KQED61%
Amid Chaos at SF Immigration Court, Judges Give 800 Deportation Orders in 1 Week 0%
By Elize Manoukian47%
3/24/2026, 3:35:13 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Framing Effect, and Fundamental Attribution Error, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 27.1% saturation with 164 hits. Analysis detected 803 faulty-reasoning hits from 605 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 0% and a BS Rank of 0% (0 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 100.00% of the article peer group.
The U.S.
Immigration & Customs Enforcement building at 630 Sansome St. on Feb.
5, 2020.
San Francisco immigration courts ordered more than 800 in absentia removals in one week amid rescheduled hearings, asylum restrictions and mounting case backlogs.
(Beth LaBerge/KQED)
San Francisco immigration judges ordered more than 800 people to be removed “in absentia” last week, advocates said.
Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the San Francisco Bar Association, told KQED on Tuesday that many of those targeted for removal, while not present in the courtroom, may not have realized that their hearing times had changed.
Chaos in San Francisco’s immigration court system has led to the sudden rescheduling of court appointments — some of which were moved up by two years — and mass hearings of dozens of immigrants at a time.
Those who missed their court-ordered hearings last week have lost their pathway to asylum and can now be taken into custody by U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for deportation.
“It’s a challenging position that people are in now, especially those who have a really strong asylum claim and just didn’t understand what time their hearing was or where their hearing was and missed it,” Atkinson said.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, heavy restrictions on asylum have coincided with the hollowing out of San Francisco’s main immigration court at 100 Montgomery St., the largest in Northern California, and where the majority of Bay Area cases are heard.
People gather outside 100 Montgomery St. during a rally calling for the release of journalist Sami Hamdi on Oct. 31, 2025, in San Francisco, California.
(Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)
The court, which is slated for closure by the end of the year, has seen its bench whittled down from 21 judges at the beginning of 2025 to two, after 12 were fired and others retired, asked for a transfer or were reappointed, according to Mission Local.
San Francisco has also been utilizing a judge remotely from San Diego, Atkinson said.
The court currently has a backlog of 120,000 cases.
At the same time, many people have stopped showing up for court-ordered appointments, likely out of fear of arrest and deportation.
Advocates’ alarms went off last week after observers noticed judges who normally serve in the immigration court in Concord were scheduled for hearings in San Francisco.
Instead of a typical schedule of one morning and one afternoon hearing, the hearings were back-to-back, with scores of immigrants ordered to appear at the same time, Atkinson said.
“From what we saw last week is that the court was intentionally scheduling hearings where they believed that people would not show up,” Atkinson said.
In one hearing, Atkinson noted, 77 people were scheduled to appear.
Only three showed up, and the rest were ordered to be removed.
Atkinson said the roughly 800 people removed is an “incredibly high” number, compared to the five to ten people per docket who miss their appointments, out of hundreds.
While the SFBA does not currently have the exact number of removals, Atkinson said the figure is likely an undercount, since not all removal hearings had a court observer.
“It looks like they’re just trying to deny people the right to apply for asylum by finding out procedural ways to get their cases dismissed or thrown out,” Atkinson said.
Kathryn Mattingly, press secretary for the U.S.
Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, declined to comment on the number of cases and said staff reductions have not affected EOIR productivity.
KQED’s Tyche Hendricks contributed to this report.
Speakers
2speakers47%attributed speech323writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
79%flagged-word coverageMilli Atkinson
257 attributed words91% of attributed speech80% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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