President Donald Trump’s administration has been using a “mega master” calendar to target people who don’t know their case has been taken to court, according to a new report.
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According to reporting by The Guardian, the Trump administration is ordering immigrants removed from the U.S. without them being physically present to find out about it. Immigrants are being scheduled for “mass hearings” at the last minute, where they are receiving removal orders by default.
“There’s people that are walking around, going about their business, without realizing that they have a removal order on their record,” Katie Fleming, the director of public education and engagement at the Acacia Center for Justice, told The Guardian.
The Guardian described it as the latest tactic in Trump’s mass deportation plan, and it noted that Trump ranted against due process for immigrants and suggested the U.S. needs to “get rid of judges” in immigration courts.
In one courtroom featured in The Guardian’s reporting, a young judge who had only been in her role for about a month, Brittany Rodriguez, read through a list of 15 people who had missed their hearings and now face deportation. The other immigrants who were in the courtroom mostly didn’t have legal representation.
“I don’t have a lawyer. I only have God,” one immigrant told Rodriguez, who became a judge after a career in immigration enforcement, according to The Guardian.
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“These are kind of ways to skirt you getting a final hearing where you can actually present evidence for relief you’re seeking in immigration court,” Brandon Marrow, who researches the federal government’s “mega master” calendar hearings, told The Guardian.
The Guardian reported that some of these mega masters bring in 150 people per session while disproportionately and intentionally singling out those without lawyers.
Retired immigration judge Paul Schmidt told The Guardian that the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency in the Department of Justice, has flipped from its original mission of providing immigrants a last line of defense to helping speed up deportation orders.
“They abandon the real mission of the agency, which is to provide fair hearings and due process to as many people as possible,” Schmidt said. “And instead sort of run it as an adjunct of DHS enforcement, with the only real objective to be being [able to] enter as many removal orders as you can, as fast as you can.”
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