Expedited hearings lead to more deportations; faith leaders support immigrants in court

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Welcome in San Diego. It's Jade Hindman. On today's show, data tell us deportations are up due to fast-tracked immigration hearings. We'll talk about that. Then, it's been one year since faith leaders started going with immigrants to court hearings and ICE check-ins. We'll tell you about the impact. This is KPBS Midday Edition, connecting our communities through conversation. A new federal tactic fast-tracks immigration court hearings with little notice. Immigration courts are flooded with hundreds of hearings, aka mega-master hearings. The strategy is already impacting people in San Diego. Joining me with the details is Gustavo Solis. He's investigative border reporter for KPBS. Gustavo, welcome. Hello,

Jade.

So listen, walk us through this concept of mega-master hearings. How do they typically work?

They schedule a bunch of hearings all in one day, and they don't give a lot of notice. So, for example, here in San Diego, on a normal day, we had one judge. They get 29, 27 hearings. In a master, in a mega master hearing day, they get 90. So you go from 30... to 90, you give them short notice, a few weeks, maybe a month, that's not enough time to show up or prepare. So what ends up happening is that people just don't show up. And as soon as they don't show up, the immigration judges will order them removed in absentia. Basically, you get a deportation order because you did not show up to court.

When did you first get wind of this?

As soon as it happened, I got actually some good folks you're talking to later today, court watchers over at Faith. They would send me text messages and call me saying, hey, this is happening. We had kind of heard wind of it before. It was happening in other cities around the country, and these networks are pretty dialed in. So we were thinking it might be coming. We just didn't know what day. And there are folks, volunteers, who have been watching the court for well over a year now. And they know who the judges are. They know what their normal caseload is. And they got up there and saw, whoa, 90 hearings from one judge. This is going to be wild. And that's when I got phone calls about it.

Now, you poured through federal data to find out how big of an impact this is having. What did you find out?

Well, I didn't pour through the data myself. People smarter than me poured through the data. But they found, I mean, it confirmed what people suspected on the ground, right? The initial reaction to it from advocates were this is going to lead to a lot of deportations because people may not know. Maybe their notice went to an old address or their lawyer didn't give them a heads up. And, you know, when you don't show up to court, you get deported. So that's what was going to happen. The report shows that is exactly what happened. A historic surge in absentia deportation orders. The numbers were 53,000 orders in June, which was 55% increase from...