San Francisco Immigration Courts Order 800 Removals in Absentia in 1 Week

San Francisco immigration judges ordered more than 800 people to be removed “in absentia” last week, advocates said.

Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association, told KQED on Tuesday that many of those targeted for removal, while not present in the courtroom, may not have realized that their hearing times had changed. Chaos in San Francisco’s immigration court system has led to the sudden rescheduling of court appointments — some of which were moved up by two years — and mass hearings of dozens of immigrants at a time.

Those who missed their court-ordered hearings last week have lost their pathway to asylum and can now be taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for deportation.

“It’s a challenging position that people are in now, especially those who have a really strong asylum claim and just didn’t understand what time their hearing was or where their hearing was and missed it,” Atkinson said.

Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, heavy restrictions on asylum have coincided with the hollowing out of San Francisco’s main immigration court at 100 Montgomery St., the largest in Northern California, and where the majority of Bay Area cases are heard.

The court, which is slated for closure by the end of the year, has seen its bench whittled down from 21 judges at the beginning of 2025 to two, after 12 were fired and others retired, asked for a transfer or were reappointed, according to Mission Local.

San Francisco has also been utilizing a judge remotely from San Diego, Atkinson said.

The court currently has a backlog of 120,000 cases. At the same time, many people have stopped showing up for court-ordered appointments, likely out of fear of arrest and deportation.

Advocates’ alarms went off last week after observers noticed judges who normally serve in the immigration court in Concord were scheduled for hearings in San Francisco. Instead of a typical schedule of one morning and one afternoon hearing, the hearings were back-to-back, with large numbers of immigrants, between 20 and 30, ordered to appear at the same time, Atkinson said.

“From what we saw last week is that the court was intentionally scheduling hearings where they believed that people would not show up,” Atkinson said.

In one hearing, Atkinson noted, 77 people were scheduled to appear. Only three showed up, and the rest were ordered to be removed.

Atkinson said the roughly 800 people removed is an “incredibly high” number, compared to the five to ten people per docket who miss their appointments, out of hundreds.

While the SFBA does not currently have the exact number of removals, Atkinson said the figure is likely an undercount, since not all removal hearings had a court observer.

“It looks like they’re just trying to deny people the right to apply for asylum by finding out procedural ways to get their cases dismissed or thrown out,” Atkinson said.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

KQED’s Tyche Hendricks contributed to this report.