DOJ schedules 100+ immigrants per hearing to generate mass deportation orders

The Justice Department's immigration courts began scheduling "mega master" calendar hearings in early 2026, sessions with more than 100 immigrants at once. Before this policy, a typical master calendar hearing included two to three dozen people. A master calendar hearing is an immigrant's first appearance in , where basic information is established, charges are explained, and future hearing dates are set.

The practice started in immigration courts in Chicago, Boston, and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, according to attorneys who described the tactic to NPR. Dallas is planned as the next city to adopt the practice. The scale of these sessions means an immigration judge is expected to process the administrative intake for 100 or more people in a single session, a volume that attorneys say makes meaningful individual attention impossible.

The Justice Department runs immigration courts through its Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and it is rescheduling immigrants whose original hearings were set for 2027, 2028, or 2029 to much earlier dates. In some cases, no notice of the change goes to the immigrant. In others, notice is sent only electronically, which attorneys say many immigrants without legal representation won't see because they don't regularly check the EOIR online portal.

Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, the practicing policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told NPR that the courts "often lack enough seats for hearings with so many people at once." She added that the hearings appear "designed to increase how many people get deportation orders automatically."

The core legal risk for immigrants in these hearings is an order. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act § 240(b)(5), if an immigrant doesn't show up for a scheduled hearing and the government proves proper notice was given, an immigration judge must issue a deportation order without hearing the case on the merits. That order makes the immigrant immediately eligible for deportation.

A Texas-based immigration attorney described the calculation to NPR directly: "They're anticipating that the majority will not show up and they'll just be able to say that they completed X number of cases because they'll be in absentia orders of removal." The attorney said the goal is a metric, number of cases "completed," not a legal determination of each person's status.

Immigration courts are part of the executive branch, not the independent federal judiciary. Immigration judges are employees of the Justice Department, hired and fired by the attorney general. They don't have the life tenure or salary protections of Article III federal judges. This structure means the same branch of government enforcing immigration law also employs the judges deciding removal cases, a conflict that the Brennan Center has documented for years.

Under EOIR Director Daren K. Margolin, a retired Marine Corps colonel appointed by the Trump administration, EOIR fired more than 100 immigration judges between January 2025 and early 2026, according to reporting by Axios. A March 2026 Merit Systems Protection Board ruling affirmed the attorney general's authority to terminate immigration judges without cause.

The Trump administration hired 153 permanent immigration judges in fiscal year 2026, the most in any single year in EOIR's history. On May 20, 2026, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and EOIR Director Margolin swore in 77 judges and 5 temporary military lawyers as immigration judges at the DOJ's Great Hall in Washington, D.C. The military lawyers are serving as temporary immigration judges under an arrangement that legal scholars say raises further questions about judicial independence in immigration proceedings.

The combined strategy of mass hirings, mass firings of judges with records of ruling for immigrants, and bulk scheduling tactics is designed to increase case throughput toward the administration's stated goal of one million deportations per year.

The administration deported roughly 600,000 people in 2025, according to DHS data cited by the NPR report, well short of the one-million annual target that appeared in DHS's fiscal year 2026 budget justification. The mega masters tactic attempts to close that gap by generating in absentia orders at scale, which count as "completed" cases in EOIR's metrics even though they don't involve an immigration judge evaluating the merits of an individual's asylum claim, fear of persecution, or legal status.

EOIR reported completing more than 1.08 million cases since January 20, 2025, and reducing the pending caseload by over 447,000 cases, bringing it from approximately 4 million to under 3.53 million. Those numbers include in absentia orders, which in fiscal year 2025 totaled 306,557 removal orders, roughly 63 percent of all removal orders issued that year.

The Government Accountability Office found in a December 2024 report that 34 percent of immigrant respondents fail to appear at some point during , a figure frequently cited to justify stricter enforcement. But the GAO also found that EOIR's tracking of hearing appearances is inadequate, making it difficult to determine how many no-shows result from genuine flight versus lack of proper notice.

The mega masters practice directly exacerbates this problem. By rescheduling hearings from years in the future to the near-present with minimal notice, EOIR creates the conditions for no-shows among people who had no reason to expect an early hearing. Attorneys told NPR that immigrants who do show up late to these oversized hearings, even by a few minutes, are also receiving removal orders.

Immigrants who receive in absentia orders can seek to reopen their cases, but the grounds are narrow. Under 8 CFR § 1003.26, a motion to reopen can succeed if the immigrant proves lack of proper notice, exceptional circumstances like serious illness, or that they were in federal custody. The Supreme Court has issued rulings in recent years limiting the ability to rescind in absentia orders in cases where immigrants received notice but failed to appear.

Legal aid organizations and immigration attorneys say the combination of inadequate notice and mass scheduling makes it very difficult to demonstrate "lack of proper notice" when EOIR can point to an electronic notification sent to the respondent portal, even if the immigrant didn't receive it or didn't know to check. The American Immigration Council has documented how this systemic pressure reduces meaningful access to .

EOIR's scheduling authority sits entirely inside the executive branch. No court order, congressional statute, or independent body needs to approve the decision to bundle 100 immigrants into a single hearing or to reschedule cases from 2028 to this month. The mega masters tactic didn't require legislation. It didn't require a rulemaking. It required only that the Justice Department's court administrators change the entries on a scheduling system.

That concentration of authority over who gets a hearing, when, how many people share a time slot, and how much notice they receive is what attorneys and civil liberties groups say makes this different from other changes. The mechanism that produces deportation orders is controlled entirely by the party seeking the deportations.