Federal officials accused of 'strange secrecy' as court cases fast-tracked

Lawyers representing immigrants being swept up by the Department of Homeland Security are raising the alarm that federal authorities are deploying new tactics to fast-track deportations.

According to New York Times reporting, federal officials have begun pushing dozens of additional cases onto court dockets on specific days to rapidly process asylum and other immigration claims. The secret acceleration started without any public notification from the administration.

The impact has been dramatic, observers told the Times. Some immigration judges have seen their caseloads double and triple, raising concerns that cases are being processed too quickly for proper legal review.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency overseeing the immigration court system, defended the larger caseloads as a result of hiring new judges and described them as necessary to address a backlog of more than 3 million cases this year.

But immigration lawyers and rights groups argue the acceleration creates a fundamentally unfair process.

"Everything related to these large dockets or mass dockets is shrouded in such a strange secrecy," Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told the Times. "Our confirmation that they were even happening really came from going to the court on Monday and seeing the large lines of people standing outside," she claimed, referring to proceedings she observed in New Orleans.

Lawyers reported witnessing judges processing groups of people simultaneously despite their different cases and legal claims. In one instance, a judge heard 15 people at once, cycling through Arabic, Spanish, and Creole interpretations.

On a single Monday and Tuesday, the Times is reporting, 89 people in one court were declared absent and therefore deportable. "And that is not because they were 'the worst of the worst.' It is because they had a hearing scheduled that they were not able to attend for a variety of reasons," Willis stated.

The administration's push comes amid broader upheaval in Trump's immigration strategy. The report notes that on Friday, a federal judge rejected the government's indefinite hold on asylum applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and on immigration applications from 39 countries where people had been unable to obtain green cards and citizenship. That ruling is not expected to significantly impact immigration court proceedings.