'Mega master' immigration hearings address massive backlog, but speed sometimes compromises due process, advocates say

Federal officials are packing immigration courtrooms for mass hearings in New York City and across the country in what advocates said is an effort to accelerate immigration cases, sometimes prioritizing speed over deliberation and raising due process concerns.

In July, for instance, dockets for judges at Manhattan’s Federal Plaza Immigration Court compiled by the nonprofit BKLG.org showed seven hearings in which 100 or more deportation cases were scheduled, concerning a total of 892 individuals. The busiest hearing, on July 13 before Judge Tiesha Peal, involved 101 cases and 181 individuals. In the past, one immigration lawyer said, a typical hearing might have involved 40 to 60 cases.

These are master calendar hearings, where immigrants make an early appearance before a judge who lays out the factual and legal issues of their case and gives a schedule for future appearances. Hearings of 100 cases or more have become common enough that lawyers for immigrants and the Department of Homeland Security have adopted a shared, informal name for them: “mega master.”

These hearings are sometimes scheduled on unusually short notice, making it hard for an immigrant to prepare or attend the hearing. Nationally, the number of days between when a master calendar hearing for nondetained immigrants was added to the court calendar and the date it was scheduled to take place dropped from 178 days in December to 42 days in June, according to BKLG.

Possible legal jeopardy

Advocates said the accelerated timeline contributed to a spike in in-absentia removal orders, which can be issued by an immigration court judge if an immigrant misses a hearing.

Nationally, those orders jumped from 34,725 in May to 53,808 in June. People for whom removal orders have been issued may not be aware of their legal jeopardy because they don't understand the ramifications or, sometimes, because they don't receive a notice, advocates said. But once it is finalized, they are vulnerable to physical removal from the United States with few options to reopen proceedings. Any future contact with immigration authorities — on the street, at home or at work — could result in their detention.

The accelerated pace appears to be impacting Long Island immigrants. According to data posted by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, processed by the Deportation Data Project, and analyzed by Newsday, the number of cases for Long Islanders ending in removal climbed from 305 in December to 733 in May and 768 in June. More than half of these were issued in absentia. EOIR, an agency of the Department of Justice, manages the nation's immigration courts.

Mega hearings “raise some incredibly serious due process concerns,” said Benjamin Remy, senior coordinating attorney with the New York Legal Assistance Group's Immigrant Protection Unit.

Missed notifications and changes to schedules or hearing location contributed to the spike in in-absentia orders, Remy said. “The rule of thumb for most of these dockets is that at least a quarter of folks aren’t making it,” he said. Accelerated timelines also have made it harder for immigrants to build a case, Remy said. “Asylum cases are extremely complicated — the corroborating evidence might mean getting documents from the home country, a police report from El Salvador or a marriage certificate from West Africa. They’re shrinking all this down … They’re not allowing that time and access for folks to really present their case.”

A massive backlog

A master calendar hearing in immigration court is analogous to an arraignment in criminal court. But unlike criminal courts, which fall under the independent judicial branch of government, immigration courts are a subagency of the Department of Justice, whose other agencies have been tasked with detaining and deporting immigrants. Its judges are department staffers, some of whom answered a Justice Department job ad inviting people to “Apply today to become a deportation judge.”

And unlike in criminal courts, immigrants have no right to a court-appointed lawyer to navigate the arcane aspects of court procedure. Some of the immigrants appearing in Federal Plaza’s mega masters had lawyers, but many did not. On the day of Judge Peal’s mega master calendar hearing, just 3% of the immigrants who appeared had representation, according to BKLG.

Master calendars can be enormously consequential for an immigrant. Failure to appear may result in an in-absentia removal order. Lawyers for DHS also can use a master calendar hearing to ask a judge to dismiss an immigrant’s asylum claim. In May, the advocacy group National Immigrant Justice Center announced its staff had observed hearings in which judges handed pleading declaration forms to immigrants that, if completed, “could accelerate or alter the course of their deportation proceedings.”

Federal officials said they are reducing a massive backlog in immigration cases and that while master calendar dockets are routinely scheduled in large groups, each case is heard separately and afforded due process.

But as large group master calendar hearings emerged this spring, in-absentia removal orders rose sharply nationally and in New York City immigration courts. In New York City, the number of in-absentia removal orders more than doubled from May to June, from 2,189 to 4,447, according to BKLG’s analysis of court data.

Remy said that in early summer he’d observed about 20 mega master calendar hearings, including one before Judge Tanawa Lebreton at the 290 Broadway immigration court that drew about 150 people. “Not only was her entire courtroom full, with folks lined up on the wall, the waiting room was completely full, with people sitting on the ground, leaning on the wall. Folks show up at 8:30 in the morning. It’s not uncommon to see folks there at 3, 4 p.m., still waiting for a hearing,” he said.

In an email, Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for EOIR, said there was no fast-tracking of cases. EOIR “makes scheduling adjustments as needed to ensure cases do not languish,” she wrote. “Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible.”

Hoping to tell his story

In courtroom 29 at Federal Plaza on July 30, a reporter observed as Judge Linda Hristova moved through the morning’s docket. Roughly 20 immigrants sat in the windowless space. She first heard those with lawyers, granting several requests for changes of venue or for continuances after the lawyers raised procedural arguments for clients who were unaccompanied minors. During those hearings, the judge and lawyers for DHS and the immigrants referred by number and acronym to forms from the court and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Among the unrepresented immigrants appearing was a man from Colombia, now living in Queens, and who spoke to Newsday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his case.

The man said he came to the United States 10 years ago on a tourist visa after he was beaten and threatened with death by affiliates of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, a guerrilla group. He said he filed an asylum application soon after arriving in the United States and learned at an interview in Bethpage this year that his application for asylum had not been approved. He received a notice to appear at the master calendar hearing for removal proceedings. He said he decided to defend himself after an immigration lawyer told him his case would cost $10,000, a price he could not afford.

At first, he told a reporter he thought he could make his case. “I know how to defend myself — these are facts, what happened to me,” he said. “I paid all my taxes, I don’t have any criminal record.”

The man did not make his case on that day; Hristova’s legal assistant told him his hearing had been rescheduled for Dec. 3. Speaking later, outside the courthouse, the man said that after observing hearings, he’d decided he needed a lawyer after all. “I learned I can’t give any information directly,” he said. “I expected to tell them [my story], but I see it doesn’t work like that.”

Between March, when Hristova started working as an immigration judge, and June, the last month for which data was available, Hristova cleared 355 standard removal cases from her total caseload; she issued a removal order in 340 of those cases, according to EOIR records posted by research group Deportation Data Project and analyzed by Newsday.

Newsday observed another hearing on July 27 in Federal Plaza’s courtroom 13, where a written message outside the courtroom advised "illegal aliens" to “self-deport.” Judge Alison Igoe appeared from a Hyattsville, Maryland, courtroom by video link before more than 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants, none of whom appeared to have lawyers. Inside the courtroom, children cried so loudly that at one point the judge's legal assistant, who was present in person, said he could not hear Igoe and asked her to repeat herself.

Igoe addressed the immigrants as a group through a Spanish-speaking interpreter who was at a third location, also using a video link: “The Department of Homeland Security has asked the court to remove you from the United States … This process is called removal proceedings.” She issued standard warnings about the consequence of missing hearings and of filing a “frivolous” claim to the court.

At the end of her remarks, she announced appearance dates for the immigrants, some as soon as September, at least one not until 2029.

Immigration lawyers' observations

Reuben S. Kerben, a Queens-based lawyer whose clients include Long Island immigrants, said increases in large group master calendar hearings and in-absentia removal orders were among several recent developments that, combined, make it much harder for an immigrant to win the right to stay in the United States. Requests for continuance, a standard tool for lawyers seeking more time to gather information and build arguments for court, “are today almost all blanket denials,” he said. EOIR filing fees have increased dramatically, he said, including the cost to file an appeal: $110 as late as 2025, it's now $1,030. “If you make $1,000 a month as a housekeeper, you can’t spend $1,000 on a filing fee to appeal,” he said.

Afshan Khan, an immigration lawyer who has attended several group master calendar hearings in recent weeks, said she doubted if the immigrants who appeared unrepresented in group hearings were “understanding fully what’s going on, what their next steps are” or how little time they had to build a case.

She said one of her own clients, originally scheduled for a calendar hearing in 2028, was abruptly scheduled for a hearing last April, with a merits hearing — the final trial of his case — scheduled 30 days later.

“If one observes and sees on the ground what’s happening, it’s a deportation machine. They’re trying to remove as many individuals as possible.”

EOIR’s case backlog has been growing for years, reaching 3.9 million cases in 2024. But under President Donald Trump, who has made mass deportations a key part of his agenda, the total has begun to shrink, falling to 3.2 million by the end of June.

For fiscal year 2026 so far, the office reported completing 76,372 cases per month nationwide, with an average 31,319 in-absentia orders per month, the highest in at least a decade.