DOJ Delays Big City Mass Immigration Hearings Due to Virus

A Justice Department agency the oversees the nation’s immigration courts will delay preliminary hearings that bring large amounts of people together at several large city venues in response to the coronavirus, while otherwise keeping the doors of those courts open, the agency said in a statement given to Bloomberg Law late Friday night.

The cities where non-detainee master calendar hearings will be suspended are Boston, Los Angeles, Newark, New York City, Sacramento, and San Francisco. Those delays were determined “after close evaluation of each region that have both confirmed coronavirus cases and at least one immigration court,” the agency said. It is continuing to evaluate other areas.

The measures taken by the Executive Office of Immigration Review come after a union representing immigration court judges on March 12 called upon agency Director James McHenry to follow other state and federal courts across the country taking action to limit the spread of coronavirus.

The EOIR response follows the World Health Organization’s designation of the coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic and President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency yesterday. As of Friday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta had reported 1,629 confirmed cases of the virus across 46 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and 41 deaths.

The The National Association of Immigration Judges late Friday said those EOIR steps aren’t enough. “The limited measures announced tonight are wholly inadequate to address the public health risk,” the union said in a tweet March 13.

In its Thursday letter to McHenry, the NAIJ asked that the agency delay master calendar hearings for non-detainees nationwide and take other preventative measures to protect the courthouse community. That letter came after EOIR ordered the taking down of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posters the judges had put up with information about the virus, saying the judges didn’t have the authority to do that, only to later have them restored.

Master calendar hearings can put 50 respondents, plus lawyers and family members in one room at one time. Respondents may risk deportation if they fail to appear.

The agency will also prolong the closure of a Seattle immigration court until April 10, it said. That court has been closed since March 11 after “a reported second-hand exposure to coronavirus,” the agency said in a tweet earlier this week.