The Department of Justice closed its main immigration courthouse in San Francisco last week, a decision that legal advocates say will intensify delays for asylum seekers and other migrants already facing years-long waits for hearings.
The facility on Montgomery Street is shuttering despite a nationwide backlog of 3.75 million pending immigration cases. In San Francisco alone, 120,000 cases are pending, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research center.
Court operations will shift to a smaller facility in San Francisco and to an immigration court in Concord, about 35 miles away in the East Bay. The Justice Department's executive office for immigration review justified the closure as "cost effective" in a statement.
The move follows a contentious year at the San Francisco court. The Trump administration fired 20 of the courthouse's 22 judges, with critics contending the departures targeted judges viewed as insufficiently aligned with the administration's deportation priorities. The Concord court, which opened in 2024, has also lost six judges recently.
Legal experts question whether the Concord facility can absorb the San Francisco caseload. "With so few judges at the Concord court, we're going to see a lot of people waiting years and years and years to have their cases heard," said Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association's immigrant legal defense program.
Extended delays carry real consequences for migrants seeking asylum or fighting deportation. Shira Levine, a former judge at the San Francisco court now serving as legal director for the Immigrant Institute of the Bay Area, warned that years between filing and hearing can degrade cases.
"At asylum hearings, people are presenting a lot of oral testimony from themselves and from witnesses," Levine said. "Over years, testimonial memories can fade." Even with written evidence submitted, witnesses may become unavailable to testify years later, she added.
The closure has already created scheduling chaos. Court dates are being rescheduled in both directions as the system adjusts, leaving migrants and their attorneys scrambling to track their cases across multiple courthouses.
The practical fallout could push vulnerable people out of the system entirely. Many migrants have unstable housing and may miss notices, particularly if documents arrive only in English. Those who fail to appear for rescheduled hearings risk drawing Immigration and Customs Enforcement attention, Atkinson said.
"If someone gets the wrong date, gets the wrong time, gets the wrong place, doesn't file something exactly correct, the consequences are in some cases, where they really do have a serious fear of return, life-threatening," Atkinson said.
Author James Rodriguez: "The administration is betting it can manage a crisis by shrinking the system, but lawyers on the ground say it's creating a machine designed to lose people in the shuffle."
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