“Worse Than You Think:” How Immigration Courts Have Changed

Griselda Ponce says you can hear the difference in her office compared to a year ago.

“Our calls have doubled, and that’s just my small firm,” Ponce says. “Everybody’s phone is ringing off the hook.”

Ponce is an immigration attorney in the Rundberg area. She, like many other attorneys in the area, are facing a deluge of requests for help as federal immigration pushes have sent detention rates skyrocketing. At the same time attorneys say they find themselves working under increasingly difficult circumstances, with shifting precedents, court dates changed with little notice and trial prep time often cut in half.

“Whatever it is you’re able to see just on social media, it’s not being exaggerated. It is that bad,” says immigration attorney Karen Crawford. “It may be even worse than you think it is.”

Trump 2.0

Crawford says most bodies of law are stable; they don’t change that much. But immigration law is much more like a patchwork quilt.

“There's this thing that's there on the books and then something gets slapped on top and slapped on top,” Crawford says. “Every president comes in with different agendas.”

President Trump’s agenda during his first term was to crack down hard on immigration. Early into his first presidency he signed an executive order banning nationals from many Muslim-majority countries. Later his administration oversaw the detention of a record number of children, and he slashed programs like Temporary Protected Status, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and the refugee resettlement program. Still, attorneys like Cecila Partida said they figured out how to navigate the system under the ‘Trump 1.0’ administration. When Trump was reelected, she thought she knew what to expect.

“I don't think we realized the magnitude of the aggressiveness and the changes that were going to come,” Partida says. “I think that things have continued to escalate.”

Trump returned to the White House with an aggressive outlook on immigration policy. New travel bans have been put in place, and detention numbers have spiked: around 400,000 people have been booked at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility since 2017. But a lot of changes have hit the courts.

Changing Court System

Crawford says in recent months she has had to redefine what victory means.

“Victorious doesn't necessarily mean you're going to win the case,” she says. “Victorious could be my client wasn't alone in court, and they got all of their evidence on record, and were able to walk out of the building with me.”

Immigration courts are different from other federal courts. They fall under the Department of Justice and are subject to direct interventions from the Oval Office. And Trump has made reshaping immigration courts a major focus of his current administration. Judges have reported being threatened with disciplinary measures if they didn’t follow Trump’s policy. Since January 2025 he’s fired over 100 judges. Many others have taken buyouts or retired. Ponce says she’s seen how that pressure impacts whether a judge will issue a continuance for a case.

“They're getting pressure from the higher ups that say, if you grant that too many continuances or if you can't continue to us at all, you might be fired,” Ponce says.

That pressure combined with newly appointed ‘deportation judges’ have drastically changed court outcomes. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an organization that’s been tracking immigration records, immigration prosecutions are up 210% compared to five years ago. Even compared to just last year, filings have increased by more than 11%. And while less than 2% of cases seeking deportation were based on criminal activity, judges ruled for deportation in 83% of cases.

“This isn't, ‘we're going after the bad guys,’” says Crawford. “We were pretty good at going after the bad guys before. This is going after people that you really didn't think would be affected by this.”

Judges are also being pushed to work through more cases quickly. So-called ‘mega masters’ have become the norm, where upwards of 100 people are scheduled for master calendar hearings at the same time. Often these target people who don’t have lawyers, but even those with representation are caught in a time crunch. Lawyers said final hearings were usually scheduled a year to two years out, which gave them time to prepare evidence. Now they’re getting a few months to prepare at most.

“We need to develop evidence, we need to get exhibits, we need to get affidavits,” Ponce says. “They're tying our hands behind our backs and we can't prepare for a case.”

Easy Targets

Ashley Morris wraps up a meeting with a client she’s known since the girl was a toddler. Morris describes her as a driven young woman; a high school graduate who had just started college. She had to drop out when they started asking for a social security number. She wanted to know if there were any avenues open to her. It didn’t go as well as she would have liked.

“There’s nothing available except a petition that would take 19 years,” Morris says. “In other years I would be like, ‘just try it, put yourself in line.’ Now when you do that you’re saying, ‘hi immigration, here’s my address, here’s where I live and I have no status.’”

Immigrants have been routinely picked up at immigration court hearings during Trump’s second presidency. An investigation by the AP dubbed it the ‘deportation trap’: government lawyers would move to dismiss a case, then coordinate with ICE agents to pick the person up at the courthouse. Lawyers said these are people who are following the rules to become residents.

“They're showing up for ICE check-ins,” Morris says. “They're showing up for their fingerprint appointments, and that makes them more vulnerable because they're low hanging fruit. They're easy targets.”

The biggest target many local immigration attorneys say have seen lately is drivers for minor–or nonexistent–traffic violations. Clients said they were accused of not having a front license plate when they did, or having a tint that was too dark. They’re often pulled over by DPS officers who will then contact ICE.

“I would say about 99% of my calls for people detained are minor traffic infractions,” Ponce says.

In a response, DPS says it has not received any official complaints about any unwarranted traffic stops, and that they encourage anyone who feels like they were stopped with undue cause to submit a complaint to the DPS’ Office of Inspector General. They went on to say that when DPS officers encounter undocumented immigrants in the course of law enforcement operations, all officers know to contact federal authorities.

Many detainees are now filing habeas petitions. This legal procedure lets people challenge the right of the government to detain them. The government has to prove the detention is lawful. If not, the individual is freed. These petitions have seen a massive spike in recent months. According to ProPublica, there were 21 cases filed in February of last year. This February that number jumped to more than 2,000.

“We're filing them on a weekly basis because this is just not normal,” Ponce says.

No Good News

Burnout is a major concern for Crawford.

“Honestly, I'm concerned about the mental health of anybody who works in this field right now,” Crawford says. “It is profoundly exhausting.”

Partida says a big part of her job now is helping clients come up with contingency plans if they are detained.

“Some days I feel like I'm just giving a lot of bad news to people,” she says.

Morris says while stress and exhaustion are real, she is acutely aware that her clients are under even more strain.

“I had clients just an hour before say they have to tell their kids, ‘we can't go out to the park, we just can't right now,’” she says. “And to hear these stories, it makes me feel silly complaining about myself, right?”

Ponce echoes that sentiment, acknowledging the challenges that her clients have had to go through. For her, that’s the fuel that keeps her coming into the office day after day.

“I think most immigration attorneys, it's just built in us to just fight against the wind,” Ponce says.