Immigrants arrive at Orlando court — only to find hearing dates were ‘fake,’ lawyers say

Dozens of immigrants lined up in front of Orlando’s immigration courthouse Wednesday morning carrying notices that said they had a court hearing, only to find their cases were not actually on the docket.

By 8:30 a.m., when hearings were supposed to start but immigrants were still stuck in line, courthouse staff members were outside trying to figure out who was there for a scheduled hearing and trying to help those who weren’t.

“It’s a tremendous amount of wasted time and money and effort by everyone. Government employees, attorneys, respondents,” said John Gihon, an immigration attorney with Shorstein, Lasnetski, & Gihon who watched as the line outside the courthouse

off Maguire Boulevard stretched down the sidewalk and around the corner “Just a waste.”

Attorneys said the dates originated not from the court itself, but from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

And it’s not just in Orlando — people have come to immigration courthouses for hearings that don’t exist in Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix, among other places, said Bridgette Bennett, an immigration attorney who runs the Bennett Law Center in Groveland.

“We believe that one of the things that the Department of Homeland Security is doing is just randomly putting dates on these notices to appear,” Bennett said. “However, these dates have not been put into the court system. … These are not real court dates because they did not tell the court about these dates.”

In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Justice said the departments of justice and Homeland Security are working together to try and schedule the hearings.

“These errors will be resolved and will not prevent these cases from being docketed properly in a timely fashion,” spokesman Steven Stafford said.

Employees from the Department of Homeland Security agencies, like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, issue the notices to appear to start deportation proceedings, said Henry Lim, an immigration attorney with Lim Law.

That can happen when a person’s application for asylum or a green card is rejected, when ICE takes a person living in the U.S. illegally into custody, or when local police arrest someone in the country illegally for a crime not related to immigration and then refer them to ICE. Homeland Security officials are supposed to also notify the courts, which put the hearings on judges’ schedules.

That starts the legal process in which immigrants can be deported or argue they should be allowed to stay in the country.

But for about 20 years, the notice to appear was not required to list a time, date and location for court. Immigration officials — most recently, the Department of Homeland Security — would mail that information separately on a later date. That could take months, and sometimes people would not receive their notices.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision called Pereira v. Sessions that the notices to appear had to tell immigrants where and when they needed to be in court. In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito predicted it would cause “arbitrary dates and times that are likely to confuse and confound all who receive them.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority that Homeland Security and immigration courts should work together to schedule hearings.

“What the DHS is doing is trying to skirt around the issue by issuing these notices to appear with fake dates,” said Rafael Ortiz-Segura, who was an immigration judge in Orlando for 20 years. He retired at the end of 2017 and now works with Lim Law. “... Frankly, the system is being broken down more and more.”

The six immigration judges in Orlando’s courthouse cover most of the state, from the Panhandle to about Lake Okeechobee.

“To have people that really have no money, they don’t have driver’s licenses so they have to rely on family or friends to bring them down here, or they have to spend a lot of money to get there — it’s really fundamentally unfair,” Bennett said.

People who receive notices to appear can call the court’s hotline, 1-800-898-7180, to get an automated system with information about their hearings, but not everyone does. And failing to show up for a hearing that really is scheduled can end with a judge ordering a deportation in the immigrant’s absence, said Milena Portillo, of Portillo Immigration Law in Orlando.

“We don’t want to tell everyone, ‘Just don’t show up,’” Portillo said. “We want to make sure that we’ve reviewed case by case, and it’s a good practice to still show up.”

Lim said days like Wednesday can erode people’s trust in the immigration system.

“It’s really rigging the system against them, and that’s not what justice is about,” Lim said.