source: Austin Kocher
Starting in May, immigration attorneys began reporting that they were arriving at immigration court to find judges’ dockets packed with over 100 hearings scheduled in a single morning—a phenomenon that quickly became known as “mega master calendar hearings,” or “mega masters” for short. Under normal circumstances, the number of removal hearings scheduled in a single morning doesn’t come close to 100, so the idea that a single judge could process this number of cases—at a rate of 1.8 minutes per case for 100 cases over three hours—while providing anything that resembles due process is absurd on its face. Indeed, attorneys and court observers, and later reporters, found that these “mass removal hearings” were being conducted with the scantest of attention to basic court procedures and seemed more designed to generate chaos and in absentia removal orders than to improve efficiency.
A master calendar hearing is often described as the initial stage of removal proceedings, as distinguished from an individual or merits hearing and bond hearings, which involve more substantive questions about a person's claims to remain in the country. The hearing takes place in front of an immigration judge in an open courtroom with other non-citizens (“respondents”), attorneys, paralegals, interpreters, and court staff. An initial master calendar hearing is truly the first hearing a person has in court, while subsequent master calendar hearings are often needed before a case goes to an individual merits hearing (a closed-door hearing)—if it even makes it that far. In reality, most cases do not make it out of the master calendar hearing stage as we will discuss in this series.
In June, the number of these mega masters hearings grew, with immigration courtrooms in New York City, Minneapolis, Baltimore, New Orleans, and a handful of other cities named as hotspots for this new tactic. New York City immigration judge Arya Ranasinghe was reportedly assigned 121 cases in a single day, Baltimore judge Vargas-Padilla was assigned 120, and a judge near Minneapolis was assigned over 100, in a court where observers had never previously recorded more than 73. Attorneys developed a tracker to identify more hotspots. The National Immigration Project published a brief explainer on master calendar hearings, citing concerns that accelerated hearings, including rescheduling hearings from future dates with little notice, would force cases into a decision before they were ready, or worse, that most people wouldn’t even know they had a new court date at all. Due process concerns have only grown while reporters have emphasized the image of packed hearings where people can’t fit into the room.
But these stories have barely scratched the surface of the magnitude of mega master hearings. Starting today, I will be publishing an extensive data-driven series of posts on the mega masters phenomenon that will examine when and where this is happening, how many people are impacted, and the effects of mass master calendar hearings on individual people and the immigration courts writ large. The findings from the data are unambiguous: this is an intentional program of cramming cases together in crowded hearing schedules with little notice in order to manufacture removal orders. My goal is to bring you with me on the data journey of how we get to these findings, reveal hidden stories along the way that have not yet been reported, and use the current immigration court crisis to illustrate deeper and more persistent failures within the immigration system that both parties have either ignored or exacerbated.
The mega masters topic is close to my work. My doctoral dissertation on the immigration courts was based on years of courtroom observation, ethnographic research with immigration attorneys, archival casework, and direct advocacy. One of the central arguments of the dissertation is that the immigration courts produce deportable subjects (rather than simply adjudicate objectively and independently) not only through the subjective intent of individual judges but through the mechanics of how immigration law functions as an institutional practice. As a logical extension of that work, I spent subsequent years studying the courts using data-driven methods that helped expose more about the inner workings of the courts, particularly in response to policy swings over the past 20 years.
I mention this backstory because I want to foreshadow why my approach to examining the mega masters phenomenon takes a longer historical view, weaves in empirical data, and incorporates theoretical observations about how mega master calendar hearings are a window into how the immigration system works. And I want to do so in a way that you won’t get from the standard churn of news reporting, advocacy statements, or other independent sources.
I hope you’ll follow along over the next several posts. We are going to go into more detail than I ever have on Substack (call it data spelunking), but I’ll keep the writing accessible to a broad audience while giving specialists enough to dig into. Subscribing now is the easiest way to make sure each report in the series lands in your inbox. I’ll publish each one when it’s ready, so you may get more than one in a single day.
