Five pages of names, identification numbers and countries of origin were stapled under Judge Kalin Ivany’s name on a bulletin board Monday at Fort Snelling immigration court.
The volume itself wasn’t as surprising as the timing: All 73 immigrants’ cases were to be heard at one hearing that day.
The official posting of more than six dozen cases to be heard in one session marked a stunning shift in court procedure that immigration lawyers and advocates had for weeks feared would reach the Fort Snelling court after being tried in other jurisdictions. The innovation of the “mega” hearing had finally arrived in Minnesota.
“In the time we’ve been tracking docket numbers, we’ve not seen a docket with 73 people listed for a single morning or afternoon,” said Amy Lange, head of The Advocates for Human Rights’ court observation project that has been running since 2017.
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The sheer size of the docket, which was initially scheduled for a half-hour but ran much later, led to court observers being locked out of Judge Ivany’s courtroom. It wasn’t until some 50 cases had been processed over almost two hours that observers were allowed to enter, Lange said.
Fort Snelling has now joined immigration courts in Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. in cramming as many as 100 or more respondents’ initial hearings into one block of time, often with little notice of the change being given to immigrants. A disproportionate number of those in mega hearings are unrepresented by lawyers, feeding suspicion that the reshuffling of the docket is intended to speed up deportation orders.
“This is the next level of the weaponization of hearings,” said Sarah Brenes, executive director of the Binger Center for New Americans at the University of Minnesota. “They’re really setting people up for an in absentia order [for deportation] because of the minimal heads-up being given.”
Some miss hearings because they aren’t able to take time off work, arrange childcare, schedule travel, or retain a lawyer. Others have lost faith in the immigration system and fear that they will be detained if they show up to a hearing they are unprepared for. The consequences are the same. Those who do not show up to hearings, even those rescheduled on short notice, are highly likely to be marked for deportation, closing the door on their legal pathway to residency.
‘Mega master’ hearings raise fears of due process at Fort Snelling
Master calendar hearings are generally the first time an immigrant appears in front of an immigration judge. They function similar to an arraignment hearing in criminal court, focusing on procedural and administrative issues as well as scheduling future hearings.
The legal community’s newly coined term “mega master” can mean different things in different jurisdictions, depending on how large master calendar dockets were to begin with, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
On Tuesday morning, a master calendar docket for Judge Brian Sardelli had 21 respondents listed, which is closer to the norm for the Fort Snelling court. Observers at the court Tuesday questioned why mega masters are more effective than simply better distributing cases between judges in a way that does not jeopardize respondents’ due process rights.
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“Some courts are doing mega masters in a group setting, where 30 or 40 people at a time will be asked the same questions, and told to raise their hand if they understand,” said Dojaquez-Torres.
“We’re very worried about this style of hearing which leads to people getting less individual attention to their cases,” she said.
The government agency that oversees immigration courts did not respond to a request for comment on the intent or legality of these “mega master” hearings. However, the Trump administration has said before that it is taking all necessary steps to clear out the backlog of immigration cases that has persisted for decades.
Hearings can be “life or death”
The Department of Justice recently announced that it had hired 77 permanent immigration judges to help with this backlog. But the administration has also terminated over 100 experienced judges since last January, and getting the new judges trained to make consequential decisions in a notoriously complicated area of the law will take time.
“This is not like getting a traffic ticket,” said Dojaquez-Torres. “This is life or death for a lot of people who have legitimate fears about returning to their birth country and have built a life over many years in the United States.”
Dojaquez-Torres also noted that courts also need more clerks and other support staff, and that the investment in immigration judges is dwarfed by the funds being given to enforcement efforts and building detention facilities.
At Monday’s mega-master hearing, respondents had their evidentiary hearings – where actual decisions are usually made – moved up from 2027 or 2028 to August, September, and October of this year, said Lange of The Advocates for Human Rights, giving them significantly less time to prepare their cases.
The time necessary to get through a mega master calendar docket is also forcing judges to reschedule other cases that would have been heard that same day, said Dojaquez-Torres of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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Her organization hopes that the government will recognize that this technique is not actually making courts more efficient and will likely lead to more appeals down the line, further gumming up an overstretched immigration system.
Even if the mega masters eventually lead to more cases being processed more quickly, that will come at the cost of sacrificing due process and hearing each case on its individual merits, court watchers say.
“The amount of work that people have to do to actually make their immigration claim should be met by an equal amount of care and concern by the courts,” said Brenes at the University of Minnesota. “They deserve to have their fair day in court.”
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