"Due process for who? All immigrants!"
"New England judges for New England courts!"
At least 50 immigration attorneys, clerks and advocates gathered by Boston's immigration court chanting Wednesday afternoon. They called for fair hearings, stronger due process and experienced, unbiased judges who are appearing in-person — not hundreds, or thousands, of miles away on a video call.
Nina Froes is one of many immigration judges fired by the Trump administration this year. She told the crowd that immigration court hearings have three essential steps for due process: The person who's supposed to appear receives a notice; they have an opportunity to respond; and a neutral arbiter presides over their case.
"And this court right now is failing on all three fronts," she said.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, that the office is working to make sure all cases are heard in "a timely and lawful manner."
Lawyers said the temporary immigration judges filling spots in Chelmsford and Boston are military officers with little to no experience in immigration law. They're concerned the judges are biased and answer first to the military and Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche instead of serving as a check on the executive branch.
"They don't understand the law that they're applying. It's like replacing the U.S. Olympic diving team with a bunch of kids told to do belly flops — that's what these judges are doing. They're following orders," said Heather Yountz, senior immigration staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. "They aren't using discretion. They aren't weighing facts. They aren't applying the law. Trump doesn't want judges who think for themselves."
On Thursday, attorneys said one Haitian client who was sexually assaulted in Haiti dealt with a judge who kept speaking to a federal government's attorney without an interpreter.
"Then the judge basically turned to her and explained to her how she wouldn't have a right to ask for asylum," Yountz, who knows of the case, told GBH News in an interview.
This is a common example of something called a "pretermission" — when a judge, at the request of an attorney for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will close a case.
Attorneys say that's happening more frequently under the Trump administration for asylum cases that would otherwise be considered strong.
They said the issues around due process are causing more deportations.
"We've seen too many clients, too many children, get ordered deported, get put on a plane, get sent to a country where they don't speak the language, they have no ties," said Robin Nice, a local immigration attorney who organized the rally.
“They don’t understand the law that they’re applying. It’s like replacing the U.S. Olympic diving team with a bunch of kids told to do belly flops — that’s what these judges are doing.”Heather Yountz, senior immigration staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
'Hearings on steroids'
Advocates decried so-called "mega-master hearings," which began in the spring to speed up immigration court cases.
In a highly unusual move, the Department of Justice has been bundling immigration court cases — sometimes more than 100 at a time — into a single courtroom docket.
"We're talking about hearings on steroids," said Michele Cantará, a retired Chelmsford resident who leads the Chelmsford Immigration Court Watch team. "Usually people who are not represented, and they are batched in half-hour increments."
The Justice Department defended its immigration process in a statement Wednesday.
"Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration," a spokesperson wrote in a statement. "The Justice Department is restoring integrity to our immigration system by hearing cases fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly, in accordance with the law."
Massachusetts has more than 149,000 pending immigration court cases through August, according to records obtained by the data-gathering organization TRAC, compared to 148,000 in February.
Immigrants also report issues with the communications about their hearings: Some people may have been assigned a one-on-one hearing date, but then gotten re-scheduled for the mass hearings. Cantará said sometimes people aren't told when their hearings are rescheduled. She's seen immigrants who drove in from Vermont or Maine to show up in court, but they were turned away and told to come back another day for the "mega-master" hearings.
Froes told GBH News some immigrants aren't getting their hearing notices at all, so they're missing court dates without knowing it. She's described judges hired to replace her and others as "not neutral" and under an "incredible amount of pressure to follow the administrations guidelines and priorities."
For a removal order to be issued when an immigrant fails to appear for their hearing, the judge must find that the person was properly informed that the hearing was taking place, according to the Department of Justice.
Froes is now representing immigrants in front of the court where she used to serve as a judge. She described her first hearing representing an immigrant on Tuesday for a routine master calendar hearing, when an immigrant and their attorney tell the court what their planned legal route is — like if the client wants to remain in the country, and if they're applying for a green card. The attorney and client put the same legal arguments in writing ahead of time.
That caused all the more frustration when Froes drove to Chelmsford, waited in a long line to get in through security — as a result of the mega-master hearings — met her client and were met with an empty courtroom. The judge, prosecutor and clerk appeared on the video screen to go over arguments Froes had made in their legal filings.
"Part of the chaos is that the paperwork had been filed in advance," she said. "There was no actual reason for anyone to appear."
If her client had not appeared, they could have been ordered deported.
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