The Immigration Courtroom Is Now an Enforcement Tool

The immigration court backlog fell from 3.7 million to 3.5 million this year — the first decline in a decade ^[1]. On its face, that is the kind of number an administration points to as proof that a broken system is finally being fixed. What is happening inside that number is not a fix. In Chicago, a single immigration judge now cycles through more than 50 cases a day, with 200 or more people packed into one courtroom for what the administration calls "mega master" hearings ^[1]. In June alone, Chicago's immigration courts issued 6,012 in absentia removal orders — nearly triple the number from the same month a year earlier ^[1]. Nationwide, the asylum approval rate has collapsed from 48% to under 5% ^[2]. Cases for children as young as four, originally docketed for 2027, have been moved to dates less than a week away, and some of those children appear in court without a lawyer ^[3]. Immigration attorney Christine Flowers described what the quota system does to the adjudication process.

the real mistakes made by Trump’s predecessors do not justify the wholesale inhumanity that I see happening today in courts and offices in my city and elsewhere. — Christine Flowers

The compression of the docket is not merely an administrative choice about speed. What happens at the courthouse itself turns the hearing system inside out. ICE officers wait in the hallways where the hearings take place and make arrests immediately after proceedings conclude ^[4].

It is now clear that the lack of connection between ICE’s stated rationales for the 2025 courthouse-arrest policies and the expansion of arrests at immigration courthouses results not from merely unreasoned decisionmaking but a complete lack of decisionmaking. — P. Casey Pitts

The logic is airtight in its effects. A person who attends their hearing can be taken into custody on the way out. A person who does not attend receives an in absentia removal order. Either path ends in removal. The hearing system — designed as a forum for adjudicating claims — has become an enforcement mechanism. Attendance produces custody; non-attendance produces deportation. The courtroom is the trap.

The courthouse is meant to be a refuge for the pursuit of justice, not a hunting ground for ICE. — Jordan Wells

In March, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Urias-Orellana v. Bondi that federal appeals courts must defer to immigration judges' factual findings on asylum claims ^[5]. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the majority opinion. The standard the Court set permits an appellate court to override an immigration judge's factual determination only when the evidence is "so compelling that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution" ^[5]. The Court itself described this as a "restrictive substantial-evidence standard."

Federal courts cannot conduct a de novo (fresh) review of whether facts qualify as "persecution". — Supreme Court of the United States

The ruling means that the factual record produced by a compressed mega-hearing — a judge moving through 50 cases in a day, an asylum seeker without counsel, a four-year-old whose case was accelerated from 2027 to next week — is the record an appellate court must defer to. The one institution that could correct the errors the compression generates has been instructed not to. Beneath all of this sits a personnel transformation. Nearly 100 immigration judges have been terminated and replaced with more than 140 new appointees, including military lawyers and former prosecutors ^[2]. Their training was cut from five weeks to three ^[2]. The San Francisco immigration court was closed entirely, its 120,935 pending cases transferred to other dockets ^[6]. Former immigration judge Jeremiah Johnson described what the new hiring pattern produces.

You're weakening the rule of law by not having immigration judges; you're having deportation judges. — Jeremiah Johnson

Federal courts have not been entirely inert. Judge P. Casey Pitts issued a nationwide injunction in June barring ICE from making arrests at immigration courthouses, ruling that the policy was "arbitrary and capricious" and "devoid of rational explanation" under the Administrative Procedure Act ^[4].

In sum, ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest policies are devoid of rational explanation for (or even acknowledgement of) the agency’s choices (1) to remove its earlier restrictions on civil arrests at immigration courthouses and (2) not to extend the new policies’ limitations to immigration courthouses. — P. Casey Pitts

The administration is appealing to the 9th Circuit ^[4]. Judge F. Dennis Saylor issued a preliminary injunction in February barring ICE from conducting warrantless raids at houses of worship. His ruling rested on the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — a different legal basis than the administrative and constitutional claims that have produced mixed results elsewhere.

The Court can conceive of no circumstance, outside of a true emergency, in which a law-enforcement operation to enforce the immigration laws inside a church would be justifiable under the First Amendment and RFRA. — F. Dennis Saylor IV

Judge R. Brooke Jackson in Colorado found ICE in material violation of his preliminary injunction against warrantless arrests and ordered a retraining program within 45 days, with untrained officers barred from making warrantless arrests ^[7].

The Court finds that defendants have materially violated the Court’s (preliminary injunction) Order. — R. Brooke Jackson

But ICE appealed the Colorado injunction and continued making warrantless arrests while the appeal was pending ^[7]. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons was separately summoned to a Minneapolis federal court for potential contempt charges over the same home-entry policy ^[8]. And other courts have upheld the administration's approach outright. Judge Carl Nichols ruled that immigration judges should complete asylum adjudications within 180 days and that challengers to the accelerated timeline likely lacked standing ^[9]. The 5th Circuit unanimously upheld no-bond detention during deportation proceedings ^[9]. The 8th Circuit suspended a lower-court injunction that had barred ICE from using pepper spray and tear gas against peaceful protesters in Minnesota; two U.S. citizens were fatally shot during the enforcement surge that followed ^[10]. The wins are real. They are also narrow — jurisdiction-specific, under appeal, or defied. The loop runs around them.