Scheduling ‘trick’ sends immigrants to DC for Baltimore hearings

Some Maryland immigrants are discovering a surprising twist in their immigration cases: They’re being ordered to report to Washington, D.C. — often on short notice — to attend a virtual hearing with a judge back in Baltimore.

The Washington location isn’t associated with any known immigration court. One attorney said she thought the address was a mistake when a potential client brought the notice to her office.

On Sept. 9, people appeared lost — panicked, even — when they arrived at the glass building in D.C.’s Federal Center Plaza. There were no signs indicating where to enter the virtual hearing room; confused people kept showing up at the building’s first-floor McDonald’s.

Meanwhile, more than 30 miles north in Baltimore, a judge sat in a nearly empty courtroom, using a webcam to address immigrants pleading their cases.

“There’s really no reason for doing this other than trying to jam people, hoping they’re not going to get the notice, hoping they’re not going to show up at this obscure office in D.C.,” David Koelsch, a former judge at Baltimore’s immigration court, said in an interview.

Virtual proceedings in immigration court are not new. They were standard during the COVID-19 pandemic, and immigrants are still sometimes allowed to attend hearings from their attorney’s office or even from a device at home.

But requiring them to report in person for a virtual hearing far from both their home and the court feels “Kafkaesque,” Koelsch said. He theorized that the move appears to be part of a broader strategy to increase the number of in absentia deportation orders for people who don’t show up in court.

“It’s just stacking the deck,” Koelsch, who was appointed to the bench during President Donald Trump’s first term and retired last year, said in an interview. “It’s frankly embarrassing to me as a former immigration judge.”

Trump’s second term has introduced sweeping changes to immigration courts that some former judges and attorneys say have whittled away due process rights. Asylum grants have plummeted while in absentia orders are up, and new case precedent has forced judges to issue deportation orders for certain people even before the U.S. Department of Homeland Security makes a decision on their application for legal status.

Others, however, argue that an unprecedented backlog of more than three million pending cases — a number that exploded during the years of the Biden administration — necessitates some of the changes.

Representatives from the Justice Department, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, did not address specific questions about the use of the virtual hearing room in an emailed statement, but wrote that quickly reducing the case backlog is a top priority of the Trump administration. All individuals going before immigration judges receive due process, they added.

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, wrote that the office “will continue to make scheduling adjustments, to include opening new hearing locations as needed, to ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner.”

Months ago, immigration courts around the country, including in Baltimore, began packing more people than before into master calendar hearings, which are preliminary group appearances before a judge. The vast majority of people at the so-called “mega” hearings don’t have attorneys.

The sheer number of individuals present sometimes requires judges to speed through each case. Now, some immigrants aren’t even physically in the same room as the judge.

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge in York, Pennsylvania, and now a policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a national think tank that advocates for stricter immigration enforcement, thinks the use of a virtual hearing room is not nefarious.

Baltimore’s immigration court, which is on the fourth floor of the George H. Fallon Federal Building, simply doesn’t have the space for so many people to wait simultaneously, he said. Opening the virtual hearing room is likely just a practical reuse of available space in another federal building, he added.

The new procedure still provides immigrants with the pillars of due process, he said — the chance to present their case to a judge and to be represented by an attorney if they can afford one. Any individual merits hearing, such as an asylum claim, would still occur in person, Arthur added.

Koelsch, however, disagreed, arguing that providing only a few days’ notice to go find an unfamiliar address cuts against “fundamental fairness.”

Seventy-six people from across Maryland attended hearings in the virtual hearing room throughout the day on Sept. 9, including a large number of Haitians from Salisbury. Many said their hearings had been scheduled for later in the year, but they discovered days earlier that they had been moved up.

Jimmy Norgues, a community advocate from Salisbury who drove more than two hours to escort a fellow Haitian community member, said the whole process felt “shady.” The woman he was accompanying never received a notice of the hearing in the mail, and only knew about her court date because she happened to check her online case portal.

“Everybody was nervous coming there. People don’t feel protected,” Norgues said. “It’s a trick. It seems like they are trying to get people in trouble.”

It’s difficult for people without attorneys to meaningfully represent themselves, said immigration lawyer Katherine Stenlake, both because of the complexity of the law itself and the intricacies of court procedures — sometimes, for example, the court will reject evidence simply because the paper is not hole-punched correctly.

Getting such little notice ahead of time will only make it harder, she added. Court regulations require 10 days’ notice before any scheduled hearing, though long-held practice in Baltimore has been to provide months of lead time.

“This is definitely going to drastically increase the amount of removal orders that are being issued, and I think that’s clearly the intent,” she said.

As people filed into the Washington hearing room, the wooden chairs and benches in Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Kuyomars Golparvar’s Baltimore courtroom were mostly empty, save for a Banner reporter and three men from Haiti. They had come to the Fallon building instead of the D.C. hearing room by mistake. They were allowed to have their cases heard in Baltimore.

The afternoon docket of 32 people dragged on well past the 4:30 p.m. cutoff Golparvar had set. After reading the group their rights with the assistance of Spanish and Haitian Creole interpreters, Golparvar raced through high-level reviews of each case individually, at times cutting people off as they spoke.

The group included many Haitians who entered the country lawfully under a Biden-era parole program or who previously held Temporary Protected Status; almost all of them had submitted asylum applications. However, Golparvar rejected each application because it was incomplete, and gave many of them 12 days to resubmit.

That happened to one of the men who mistakenly arrived in person. Golparvar gave the man, a West Baltimore resident who declined to speak to The Banner, two weeks to find an attorney before reporting once again for court — but next time at the Washington hearing room.

Eight of the 32 people in the afternoon slot did not show up to court and received deportation orders.