Researchers and university students sat through nearly 3,600 immigration hearings across 13 states between January and August, and what they documented was a system increasingly built to end cases before judges ever weigh the facts. Their findings, compiled into a report published Monday, describe immigration judges agreeing with Department of Homeland Security attorneys to dismiss cases through administrative shortcuts rather than full hearings on the merits — a practice the researchers call “pretermissions.”
The report comes from researchers at California State University, Long Beach and Princeton University, who trained and worked alongside undergraduate students from both schools to build what they describe as a ledger of off-the-record court proceedings, according to Princeton University. As reported by The Washington Sun, the researchers describe the resulting deportations as “procedural removal” — cases closed based on administrative process rather than a full and fair consideration of a person's claim for relief. Report author Amelia Frank-Vitale, a Princeton professor, put it starkly: immigration courts are experiencing “a kind of hollowing out of the content of immigration court while maintaining the facade of a judicial process.”
Frank-Vitale said she first noticed judges considering pretermissions on a larger scale than under previous administrations last summer. Lauren Heidbrink, the report's other author and a professor at Cal State, Long Beach, said the process by which decisions get made matters just as much as the outcomes themselves, and argued the administration is narrowing the range of matters judges are even allowed to judge.
Third-Country Removals Dominate Master Calendar Hearings
Court observers for the report sat in on 235 hearings involving third-country removals — cases where DHS sought to send someone to a country where they were not a citizen — and 90% of those hearings happened during routine master calendar hearings, per the Washington Sun's reporting. Immigration judges ultimately ordered removal for 58% of the people DHS sought to send to those third countries, according to the report's findings. Master calendar hearings made up nearly 95% of all hearings observed for the research, according to Inkstick Media's review of the data, with the bulk of 1,300 hours of courtroom observation gathered across more than 107 courtrooms in 13 states and Puerto Rico.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed more than 25,000 people to more than 30 countries where they were not citizens, according to third-country deportation tracking cited in the report. That pace has been enabled in part by a Supreme Court decision in September that allowed the administration to carry out third-country deportations without advance notice. The scale of these arrangements has grown substantially nationwide — the U.S. has struck removal arrangements with at least 35 governments worldwide, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
A System Already Under Strain
The pretermissions tactic did not emerge in isolation. ICE attorneys began asking immigration judges nationwide to dismiss noncitizens' cases around May 20, 2025, a tactic intended to funnel people into expedited removal rather than full hearings, according to the American Immigration Council. Oral motions to dismiss spiked 633% in a single day, from May 19 to May 20, 2025, and ICE filed 6,210 dismissal motions between late May and late July of that year — nearly 81% of them made orally in court. Judges granted 80% of the 4,336 oral dismissal motions they decided on the spot, the Council found.
The Board of Immigration Appeals this month upheld judges' authority to pretermit cases even without a request from DHS attorneys, the Washington Sun reported. Some judges observed by the Princeton and Cal State team pushed back where they could, invoking legal rationales to challenge motions seeking in absentia removals and requiring new Notices to Appear, which gave respondents another chance to come to court, Princeton's summary notes.
Behind these procedural fights sits a staggering backlog. The immigration court backlog exceeds three million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, with more than 130,000 new cases established by the end of December 2025 alone, per Princeton's report. Separately, almost 2.5 million asylum cases were pending at the end of the federal government's fiscal year on September 30, 2025, according to SCOTUSblog.
Asylum Grants Plummet as Judges Leave the Bench
TRAC data show that nearly all asylum cases are being denied as the administration presses judges to move cases through the backlog. That trend shows up starkly in federal data: the asylum denial rate reached 94.1% in June 2026 while the grant rate fell to just 5.5%, according to TRAC Reports. Only 771 people were granted asylum that month — less than a quarter of the number granted asylum three years earlier. Three-quarters of 130 immigration judges tracked from fiscal years 2021 through 2026 increased their denial rates in fiscal year 2026, by an average of 33 percentage points, TRAC found.
The Justice Department has removed roughly one in six immigration judges since the start of President Trump's second term, according to the report, and replaced some with military attorneys. The number of immigration judges nationwide fell from 735 in fiscal year 2024 to 634 in fiscal year 2025, then to 557 in the first quarter of 2026, per SCOTUSblog. Heidbrink said judges closer to retirement were more likely to scrutinize government actions because they feared being fired less.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review swore in 47 new immigration judges in September. Sirce Owen, the office's acting director, praised the qualifications of the new judges and said the positions are critical to reducing the court backlog and restoring integrity to the immigration system. The Department of Homeland Security maintains that all immigrants receive full due process.
Due Process Concerns Echo Beyond This Report
In absentia removal rates for asylum seekers have more than doubled, climbing from 10.6% in 2024 to 24.0% in 2025 and 27.9% in the first months of 2026, according to Acacia Center for Justice. Former Immigration Judge Chloe Dillon described one master calendar hearing in summer 2025 where only three people showed up despite 20 being scheduled, illustrating how thin the system's attendance can run even before dismissals are factored in.
Similar strains have surfaced regionally. San Francisco's immigration court was officially closed, shifting thousands of cases to the court in Concord, which has begun holding mega-master hearings scheduling dozens of immigrants for the same slot, sometimes with little notice, according to NBC Bay Area. Court watchers elsewhere have also reported being locked out of virtual hearings; observers from a Chicago court-watching group said they lost access to proceedings run by four judges starting in January, with two more judges appearing to cut off virtual access in February, according to the Chicago Tribune. Court observers say restricted remote access is limiting their ability to monitor proceedings.
Court watchers argue their presence matters precisely because they are often the first to flag emerging DHS strategies, such as the push toward dismissing cases before a final hearing, the Tribune reported. The researchers behind Monday's report describe it as the first study of this magnitude to examine court processes during the second Trump administration — a body of evidence drawn from thousands of hours spent simply watching what happens when a judge calls a case.
