Manhattan immigration courts on Monday saw the first instances of so-called mega master hearings, a tactic the Trump administration is using across the country to accelerate deportations. One judge was scheduled to hear 121 cases in a single day. Another had a docket of 88. The vast majority of individuals were listed as having no legal representation.
“It’s pretty horrifying,” New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams told the Prospect in the waiting area outside the courtroom of Judge Kalenna Lee, who was rapidly moving through the list of 88 cases, many of them unaccompanied children with legal representation, spending in some instances no more than three minutes per person. “For clarity, this has nothing to do with public safety,” Williams added. “This is about rounding up people the government doesn’t like.”
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Stuffing the docket is the Trump administration’s latest tactic to deport one million people annually, a practice NPR was the first to report last week. Lawyers who spoke with NPR said mega master hearings were under way in Boston, Chicago, and Massachusetts, and would soon begin in Dallas. Court-watchers alerted the Prospect last Friday that they’d start in New York City on June 1; staff of some elected officials said they were not aware of the plan until this past weekend.
Master hearings are typically the first time someone attends immigration court to begin the process of staying in the country legally; the hearings were already quick and crowded, typically including 20 or 30 people all heard by the same judge at the same time.
The goal of mega master hearings is to speed up that stage of the process. It comes after federal judges have forced the Trump administration to end earlier maneuvers, including dismissing people’s cases from the very beginning and arresting people at immigration court, pointed out former comptroller and Democratic candidate for New York’s Tenth Congressional District Brad Lander, who attended Monday’s mega masters with Williams.
Immigration advocates and court-watchers agreed that the mega master hearings underscored the intense need for legal representation.
Lander commented on the room full of children, some of whose cases were sped up by six months. Even though they are eligible for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status—a federal status for those who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent—the judge’s rulings essentially meant they were subject to immediate removal.
“It’s a grim day here, and they keep looking for new ways to frighten, to terrorize, to use cruelty. They know these people are watching what’s happening at Delaney Hall and are afraid of what could happen if they end up detained,” Lander said, referring to the ICE detention camp in Newark, New Jersey, where prisoners are on a labor and hunger strike.
Harold Solis, co-legal director at Make the Road New York, told the Prospect via email that grouping 100 or more people into mass hearings “will undoubtedly wreak havoc across the immigration courts” and deny individuals any semblance of due process. This is especially troubling for those without legal representation, many of whom will struggle to understand what these hearings entail, how they will take place, and whether they will have a meaningful chance to be heard.
Other immigration advocates and court-watchers agreed that the mega master hearings underscored the intense need for legal representation. Immigration court allows an immigrant to bring an attorney to hearings, but unlike criminal court, does not provide one.
It’s crucial that the New York state legislature pass the Access to Representation Act, which would fund legal representation for immigrants who can’t afford a lawyer, said Barbara, who is part of her union’s team of court-watchers and spoke on condition of using her first name only. Detained immigrants with a lawyer are ten times more likely to win their cases than those without one, and seven times likelier to get released from custody, according to the New York Immigration Coalition. New York should lead the way on providing immigrants with attorneys, Barbara said, because it is the epicenter of Trump’s attempt to make the court system into one that relentlessly punishes immigrants.
“If they’re here, if they have come or stayed without documentation, they have endured tremendous suffering in their home country and tremendous hardship to get here, then they arrive here and the system is completely weighted against them,” she said. “It’s a pretense of justice when there’s no legal support for immigrants here. It’s not justice.”
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HUDSON RIVER, the deadly and inhumane conditions at Delaney Hall illustrate what can await those who are unsuccessful in immigration court, even if they are following the rules.
Over the past week, hundreds of prisoners in the Newark camp continued their hunger and labor strike and reported to advocates and family members that conditions have worsened since they undertook collective action.
Guards beat and gassed detainees in an attempt to break the strike on Thursday; Rep. Rob Menendez (D-NJ), who conducted an unannounced oversight visit that day, told New York–based outlet Gothamist that four people from Unit 2 had been taken to the hospital for injuries, including “a fractured hand, a head injury, shortness of breath and an abnormal EKG.” Most of the strikers are imprisoned in Unit 2.
Guards have been retaliating in other ways, too, said Catalina Adorno, an organizer with the New Jersey branch of the immigrant labor advocacy group Cosecha. Adorno told the Prospect that guards were retaliating as a way to break the strike, including frequently cutting off access to communication through phones and tablets, denying toilet paper, denying coffee, threatening to transfer people, and actually transferring 11 women who had gone on strike. Guards were also growing more aggressive, yelling at people and calling them names.
Federal officials have also barred detainees from seeing their loved ones. The Department of Homeland Security said they had restored visitation as of Sunday morning after suspending visits over the weekend because of ongoing protests in support of the strike. But some family members said that was not the case. According to a report in The Guardian, only those in Units 1 and 3 were allowed visitation rights.
Adorno noted that some strikers have submitted a petition of habeas corpus, so they cannot be transferred out of state. If ICE transfers them anyway, that means the agency is ignoring a legal order. Not all the prisoners have legal support, however, so some have not been able to file a habeas petition.
Outside the prison, New Jersey State Police took over from immigration agents as of Friday to beat and gas protesters who have been rallying in support of Delaney Hall strikers. Gov. Mikie Sherrill also set up so-called “protest zones,” because “we need to take this opportunity to lower the temperature.” Protesters on the scene shared footage across social media showing state police knocking down protest zone barricades to march against the protesters.
State police arrested multiple people throughout the weekend, and in one instance carried those they arrested into the camp.
As in Chicago, Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and Los Angeles, police also specifically targeted journalists, particularly photojournalists and TV broadcasters. They attacked Reuters photojournalist Ryan Murphy, breaking his finger; hit photojournalist Angelina Katsanis in the knee with a six-foot wooden two-by-four beam, requiring that medics on-site take her away in a wheelchair, and confiscated thousands of dollars’ worth of her equipment; forced a WNBC crew to leave; and swarmed MS NOW’s Ali Velshi, forcing him to leave as well and refusing to answer any of his questions about why he had to go.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whom DHS arrested when he attempted to tour the facility last May, ordered a mandatory curfew for the half-mile around Delaney Hall, from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., until further notice. He is restricting vehicles to only those with official business and closing the area to all pedestrian traffic. Protesters who spoke with the Prospect were incensed by officials’ response and by the repetition of false tropes, such as Sherrill’s claim that outside agitators were the ones causing all the problems.
Mike Fabricant, a faculty member at Hunter College who teaches organizing and social policy, and who was at Delaney Hall last week, described the way ICE agents are behaving toward protesters as “a microscopic enactment of a police state,” in which agents refuse to negotiate or engage with the assembled protest as a fundamental constitutional American act. He also said that outsiders were likely to join the protest because Delaney Hall embodies a national issue. The federal government is unjustly imprisoning immigrants, and immigrants are fighting back.
“Through the hunger strike, through the refusal to work, they are really placing their lives on the line for the question of freedom,” he said. “That is going to resonate nationally.”
