A line stretched around the downtown Los Angeles immigration courthouse before doors even opened. Immigrants crowded waiting rooms and spilled into hallways as clerks raced to process around 100 people scheduled for an administrative hearing that morning.
In the last two months, these master calendar hearings have been coined “mega master” hearings, as dockets nationwide have exploded with four or more times the number respondents than they had before, part of the Trump administration’s latest push to fast-track asylum cases.
Around 100 immigration cases are scheduled at one time and respondents must attend in person, a practice that has strained an already overwhelmed system and further complicated the shifting legal landscape, attorneys working in the court say.
The quickness of these proceedings, coupled with confusion on how they operate, means immigrants are much more likely to miss their hearing, advocates said. Those who don’t show up become eligible for removal.
At a hearing on June 24 observed by The Times, 14 immigrants didn’t make their appointment, and were ordered removable by the end of the day.
“What we’re experiencing in court is, in a sense, worse than what we saw on the streets of Minneapolis, but it happens in secret,” said Vera Weisz, a Los Angeles immigration lawyer.
Maura, who did not want to give her last name for fear of being singled out by ICE, made the nearly two-hour journey from Bakersfield to the Van Nuys immigration courthouse in late May for her hearing.
For the Mexico native who arrived in the U.S. as a child, the drive was filled with dread. In her mid-50’s, with children and grandchildren all in the U.S., she worried she’d be taken for deportation at the hearing, with her family outside the courtroom and unaware.
She arrived at the courtroom nearly an hour and a half ahead of her 8:30 a.m. appointment, and watched as the waiting room overflowed with at least a hundred other immigrants. Her family and a paralegal from her lawyer’s office, were denied entry into the courtroom because of how packed it was.
“All I saw was hundreds of people right there, standing, waiting for their turn,” Maura said. “You can feel the stress, the sadness, everything, in that hallway.”
Over three days in the downtown courtroom in June, a Times reporter observed how many immigrants were funneled into the courtroom in groups, and the judge rarely addressed them directly, typically calling up around five cases at a time. They would sit through hours of proceedings until a clerk directed them to exit the courtroom, with little to no clarification on what happened in their case.
Judges at times proceeded with hearings before realizing the asylum seeker wasn’t in the room. And immigrants with similar case numbers were often mixed up. The confusion is intensified for those who don’t speak English, who often resorted to communicating with the clerk through hand signals.
The expanded hearings are meant to target the most vulnerable asylum seekers and issue as many removal orders as possible, said immigration attorney Lindsay Toczylowski, the co-founder and president of Immigrant Defenders Law Center.
Just under 35,000 removal orders have been issued in California from January through May of this year, according to TRAC, a data gathering organization at Syracuse University. Under the Biden administration in 2024, 43,852 were issued over the entire year.
“These types of hearings are not about helping people find justice in our immigration system. They’re about furthering the plans for mass deportation,” Toczylowski said.
The tactic is a new approach in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown after it eased off on the controversial mass roundups it launched last summer in the face of public outcry. Asylum seekers are getting detained at routine immigration check-ins, and cases are getting fast-tracked through the system.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review said in a statement that it prioritizes a timely completion of all immigration cases and that packing the docket is needed to work through a national backlog, which was over 3.2 million cases as of May 2026, according to TRAC data.
There are about 340,000 pending cases in California, with highest concentration in Los Angeles county, with 95,000 open cases, TRAC data shows.
“Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible,” the spokesperson said. “EOIR will continue to make scheduling adjustments to ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Times that every immigrant ordered removed has received full due process.
“DHS is working rapidly and overtime to remove these aliens from detentions centers to their final destination — home,” the spokesperson said. “Illegal aliens who no longer wish to be detained can obtain release at any time by requesting a free flight home and a $2,600 exit bonus.”
A Department of Justice spokesperson said it is restoring the justice system’s integrity by ensuring speedy and fair cases.
“The Biden Administration allowed millions of unvetted migrants into our communities and intentionally turned a blind eye to tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors in need of care,” the spokesperson said. “Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration.”
Group hearings for more procedural appointments took take place before, but they typically scheduled at most 20 people at a time, said Andrew Ji, who runs the immigrant justice unit at the nonprofit, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California.
Now, 60 to 100 people are being scheduled for one four-hour hearing, a frequency of cases that immigration lawyers said they’ve never seen.
Over 120 immigration cases had a hearing scheduled for the same judge on a Wednesday in early June, a Times reporter observed. On another day, one courtroom had 96 people scheduled at the same time.
Most cases involved people attending their first hearing in their immigration case. Despite their clerical nature, an initial hearing is critical to a person’s immigration case, said Erin Moncure, who has volunteered as a court observer with the nonprofit CLUE since September.
“Often, people show up for their initial hearing without representation,” Moncure said. “They’ll come out of the courtroom, and they have no idea what just happened. Emotions are high. Everybody’s in a panic. It’s hard to retain things.”
It’s not clear how cases are selected for mega master hearings, but the proceedings seem to focus on asylum seekers who entered the country within the last five years, especially those without legal representation, and unaccompanied minors, Toczylowski said.
Nearly half of all respondents in deportation proceedings filed in California courts do not have legal representation, according to TRAC data. Over 70% of those who received removal orders nationwide in May were unrepresented.
One asylum seeker sprinted into the courthouse, hours after her early morning hearing appointment in early June, her flip flops barely holding together as she frantically ran up and down the hallway.
She was on the search for the courtroom where her hearing was being held, a Times reporter observed. Her lawyer had mistakenly thought she could appear before the judge via video call. She made it to the courtroom just before the judge finished hearing cases for the day.
Had she arrived after the judge finished proceedings, she would’ve been considered a no-show, and ordered removed, attorneys say.
In one mega master in San Antonio, Texas, out of the 175 cases ordered to appear before a judge one morning, about 40 people didn’t show up, said attorney Jessica Smith Bobadilla. At the first mega master hearing in San Diego in mid-June, around 50 people were ordered deported, out of the 80 people scheduled to appear, according to Daylight San Diego.
The court is also moving hearing dates up with little notice. Monia Ghacha, an L.A.-based lawyer, has had nearly a dozen hearings for her asylum cases, which were originally scheduled for 2027 and 2028, moved up with barely a two-month notice.
The hearing date changes make it difficult to effectively represent her clients, especially asylum seekers coming from war-torn countries. Compiling the necessary paperwork to prove an asylum case is complicated, and nearly impossible in such a short time frame, she said.
“You’re just putting all cases in one basket and trying to deny everything,” Ghacha said. “It’s been frustrating: the amount of work we’re still putting in, and the lack of attention to that work.”
Alberto, who asked to withhold his last name, thought his immigration hearing for a green card application last week would be individual and that he would have time to make his case, until dozens of people filed into the waiting room of the west Los Angeles courthouse.
The judge called Alberto, who missed work to attend the hearing, along with three other cases simultaneously, and spent only minutes on each. The judge didn’t address him at all, but rather spoke directly to his lawyer, who attended via video call, he said.
Alberto, whose primarily language is Spanish, struggled to understand the outcome of his case as he was ushered out of the courtroom, about three hours after his 8:30 a.m. appointment.
“It was confusing, because as the judge speaks, her microphone overpowers the translator on the video call,” Alberto said. “I didn’t really understand what happened.”
It wasn’t until after the hearing that Alberto reached his lawyer, who walked him through the proceedings. Alberto declined to share specific details about his active immigration case.
It took about two hours before Maura was called in front of the judge in late May, who took less than 10 minutes on her case.
“We were tense the whole time,” Maura said. “I was scared I was going to be taken away without my family even knowing. I had to memorize two phone numbers in case they did take me.”
She avoided that fate for now. The judge scheduled a final hearing in February. Other people that day weren’t so lucky. She saw one man decide to self-deport, and countless others beg the judge for extensions on their cases.
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