At least 500 people received deportation orders in a single week after failing to appear at a San Francisco immigration court — raising serious questions about whether they ever had a real chance to show up.
What Happened
Between Monday and Wednesday of the week of March 17, 2026, at least 500 people were ordered “removed in absentia” at the San Francisco Immigration Court at 100 Montgomery Street. That means they were ordered deported because they did not appear for their scheduled hearings — and they may now be barred from applying for legal status or protection in the United States for the next ten years.
The exact number is still being reviewed and could be higher, according to Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association.
What makes this week stand out is not just the number — it is the circumstances that led to it.
A Court Designed to Fail
The San Francisco Immigration Court started 2025 with 21 immigration judges. Today it has two. The Trump administration has fired, pressured out, or failed to replace nearly every judge on the bench over the past year. In their place, judges were brought in from Concord — a courthouse 30 miles away — to handle an unusually large number of hearings scheduled for those three days.
Former San Francisco immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks, who presided at the court for 35 years before retiring in 2021, was direct about what she believes drove the mass scheduling: “They’re counting on these people not showing up because otherwise you wouldn’t have that many cases on that day.” She added that if everyone scheduled had actually appeared, the judges would not have been physically able to hear all the cases in the time allotted.
“They are compromising fairness and due process in order to have dramatic numbers of deportations,” Marks said.
Former judge Shira Levine, who was fired by the Trump administration in September 2025, said that during her four years on the bench in San Francisco, an average of two to four people per day out of roughly 30 scheduled hearings would fail to appear. This week, observers at the courthouse reported only a small fraction of scheduled individuals actually showed up.
Notices That Never Arrived
There is strong reason to believe many people never received proper notice of their hearings in the first place.
Levine said she knew of asylum seekers whose hearings had been set years into the future but who were sent last-minute mail notices telling them to appear this week. “That kind of action is actually calculated to lead to more no-shows because people often will not get those notices in time,” she said.
The problem of defective notices to appear is not new in immigration court — misspelled names, outdated addresses, and bureaucratic errors have historically caused people to miss hearings they never knew were scheduled. When someone misses a hearing due to a notice they never received, they can file a motion to reopen their case — but that process requires legal representation, documentation, and time. Many people in this situation have none of those things.
The Fear Factor
Even setting aside notice problems, there is another reason people are not showing up to immigration court: they are terrified of being arrested there.
Since May 2025, ICE began conducting arrests inside and immediately outside immigration courthouses — a dramatic departure from longstanding practice that treated courts as protected spaces. Mission Local documented approximately 130 arrests at the San Francisco and Concord immigration courts between May and December 2025 alone.
The chilling effect was immediate and documented. In one instance, no one appeared at all for a scheduled docket because every immigrant told their lawyer they were “afraid to go to court.” A federal judge in San Jose, reviewing the situation in December 2025, found that courthouse arrests had put immigrants in an impossible position: show up to follow the law and risk arrest, or stay away and face automatic deportation. Judge Casey Pitts ordered a halt to ICE courthouse arrests in the San Francisco region on Christmas Eve 2025. But the fear those arrests created did not disappear when the order was issued — and the surge in absences this week suggests it persists.
A Court Being Dismantled in Real Time
The mass in absentia orders this week did not happen in isolation. They are the latest consequence of a systematic dismantling of the San Francisco Immigration Court that has been underway for over a year.
In January 2026, the Trump administration announced the court would close entirely — by January 2027 at the latest. All personnel and cases are being transferred to the Concord Immigration Court. The court currently handles approximately 120,000 pending cases across Northern California. Where those cases go — and how long they will wait — remains unclear.
Nationally, immigration courts are starting 2026 with fewer than half the judges they had a year ago. At least two courts have no judges left at all. The national case backlog now exceeds 3.5 million cases, with some immigrants seeing their hearings pushed back as far as 2030.
The agency has launched a hiring campaign to replace fired judges — but the campaign is recruiting what it calls “deportation judges” rather than “immigration judges,” and it has lowered qualification requirements, including removing the need for immigration law experience. An analysis by NPR found that the judges being fired have disproportionately had immigration defense backgrounds, while those promoted to supervisory roles have predominantly come from Homeland Security.
What a Removal Order in Absentia Means
For the individuals who received removal orders this week, the consequences are immediate and potentially permanent.
A removal order in absentia means a person can be arrested and deported at any time without a future hearing. It also bars them from applying for most forms of immigration relief — asylum, cancellation of removal, adjustment of status — for a period of ten years.
The only way to undo a removal order in absentia is to file a motion to reopen the case, and that requires proving either exceptional circumstances — such as a serious illness that prevented attendance — or that the person never received proper notice of their hearing. Both are difficult standards to meet, and both require legal representation that most affected individuals do not have.
“They are going to have a more difficult time moving forward with their cases, and they are at higher risk of being removed and detained,” Atkinson said.
What You Should Do If You Have a Pending Immigration Case
If you or someone you know has a pending immigration case in San Francisco, the most important thing right now is to verify your case status immediately. Do not assume your hearing date is the same as what you were told previously — dates can be changed without adequate notice, and missing a rescheduled hearing can result in a removal order.
The EOIR automated case search tool is available at https://acis.eoir.justice.gov and provides information in both English and Spanish.
If you believe you may have missed a hearing due to never receiving notice, contact an immigration attorney as soon as possible to explore whether a motion to reopen is an option in your case. Time is critical — delays make these motions harder to win.
Sources
- Alice Finno, Hundreds Ordered Deported in Absentia at S.F. Immigration Court, Mission Local, March 20, 2026. https://missionlocal.org/2026/03/san-francisco-immigration-court-in-absentia-deportations/
- NPR / Houston Public Media, Trump to Shut an Immigration Court, Curbing Due Process Options, January 13, 2026. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2026/01/13/trump-administration-to-shutter-an-immigration-court
- KTVU FOX 2, Judge Orders Halt on ICE Courthouse Arrests in Northern California, December 26, 2025. https://www.ktvu.com/news/judge-orders-halt-ice-arrests-san-francisco-courthouse
- ACLU NorCal, Civil Rights Coalition Files Motions to Block Trump Administration’s Immigration Courthouse Arrest and Detention Policies Nationwide, January 30, 2026. https://www.aclunorcal.org
- KALW, Hundreds of No-Show Asylum Seekers Face Arrest, Deportation, March 23, 2026. https://www.kalw.org
- El Leñador Bilingual Newspaper / Salvador Sandoval-Garduño, San Francisco Immigration Court to Close by End of 2026, March 2026. https://www.ellenadornews.com
- MyAttorney USA, The Closure of San Francisco’s Main Immigration Court: Navigating Backlogs and Uncertainty in U.S. Immigration Adjudication, February 10, 2026. https://myattorneyusa.com
- San Francisco Bar Association, Immigrant Legal Defense Program. https://www.sfbar.org/jdc/immigrant-legal-defense/
- Executive Office for Immigration Review, Automated Case Information System. https://acis.eoir.justice.gov
- Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Immigration Court Backlog, updated 2026. https://trac.syr.edu
