Chaotic, crowded Chicago immigration mega court hearings are fueling record deportation orders
<p>The benches in courtroom 11 at Chicago’s immigration court, the one judges lament as so tiny, barely seat 25.</p><p>So how could 143 people called for hearings on a single morning ever fit?</p><p>By 9:10 a.m., roughly 60 of them — mostly asylum seekers without lawyers — had crammed in wall-to-wall. Judge Peter Kim’s clerk squeezes through the waiting crowd this July morning to collect names and mark late arrivals present.
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<p>The benches in courtroom 11 at Chicago’s immigration court, the one judges lament as so tiny, barely seat 25.</p><p>So how could 143 people called for hearings on a single morning ever fit?</p><p>By 9:10 a.m., roughly 60 of them — mostly asylum seekers without lawyers — had crammed in wall-to-wall. Judge Peter Kim’s clerk squeezes through the waiting crowd this July morning to collect names and mark late arrivals present. The stakes are high: failing to show up to court could mean an automatic deportation order.</p><p>But the hearing itself is dense and complex, the judge’s litany of immigration jargon punctuated by crying children who are hungry and hot.</p><p>“You are here because the government believes that you should be removed,” Kim says through Creole and Spanish interpreters.</p><p>When he asks immigrants how many need more time to find an attorney, nearly every hand flies up.</p><p>Welcome to a “mega master” calendar hearing, a massive preliminary procedural hearing instituted by the Trump administration at the end of May that now crams between 100 and 185 people into a single judge’s morning’s call — as many as 70 into the same hearing if they don’t have lawyers. Not everyone shows up, but before May these hearings averaged 30 people.
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- <p>The benches in courtroom 11 at Chicago’s immigration court, the one judges lament as so tiny, barely seat 25.</p><p>So how could 143 people called for hearings on a single morning ever fit?</p><p>By 9:10 a.m., roughly 60 of them — mostly asylum seekers without lawyers — had crammed in wall-to-wall. Judge Peter Kim’s clerk squeezes through the waiting crowd this July morning to collect names and mark late arrivals present.
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Chaotic, crowded Chicago immigration mega court hearings are fueling record deportation orders
Sources1TypeCoverageChicago Sun-Times