Visits to US immigration courts find chaos
LUMPKIN, Ga. — Disorder is a typical day in the chaotic, crowded and confusing U.S. immigration court system.
The Associated Press visited immigration courts in 11 different cities more than two dozen times during a 10-day period in late fall. In courts from Boston to San Diego, reporters observed scores of hearings that illustrated how crushing caseloads and shifting policies have landed the courts in unprecedented turmoil.
Shrouded in secrecy, the immigration courts run by the U.S. Department of Justice have been dysfunctional for years and have only gotten worse. A surge in the arrival of asylum seekers and the Trump administration’s crackdown on the Southwest border and illegal immigration have pushed more people into deportation proceedings, swelling the court’s docket to 1 million cases.
“It is just a cumbersome, huge system, and yet administration upon administration comes in here and tries to use the system for their own purposes,” says Immigration Judge Amiena Khan in New York City, speaking in her role as vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
“And in every instance, the system doesn’t change on a dime, because you can’t turn the Titanic around.”
Chasing efficiency, immigration judges double- and triplebook hearings that can’t possibly be completed, leading to numerous cancellations. Immigrants get new court dates, but not for years.
Young children are everywhere and sit on the floor or stand or cry in cramped courtrooms. Many immigrants don’t know how to fill out forms, get records translated or present a case.
Frequent changes in the law and rules for how judges manage their dockets make it impossible to know what the future holds when immigrants finally have their day in court. Paper files are often misplaced, and interpreters are often missing.
In Georgia, an interpreter assigned to a courtroom ends up making it to work, but the hearing sputters moments later when a lawyer for a Mexican man isn’t available when she is called to appear by phone.
The judge moves on to other cases -- a Peruvian asylum seeker, a Cuban man seeking bond -- and punts the missing lawyer’s case to the afternoon session.
This time, she’s there when he calls, and apologizes for not being available earlier, explaining through a hacking cough she’s been sick.
But by now the interpreter has moved on to another courtroom.
In a federal building in downtown Manhattan, the docket lists stretch to a second page outside the immigration courtrooms. Crowds of people wait in the hallways for their turn to see a judge, murmuring to each other and their lawyers, pressing up against the wall to let others through.
Security guards pass through and chastise them to stay to the side and keep walkways clear.
Immigration judges hear 30, or 50, or close to 90 cases a day. When they assign future court dates, immigrants are asked to come back in February or March -- of 2023.
On average, cases on the country’s immigration docket have been churning through the courts for nearly two years. Many immigrants have been waiting much longer, especially those who aren’t held in detention facilities.
With so many cases, immigrants are often double- and triple-booked for hearings. That can turn immigration court into a high-stakes game of musical chairs, where being the odd man out has far-reaching consequences.
Courts in San Francisco and
Los Angeles each have more than 60,000 cases. And cases have been pending an average of more than two years in courts from Arlington, Virginia to Omaha, Nebraska, according to TRAC.
The stakes are high for those vying to remain in the country. Some want to stay under a provision that opens the door for those without legal papers who have American relatives.
Others, who arrived recently, are seeking asylum to protect them from violence or persecution.
Those hearings are especially daunting, and most asylum seekers don’t win.
The rest are mostly slated for deportation and often have little chance of being able to stay legally in the United States -- at least for now.
Their fate often depends on the luck of the draw in a system with extreme disparities from judge to judge. There are judges who reject 99 percent of asylum cases before them; others approve more than 90 percent, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
In El Paso, Texas, immigrants waiting in Mexico show up on the border before dawn and are loaded U.S. government vans and driven to a downtown federal building for their hearings. They appear in courtrooms so crowded the government has barred observers from attending, and immigration detention guards patrol the hallways and escort immigrants on trips to the bathroom.
Immigration Judge Lee O’Connor, who hears these cases in San Diego, snaps at a Honduran mom whose infant bangs on audio devices in court and warns a Salvadoran woman she’ll be at a disadvantage without a lawyer.
“I can’t defend myself because I don’t know anything about the law,” she tells him, sobbing.