Across 13 states and thousands of cases, observers from a national court-watching initiative documented how Trump administration policies led immigration judges to quickly end cases for procedural reasons, according to a new report.
The findings from California State University, Long Beach, and Princeton University published Monday outline the mechanisms immigration courts under the Justice Department are deploying to short circuit due process. The researchers concluded deportations under this system amount to “procedural removal,” or removals based on administrative process instead of a full and fair consideration of the facts of a person’s claim to relief.
“What we see happening now is a kind of hollowing out of the content of immigration court while maintaining the facade of a judicial process,” said Princeton professor Amelia Frank-Vitale, one of the authors of the report.
Frank-Vitale and co-author Lauren Heidbrink, a professor at Cal State, Long Beach, said their report is the first of this magnitude that delves into the court processes of the second Trump administration. From January to August, researchers and university students observed nearly 3,600 hearings.
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“It’s not just about the outcomes, right?” Heidbrink said. “It’s the process at which decisions are being made, so, in some ways, we’re unmasking what those statistics actually mean.”
While the Department of Homeland Security maintains that all immigrants receive “FULL due process,” immigration judges are agreeing with the department’s attorneys to shut down cases before weighing the evidence, denials called pretermissions.
Frank-Vitale said she started noticing last summer that immigration judges were considering pretermissions at a greater scale than previous administrations. DHS is also moving to end the cases through pretermissions to send immigrants to countries they are not from, the report states.
She compared it to a criminal court where a defendant doesn’t want to take a plea deal. “It is the judge saying, ‘You know what? I’m looking at this paper filing that the cop produced, and I think you’re guilty so we don’t have to have a hearing,’” Frank-Vitale said.
Court observers for the report sat in on 235 hearings involving third-country removals, 90% of which happened during master calendar hearings meant for administrative functionings like scheduling. Immigration judges ordered removal of 58% of the people DHS sought to send to a country they weren’t citizens of, according to the report.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed more than 25,000 people to more than 30 countries they’re not citizens of, according to the Third Country Deportation Watch. The Supreme Court last month allowed the Trump administration to carry out the third-country deportations without advance notice.
A ruling this month from the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld judges’ ability to pretermit cases without DHS attorneys asking them to do so.
Immigration judges’ compliance with DHS varies across the courts, according to the court observers. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has removed roughly 1 in 6 immigration judges, according to the report, replacing some with military attorneys.
Sirce Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, praised the qualifications of 47 new judges in a press release announcing their swearing in last month. “Immigration judge positions are critical to the Administration’s goal of reducing the immigration court backlog, and to restoring integrity to our immigration system,” Owen said.
Immigration judges closer to retirement were more likely to scrutinize the government’s actions because they are not afraid of getting fired, Heidbrink said.
Nearly all asylum cases are being denied as the Trump administration pushes for the judges to speed through the backlog of more than three million cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. And former and current immigration judges previously told The Washington Sun that the administration has overhauled the system to limit their latitude.
“Again, you’re narrowing the universe in which judges can judge,” Heidbrink said.
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