NPR: Immigration courts are using a new tactic to speed up deportations

President Trump has been dramatically changing the immigration courts. As Jennifer Lee Koh put it in a recent article,

"Amidst the dizzying array of developments taking place under the banner of mass deportation, the second Trump Administration is engaged in a sustained effort to fundamentally transform the country’s immigration courts by incapacitating them. Although the immigration courts have long been the subject of extensive criticism, they also seek to function as neutral forums in which the Department of Justice adjudicates the removability of noncitizens and certain types of immigration relief, governed by due process principles. Rendering those courts unable to perform their functions could potentially give rise to a more fundamental deterioration of even the semblance of due process in immigration adjudication."

Ximena Bustillo for NPR reports on the latest developments in the immigration courts:

"Immigration courts inside the Justice Department are drastically accelerating immigrants' hearings and bunch them together with the goal of issuing more deportation orders. . . .

Immigrants are now being scheduled for massive master calendar hearings — or `mega masters' — that include 100 or more people at a time. That's up from two or three dozen people at a time that had been typical before for a first hearing. For many immigrants, this is their first appearance in court to try to make their case to be able to stay in the U.S."