Seattle Immigration Court Launches New Trump Tactic: ‘Mega’ Hearings

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The judge had just finished a marathon hearing representing a new Trump administration tactic. Begun nationwide in the spring and hitting Seattle in late June, the tactic involves calling in an unusually large number of people at a time for a preliminary “master calendar” hearing in deportation proceedings. The number on Windrow’s docket that day: 117.

As a point of comparison, other judges in the Seattle court had between seven and 35 people scheduled for preliminary hearings Tuesday.

The administration suggests these new “mega masters,” as they have been dubbed by court watchers, are meant to speed up deportation cases that have tended to lag for years.

“Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration,” the U.S. Department of Justice, which oversees immigration courts, said in a statement responding to questions about mega masters. The courts, another statement said, make “scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish.”

Immigrant advocates and at least one scholar who have watched mega masters play out across the country suspect another purpose: racking up as many deportation orders as quickly as possible.

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These hearings are nevertheless absolutely essential to attend because a no-show in most cases results in an “in absentia” removal order.

Such orders have been piling up in mega masters held in New York, California, Georgia and elsewhere. In the last week of May alone, judges nationwide issued roughly 2,200 at such hearings, representing 40% of those scheduled to appear, according to a post on bklg.org, a website analyzing publicly available immigration court data.

The post’s authors, independent researcher Joseph Gunther and civic technologist Brandon Marrow, attribute the high number of no-shows in large part to courts scheduling people to appear on short notice, in some cases two weeks or less. In the past, people have tended to get at least a couple of months’ notice, according to Marrow and others familiar with immigration courts.

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