WBUR News7%
'Mega masters' hearings pack immigration court dockets. Experts say it's a strategy to deport people faster 34%
By Simón Rios52%
7/20/2026, 5:47:29 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Unattributed Quote, Confirmation Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 27% saturation with 375 hits. Analysis detected 2,271 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,389 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 42.4% and a BS Rank of 34% (12,701 of 19,035 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 66.70% of the article peer group.
In courtroom 4 of Chelmsford immigration court sat a Mexican cowboy, with wavy hair past his shoulders, a pair of gold teeth and a trucker hat in his lap.
He wore a rhinestone belt buckle the size of a motorcycle license plate.
His fingers were swollen and his nails caked in dirt — evidence of his work wrangling horses on a local ranch.
The man from Michoacán stood out on this recent July morning among scores of people from Central America, Brazil and Haiti summoned before an immigration judge.
Like some of the others, he had an asylum hearing scheduled two years out.
Then, out of the blue, came notice of a hearing just days later.
Immigration lawyers call these mass proceedings “mega masters” hearings.
They say they’re increasingly common as the Trump administration seeks to reduce a massive case backlog.
But advocates argue many immigrants funneled into the courts will lose the ability to have their stories heard, and that the government's ultimate goal here is to increase deportations, even for people with legitimate claims to stay in the country.
Judge Christine Olson had more than 100 people on her docket that morning, several times the typical daily caseload.
She called in about a dozen people every half hour, sometimes whole families with children.
It was clear many did not understand her.
A Spanish interpreter, piped into the courtroom via phone, tried speaking to a Brazilian who didn’t seem to understand Spanish.
Haitian Creole speakers appeared to be the largest group.
“If they don't show up, even though this is just a scheduling hearing, that's enough for a judge to issue a deportation order, which is very difficult to undo.”
Jason Giannetti, an immigration attorney
Olson called them up one at a time, marked them present, then allowed them to leave pending their next hearings.
The man from Michoacán went back to his job in rural Massachusetts taking care of horses, with a hearing set for the end of August.
That hearing could decide his future in the country.
But for those who don’t show up to court, the stakes on this day can be even higher.
Observers say they are resulting in thousands of removal orders nationwide.
“If they don't show up, even though this is just a scheduling hearing, that's enough for a judge to issue a deportation order, which is very difficult to undo,” said immigration attorney Jason Giannetti.
“It seems like it's a policy, not just a problem in the system.”
Standing outside the Chelmsford courthouse after a different mega masters hearing, Giannetti said he’s never seen anything like these proceedings in his more than two decades of practicing immigration law.
He said large-scale hearings were held under prior administrations, but nowhere near this scale.
Now, according to interviews with attorneys, former immigration judges and volunteer court monitors, the courts seem to be creating new complications at every step: requiring legal documents be filed in hard copy; cramming large numbers of people into hearings; and demanding people without lawyers come in person, causing some to travel to Massachusetts from around the country for the briefest of court appearances.
“The courthouses are jammed with people that are sitting on top of one another, because there's no room for everybody who's in the waiting room,” Giannetti said.
Giannetti said some of his clients aren’t even receiving notice of the hearings by mail — a federal requirement.
Instead, he said, the only way to know for sure that a hearing is scheduled is to constantly check a government website.
Deportations ‘in abstentia’
The mega masters hearings are happening amid a backlog of 3.2 million cases nationwide and 152,000 in Massachusetts.
Individual cases historically can take years to complete, sometimes decades.
Now, the Trump administration is pushing to limit the duration in the vast majority of cases to 365 days — and just 60 days for people in custody.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recently told members of Congress that the effort is working.
Blanche said the Executive Office of Immigration Review — the arm of the Justice Department that oversees the courts — completed more than 1 million cases since President Trump took office, reducing the backlog by nearly 450,000.
An EOIR spokesperson said the immigration courts are prepared to conduct larger group-like hearings as needed.
In a statement, the spokesperson said scheduling adjustments are made “to ensure cases do not languish.”
But Austin Kocher, a research fellow at American University in Washington, D.C. who’s studying the use of mega masters hearings across the country, said they are all about ramping up deportations.
“It just means a lot of people in court — very little time for immigration judges to actually consider these cases,” Kocher said.
“And for the most part, it also means people are not getting adequate notice to show up on time.”
Typically in immigration court, master calendar hearings involve 20 to 30 cases and are held ahead of individual calendar hearings, in which respondents can provide evidence and argue why they should be allowed to stay in the country.
With these new mega masters hearings, Kocher said, at least 100 cases are scheduled in a single day, and the majority result in removal orders — in which a judge grants the government’s petition to deport — especially when respondents don’t appear.
According to Kocher’s analysis of April and May data, about 30,000 cases were completed in mega masters hearings nationwide.
Of those, 65% were ordered removed, and 85% of those orders were made when the respondent was not present.
“ This is a strategy for generating ‘in absentia' removal orders — full stop,” Kocher said.
“These cases are really going to shape the future of each person who walks through that courtroom,” he added.
The court watchers
Even for immigration activists, it’s hard to disagree that the administration is making the courts more efficient.
But Michele Cantara, who spent years consulting Fortune 500 companies on using high tech to improve systems, said efficiency shouldn’t come at the cost of due process.
“Some of the processes I see being deployed today, as a former person who used to improve processes, I'm like, ‘Well, these are pretty good,’ — if I took away any moral compass I had,” she said.
Now 66 and retired, Cantara spends her days observing immigration proceedings in Chelmsford.
She’s part of a network of volunteers monitoring the courts in Chelmsford and Boston.
They’re collecting data to find litigation trends and keep tabs on whether people are getting a fair shake.
Alexandra Peredo Carroll, an immigration attorney at the Mabel Center for Immigrant Justice in Boston, is helping coordinate the non-lawyer volunteers observing court proceedings.
With the constant stream of changes at the courts, Peredo said the watchers’ work helps lawyers stay prepared.
“The immigration court has historically always released policy memoranda that lays out their processes and the rules,” she said.
“What we're seeing now is a lot of new trends that we don't have a lot of clarity on.”
Peredo said the primary purpose of court observing is to establish accountability.
“These are public proceedings, and the public in general has a right to observe hearings to understand how the court is ruling,” she said.
“... as a former person who used to improve processes, I'm like, ‘Well, these are pretty good,’ — if I took away any moral compass I had.”
Michele Cantara, a volunteer court observer
After watching dozens of these proceedings, Cantara said about half the people summoned don’t show.
And for those present, the hearings are often chaotic, with children running around the courtrooms, scores of non-English speakers without lawyers and no one to interpret.
Cantara said she can see that the dysfunction has a function: “The people who get lost in the chaos can efficiently be removed.”
Asked why she does this work, Cantara remembered growing up in Chelmsford, where her mom and dad would talk about the dangers of government overreach.
They taught her about the U.S. internment of more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
“My parents told me, ‘If you are a U.S. citizen, you can't stand by and let it happen again,’ ” she said.
“And I can't.
I can't.”
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.