end of July.
A Salvadoran man who sat before her with his partner while two of their children snored on a back bench at the end of the morning in the courtroom thanked Halliday-Roberts for treating them with kindness. The couple had traveled from Houston to make it to the hearing. The judge moved their next hearing to Houston and explained in detail the options they would have to consider as their case continued.
Halliday-Roberts put off dealing with the cases of people who hadn't shown up for court until the afternoon.
She worked until well after 5 p.m. going through the documents in each case to verify that hearing notices had gone to the right addresses and had the right allegations listed on them. Since the court normally finishes by 4 p.m., her clerk had to leave, so a court administrator filled in to finish out the day.
Some of the cases had previously been part of Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, a program under the first Trump administration that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases progressed in the U.S. Halliday-Roberts had to make sure that hearing notices went to an address other than “domicilio conocido,” the phrase meaning known residence that border officials wrote instead of an address on initial court documents in those cases.
She and Dan Hua, the attorney representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the proceedings, identified about 14 cases that had issues that needed to be addressed. The judge rescheduled most for the end of July, dismissed a couple and transferred one case to the Buffalo Immigration Court in New York.
She ordered the remaining 50 deported in their absence — 49 of them in a group hearing that took about eight minutes once she had finished reviewing all of the documents.
They included a woman whose sister had shown up to the court to tell the judge that she had moved back to Colombia with her husband and withdrawn her request for a permanent green card.
Detention Resistance, a collective of volunteers who monitor immigration courts, ICE arrests in official spaces and conditions at Otay Mesa Detention Center, put out guidance in English and Spanish about how to prepare for a hearing on a mega docket.
The group recommends that anyone with a pending immigration court case check the status daily to make sure their hearing date hasn't changed.
