Administration Accelerating Immigration Hearings To Ensure Migrants Miss New Court Dates

from the cruelty-is-all-they-have dept

No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible.

Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, many of them from (direct quote right here) “shithole countries.” They blame Biden for this completely imaginary “crisis” and preach the same message to the faithful over and over again: “worst of the worst.”

But it’s not that and it’s never been that. If the administration was simply trying to eject dangerous criminals, ICE wouldn’t be sending officers to immigration courts to pounce on migrants who are following the rules for staying in this country. ICE wouldn’t have set up a fake college to snare foreigners following the visa rules by continuing their education. And the government wouldn’t be telling its lawyers to dismiss ongoing removal proceedings solely for the purpose of making migrants attending scheduled probation check-ins immediately arrestable.

It’s only getting nastier and uglier. The Trump administration is now moving up immigration hearing dates for the sole purpose of generating more unearned “wins” that will, in turn, generate more deportations. Here’s Gwynne Hogan with the brutally nasty details for The City Reporter:

The mass immigration hearings picked up in New York City in early June, The City Reporter reported at the time. They were dubbed mega masters because a single judge could be assigned a docket of more than 100 cases a day, about double a regular master calendar docket before.

In addition to the large number of cases, many of these hearings were scheduled just weeks in advance and replaced hearings people might have had on the books months or years away.

The City Reporter observed one such mega master hearing where, on a docket of 121 cases, 39 people and their family members were ordered removed for failing to show up to court. In some instances, family members’ cases were linked.

As this report notes, for years most hearing dates were generally scheduled 180 days out from the initial hearing. But in the past few months — along with the creation of these so-called “mega masters” — the lead time has dropped precipitously. In May, the average was 98 days. By June, it was 42 days.

This is deliberate. Migrants engaged in the legal process would have no reason to believe their cases would be accelerated. After all, the mass deportation surges the Trump administration has generated tens of thousands of new cases, which would generally result in additional delays, rather than sudden accelerations.

And while the government is required to notify migrants of schedule changes, it’s not as though it’s a push notification via the normally accepted form of human connection these days. It’s a letter sent by snail mail. And it’s not as though this government is going to perform any due diligence to make sure the notification is seen by the intended recipient.

What’s happening here is the administration flooding the docket and ambushing migrants who fail to check their hearing status daily and who would have no reason to do so when they hadn’t seen any changes to hearing dates for several months.

The plan is as ugly as it is shitty: accelerate thousands of hearing dates and send federal officers out to scoop up migrants who are now on the wrong end of in absentia rulings handed down by judges who are deliberately overloaded to prevent them from fully engaging with these cases.

This is all in service to the impossible deportation goals set by the administration. You can’t get 2-3,000 arrests per day without cheating. Here’s how this has been playing out over the past couple of months.

In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the [New York City] “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia. 

The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. 

The real human cost is as incalculable as it is heartbreaking:

On Friday morning, several dozen people managed to make it to a courtroom inside 26 Federal Plaza for their mega master hearing where Immigration Judge Thanos Kanellakos appeared virtually from a courtroom in Maryland, overseeing a docket of 90 cases.

Most of the people who made it to court had traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee, Georgia, North Dakota and Illinois to attend.

[…]

Several people at court told The City Reporter they’d had a court date scheduled months or even years away when they happened to double-check the online portal recently and learned they had a new hearing scheduled a few days away.

There is no legitimate reason for the government to be doing this. There is only the constant desire to hurt human beings this administration considers to be less than human. That’s why it’s trying to eradicate temporary protected status for all but the whitest migrants. And that’s why it’s engaging in barely disguised entrapment to keep its flying rail cars and prison camps loaded with its preferred scapegoats.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, doj, due process, ice, mass deportation, mega master, trump administration