The Department of Homeland Security this summer attempted to revive an estimated 2,000 deportation cases at San Francisco’s immigration court that had been paused for years, even decades, worrying Bay Area attorneys who say the move targeted victims of crime and abuse.
The lawyers say the initiative by the Trump administration, which was seemingly paused in August but could start up again in the future, denied due process: Immigrants with long-paused cases can be hard to track down, and attorneys have not always been informed of the motions in time to challenge them in court.
The old cases involve many who sought visas based on a special status, including one for juveniles abandoned or abused, and another specifically for crime victims.
Other cases include those who have been in the United States as far back as the 1990s, but who had their cases paused because a judge decided they weren’t an enforcement priority, often because the immigrant had no criminal record.
In June, Shira Levine, then a judge in San Francisco’s immigration court, said the Department of Homeland Security began filing thousands of requests to bring back cases that had been closed by immigration court judges, through a process called “recalendaring.” Most of the motions, she said, used boilerplate language.
She said the department filed motions to recalendar “all or nearly all of the cases that had been administratively closed in the San Francisco immigration court.”
Administrative closure happens when a judge pauses a case because an immigrant is seeking legal status outside of immigration court, or because the immigrant has no criminal record and the judge sees them as a low-enforcement priority.
The Department of Homeland Security started asking to bring back those cases nationally, unpausing them so that removal proceedings could resume and immigration judges could order deportations.
Levine said that she and other San Francisco immigration-court judges ruled on about 2,000 motions to recalendar, which she called “an incredible administrative burden.”
The move, retired San Francisco immigration court judge Dana Leigh Marks said, continued Trump’s sweeps of immigrants who have been legally seeking asylum for years or decades — not those with a criminal history.
“This administration is not just removing the worst of the worst of immigrants who have criminal records,” said Marks. “They are penalizing people who have done everything they can to function within the system and cooperate.”
While the initiative appears to have ceased in August, immigration attorneys said it could resume.
President Donald Trump has fired immigration judges across the country, including seven in San Francisco, and advocates worry that if more conservative judges fill the vacated seats, they may grant more of the Trump administration’s attempts to revive the cases.
Motions include many victims of abuse
Many immigrants who received recalendaring motions were victims of abuse or those abandoned as children. They have been seeking status through programs like Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and U visas, which is a visa only available to crime victims who have suffered substantial abuse and who cooperate with U.S. law enforcement.
Each lawyer that spoke with Mission Local had clients that were pursuing one or both of these options. Rost said that about 40 percent of her clients who received the motions were seeking either Special Immigrant Juvenile Status or U visas.
Two young indigenous men from Guatemala were caught up in the initiative, said their attorney, Cecily Clements. Both are seeking status for those who suffered abuse or abandonment as minors that, if granted, will allow them to apply for a green card and work permits in the United States.
The government was “in the process of making a decision” on their status when “this ICE attorney goes and tries to reschedule their court case,” Clements said.
If accepted, that would have opened up the immigrants to possible deportation. A judge ultimately denied the motion, and both are awaiting decisions on their status.
In an email to Mission Local, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant for public affairs for DHS, said by attempting to recalendar cases such as Clements’ clients, the Trump administration is “fighting for the rule of law.”
She added: “Those who are in our country illegally have a choice: They can leave the country voluntarily, or be arrested and deported.”
U.S. law allows refugees who are present in the country to seek asylum.
McLaughlin has claimed that “70% of ICE arrests are of criminal illegal aliens charged with or convicted of a crime” in the country. But the agency’s own data shows that 72 percent of those held by ICE across the country have no criminal record.
In its motions, the Department of Homeland Security said that old cases like these should be recalendared because they’ve been paused for so long.
But lawyers said many cases can take more than a decade, with the timeframe beyond the immigrant’s control.
Only 10,000 U Visas, for example, are currently issued per year, and it can take more than 10 years to secure one. Getting Special Immigrant Juvenile Status is supposed to take six months, but immigrants from certain Latin American countries face years-long wait times due to backlogs.
The potential pool of additional cases is vast. More than 360,000 cases nationwide had been administratively closed as of July and could theoretically be recalendared, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The median case had been closed for 11.5 years.
Clements said she thinks the administration’s recalendaring is part of a playbook to hit quotas with little regard for who is being swept up.
“The Trump administration’s mantra has been mass deportations,” Clements said. “It’s not hard for them to reactivate cases if they’re trying to deport everybody.”
Old cases add to 3.4 million in backlog
The new motions hit an already overwhelmed system. Nationally, immigration courts have a backlog of about 3.4 million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse from Syracuse University.
In San Francisco, the backlog is about 120,000 cases as of August, the most of any immigration court in California.
Levine said that “the vast majority of motions” that she ruled on “were identical copies of each other.”
While she granted some of the motions, she declined most of them on the grounds that they “did not refer to any individualized factor in the case” and “did not meet the regulatory requirements for recalendaring.”
In other courts, judges granted a higher proportion of the motions. In Texas, judges reportedly granted most of the motions over the summer.
Some of the cases were from as far back as the 1990s. With cases that old, said Levine, it is often difficult or impossible to contact the attorneys. Sometimes, the immigrants themselves are hard to track down.
Levine said if a case is recalendared and an immigrant does not show up to their court date, they “can be, and often are, ordered deported in their absence.”
Six Bay Area immigration lawyers said they saw or heard about the same motions being filed in immigration courts across the country, including across the bay, in Concord.
San Francisco-based immigration lawyer Katarina Rost said that she received more than 100 recalendaring motions against her clients. All but one of them used the exact same language.
While judges denied the majority of the motions she received, they granted about a third, opening the door to her clients being deported in the future.
So far, that hasn’t happened. But because her clients have not yet had their court dates, she fears they will be deported in the future.
“I’m sure some of my clients will be deported by 2026,” Rost said.
Lawyers allege DHS attorneys broke the law
Several Bay Area-based attorneys also said they were often told of their cases being recalendered either late or not at all. Since lawyers only have 10 days to respond to such motions according to federal law, this gave them little time, or in some cases no time, to challenge the motion.
In particular, several attorneys alleged that two DHS lawyers, Matthew Gabe and Jennifer Topp, broke the law by not properly informing them of their filings.
Rost said over the summer, “five or six times a week,” she would receive notices from Gabe and Topp that they had filed recalendaring motions after those motions had already been heard by a judge.
Rost said that, by informing her late, Gabe and Topp broke a federal code that requires attorneys to inform opposing counsel of their filings.
Gabe asked that Mission Local refer all questions about his motions to McLaughlin, who did not answer our inquiry on the matter. Topp did not respond to our inquiry.
Alexandra Wilson, a Concord-based immigration attorney, said a judge granted a motion to recalendar one of her client’s cases. The client is seeking a U visa for herself and three family members. She said Gabe filed the motion with the court, but never informed Wilson.
This made it impossible for her to challenge the motion, and her clients are now set to have their deportation case resumed.
“I think it’s a disgusting use of government time and resources,” said Wilson, “and a clear violation of due process.”
Immigration attorneys said they stopped receiving the recalendering motions by the end of August. They said they don’t know why the motions stopped, or if the initiative stopped nationwide or just locally.
All expressed concerns that the initiative could restart at any moment if more conservative judges fill in the seats of those fired by the administration this year.
In September, the Pentagon approved the hiring of 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary judges. So far, none have shown up in San Francisco.
The Trump administration, said Oakland-based immigration lawyer Cecily Clements, could install judges “who won’t know what they’re doing, won’t know the law, and lean conservative.”
Clements thinks the administration’s recalendaring is part of a playbook to hit quotas with little regard for who is being swept up.
“The Trump administration’s mantra has been mass deportations,” Clements said. “It’s not hard for them to reactivate cases if they’re trying to deport everybody.”
Thank you ICE! Keep up the heroic work you do so well for us Americans! Mwah!!!
I am glad to hear this.
I’m tired of lawbreakers being excused for specious reasons.
If people are here illegally, they should be deported. That doesn’t change if they have been there 20 years. What THAT means is that they have been knowingly breaking the law every day for 20 years.
We need more immigrants, but we don’t have to accept only scofflaws.
“I’m tired of lawbreakers being excused for specious reasons. ”
George Santos has entered the chat.
“I’m tired of lawbreakers being excused for specious reasons. ”
Tell us how you really feel about Trump’s self enrichment tour…
Merrick Garland should have prosecuted him for inciting insurrection, is how I feel.
One crime — his — (OK fine, multiple crimes by him) does not make other crimes OK.
His current wife committed Visa fraud, as did Elon Musk. Under your rules they would be deported and barred for ever reapplying for citizenship.
As soon as you push for that “law abiding” we’ll listen to you talking about actual hard working immigrant families trying to get to their court dates and being kidnapped by masked goons anyway.
Under THE LAW, these people have a right to a fair hearing with appropriate representation and that is being denied under your so-called “lawbreaking” focus.
If your attempt to enforce “a” law is itself done illegally, you’re not enforcing the law. You’re breaking it.
You need to reread the history there.
cnn.com/interactive/2023/08/politics/annotated-text-copy-trump-indictment-dg/
He was indicted by Smith, Garland’s prosecutor.
“The attack in our nation’s capital on January 6 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy, and as described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies,” Smith said in a brief statement. “Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing the bedrock function of the US government nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of a presidential election.”
Trump is committing crimes by using the ICE/DHS resources to target specific races and political groups in contravention of the Constitution, and all you got was that stupid red hat and an obvious chip on your shoulder about non-white immigrants.
If people are going through the process of acquiring legal status, and a court of law has allowed them to stay, it is a clear violation of rights for them to be abusively arrested and then disappeared.
Besides, you’re being played. The original campaign promise was to deport “the worst of the worst,” not gardeners productively raising families for twenty years. But it turns out the whole claim about millions of violent criminals being here illegally was just another Republican lie, so they can’t find any worst-of-the-worst to deport.
“I’m tired of lawbreakers being excused for specious reasons.”
“I just only bring it up when it’s immigrants. I name myself ‘send them back’ because I’m really concerned about the rule of law and the rights of all individuals under our Constitution, despite that directly and unambiguously also applying to non-documented individuals in country. I ignore the big ‘law of the land’ because I prefer the administrative state where administrative protocol outweighs human rights. This is why I’m so upset about ‘scofflaws’ – but only when it’s immigrants. That’s when I feel the need to chime in my support of ‘law’ as I understand it.”
“I’m tired of lawbreakers being excused for specious reasons.”
No. No, you aren’t.