Jere Ramsey spends so much time in the Concord immigration courthouse that she knows the name of all of the janitors and security guards. And they know her name too.
But Ramsey, 71, a retired businesswoman and Cal Poly university lecturer, is not on anyone’s payroll.
She’s a volunteer scrivener, dutifully lining up at 7:30 a.m. to be in court first thing in the morning. She’s there early to see the court’s screen light up with the list of immigrants scheduled to appear in court that day. Since no electronic devices are allowed inside, she has to scribble quickly before the screen scrolls on to more names.
“You can’t get 80 to 100 names off of a moving screen in less than 45 mins,” she said.
And with that, her day has started. Her work includes managing a team of some three dozen, mostly elderly volunteers known as “court observers” who witness the proceedings, collect data and counsel immigrants.
As the courtrooms in San Francisco have closed, her job has become even more critical. Concord is now the Bay Area’s de facto immigration court, with the number of hearings up from 54 in June to 104 scheduled for September.
Ramsey finds trends in those numbers, work that requires the data collected by Ramsey and her volunteers who note the names of all of the immigrants with hearings, the kinds of immigration applications each has filed, whether they have a criminal record (most do not), and the decisions made by judges. Ramsey inputs the data at night and creates a monthly statistical report which she sends out to an email list.
The most recent 10-page report noted that in July, only 20 percent of immigrants who appeared in court had an attorney, a decrease from the 35 percent average rate between November of last year and May of 2026.
This change, the report notes, is likely because many immigrants’ hearings originally scheduled for 2027 or 2028 had been suddenly moved up, giving them little time to find a lawyer.
Ramsey is no nonsense about why she goes to court.
“I do not trust the government to keep the data, we would have to check it,” said Ramsey, who dresses as sensibly as she speaks. On a recent Monday, she wore a simple black shirt and a blue cardigan, and as she does every day, she had in hand, a black binder, organized with tabs to keep in place all of the schedules, reports and other paperwork.
In her July report, she also noted that 47 percent of immigrants did not appear for their hearings.
Moreover, at least 81 percent of those no-shows, she noted, were ordered removed – an all-time high. From November 2025 to July 2026, 67 percent was the average rate of deportation orders for immigrants who failed to appear.
Ramsey began volunteering at the immigration court, because, she said, she needed to do something to protect democracy. First, it was attending protests. But in July of 2025, she started to volunteer at the court house as an observer, and by August, the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice asked her to take charge over the calendar and volunteers.
The job was perfect for her skillset of recruiting and managing teams. “I’ve been training for this my whole life,” she said. Plus, she lives nearby. It just made sense, she said.
Although U.C. Berkeley and Syracuse University have successfully forced the government to hand over court data giving both universities extensive records, Ramsey insists that it is important to have witnesses inside courtrooms.
“I do not trust the government to keep the data, we would have to check it”
Jere Ramsey
Sergio Lopez, who coordinates another group of volunteers called “welcome navigators”, who are dedicated to directly assisting immigrants at Concord, agreed. Lopez said Ramsey’s data is crucial because it is current. Federal figures can lag by months, and some information, such as whether an immigrant has an attorney or the outcome of a hearing, is not always recorded in federal court data.
Organizations working at the court use Ramsey’s numbers to raise money and to make their case when problems arise. Recently, judges were limiting the number of volunteers allowed inside courtrooms, and they used Ramsey’s data when reaching out to the ACLU for help.
“She is doing a really good job with the court observers,” Lopez said.
Ramsey’s volunteers can also step in to provide back-up resources to immigrants when one of Lopez’s volunteers are unavailable, doing things such as asking if they would like help from the volunteer attorney at court that day, or showing them where to find a list of low-cost attorneys.
Inside a crowded courtroom on a recent Monday, a baby cried in the back row as a 2-year-old wiggled in her stroller at the front of the room. Another volunteer offered a toy to entertain the girl.
For the most part, she said, government attorneys and immigration judges are following the rules and procedures. But the fairness of the system, she said, has been gutted by changes such as increased application fees, moving up court dates without notice, and decreasing the amount of individualized time immigrants have in front of a judge.
When there are violations inside the court room, however, volunteers note them. Although she rarely criticizes judges publicly, she points to one instance when Emmanuel Garcia, a judge from Texas was appearing remotely to oversee a hearing in Concord.
The judge told a family of four they needed to submit a separate asylum application for each child, paying a $100 fee for each application. That was not standard practice. Moreover, Garcia, she said, “was uniformly and assertively rude to respondents.” She’s considering filing a complaint regarding the hearing.
Ramsey’s main worry these days is covering all of the hearings. “This month I just do not have enough people,” she said.
But she has not for a second considered giving up. As long as immigrants can fairly plead their case, a judge denying someone’s asylum application is okay, although sad, she said. What’s most upsetting nowadays is the practice of immigrants being sent to a third country where they have never been to.
The practice, she said, “isn’t okay and I want a record of it.”
