SF Immigration Court’s Looming Closure Raises Concerns About Path to Asylum

San Francisco’s main immigration court is set to close by the end of the year, driving former judges and advocates to worry that it’s part of an effort by the Trump administration to drastically remake and shrink the overburdened immigration system in the Bay Area and beyond.

Former judges told KQED that staffers were informed Tuesday that the court would not renew its lease at 100 Montgomery St., where the majority of the Bay Area’s asylum cases are heard.

The court, which began 2025 with 21 judges, now has just four remaining after 13 were fired and four more retired at the end of the year, which some attorneys told KQED they were pressured into. Nationwide, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired since last January.

Former San Francisco Judge Dana Leigh Marks said the move to shutter the largest of three immigration courts serving Northern California feels like a step toward dismantling the path to asylum entirely.

“The system is bleeding from 1,000 small cuts,” she said. “It seems to me like what the current administration is trying to do is maximize the dysfunction in order to allow a change in the law by Congress. To eventually eliminate the system and eliminate the due process that immigrants get.”

Marks said she’s heard from current immigration attorneys that when the judge presiding over their client’s cases has been fired, their court dates have been removed from the docket and pushed back by up to three or four years.

Former Judge Arwen Swink, who was fired from San Francisco’s bench last month, told KQED that current staffers got an email confirming that the Montgomery Street court would shutter by January 2027, when the court’s current lease ends. She and three other former judges, who spoke with KQED on the condition of anonymity to protect their sources from retaliation, said the court is aiming to end operations at the site as soon as the summer and plans to consolidate remaining staff in the Bay Area’s other immigration courthouse in Concord.

The Rev. Leah Martens, who has been attending vigils outside the nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in recent months as part of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, said the news on Tuesday felt like “a gut punch.”

“It feels like this administration is continuing to make moves that make it harder for people to find legal pathways to be secure,” she told KQED. “It feels like that’s not the goal anymore.”

Martens said the immigration system is already backlogged, and she worries that shutting down the city’s main court will only further slow immigrants’ cases.

The San Francisco court, which is the largest of three that hear cases from the Central Valley to the Oregon border, has a backlog of 120,000 cases.

Another in Concord, which opened in 2024 and was expected to grow to a similar size, has just seven judges. Sacramento’s smaller court shrunk from six to three judges last year. The two locations are responsible for around 90,000 more cases.

On Wednesday morning, the line of people waiting for check-in appointments outside the ICE field office on Sansome Street, about half a mile from the court, extended down the block and around the corner. Martens said some of the people standing outside the federal building, holding folders of legal paperwork and bundled against the early morning cold, had also been lined up Monday or Tuesday but hadn’t made it through the long, slow-moving queue.

The Rev. Deborah Lee, who heads the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, said she sees the closure of San Francisco’s court as part of a series of moves by the Trump administration to dismantle the immigration judicial system.

Last spring, ICE officers began arresting immigrants outside courtrooms where they had mandatory hearings, a tactic that was previously unprecedented. DOJ attorneys would move to have asylum-seekers’ cases dismissed, while officers waited in courtroom hallways to take them into detention if they were. The DOJ used similar tactics to detain immigrants who reported to ICE check-in appointments like those held at 630 Sansome St.

If asylum-seekers fail to appear for a mandatory hearing or appointment, their case can be dropped altogether.

Marks said prosecutors have also increasingly moved to deny cases before immigrants have a hearing and offer asylum cooperation agreements, under which people can go to a country other than their home country if they agree to leave the U.S., without taking the necessary legal steps.

“What this current administration has been doing is almost like a smash-and-grab robbery. They’re not following any of the established rules … providing flimsy and transparent justifications, or just disregarding the rules,” Marks said. “Some might not hold up with litigation, but they aren’t waiting.”

Milli Atkinson, who directs the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Bar Association of San Francisco, said it is possible that the DOJ could shift some hearings in the city to three courtrooms in the Sansome Street building, which is federally owned and not expected to close. But no judges are located at the site, and the communication sent to Montgomery Street staff suggests that operations will be consolidated to Concord.

“Logistically, it’s just going to be a nightmare,” she said. “It is going to be chaotic for several months, where people are not going to know if they have a hearing scheduled, where the hearing is scheduled, who their judge is, if their case is going to be moved.”

Amanda Maya, the asylum program director at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said the move also backpedals on the goal of opening Concord’s court: easing access for immigrants in the East Bay and Central Valley.

“It was an incredible development for people who were already in the East Bay and were having to travel to San Francisco, where it didn’t make sense, or people in the Central Valley who unfortunately don’t have an immigration courthouse,” Maya said. “But now we’ve created the problem that existed, but for people on the Peninsula or people who live in the South Bay.”

Maya also said that many of the Bay Area’s legal resource centers and nonprofits are based in San Francisco because of its proximity to the court. Programs like the Bar Association of San Francisco’s Federal Pro Bono Project, through which immigrants can get legal advice from attorneys, have spent years building relationships with the city’s judges and court staff.

Marks said it’s not unheard of for the immigration court to move to a new location when its lease expires, but she said eliminating what has been perceived as one of the most liberal courts nationwide feels calculated.

“For a long time, it has been seen as a thorn in the side of more restrictive immigration policies,” Marks said. “The only rationale I can find to justify closing the San Francisco court instead of relocating it in the close area … is that it’s an effective way to close down a more liberal court.”

KQED’s Tyche Hendricks contributed to this report.