The Trump Administration Is Closing San Francisco’s Immigration Court to Bury Asylum Seekers. You are pulling more than a hundred thousand pending cases from a city built by immigrants and shuffling them across the Bay to Concord. You fire the judges whose court denied asylum at only half the national rate, and you leave Elin, who fled Nicaragua, waiting until 2029 just to find out if he is allowed to live. His brother already won asylum and a green card — same evidence, same persecution, same flight. The difference is a calendar and a fired judge. You do this while telling the public it is an efficiency measure.
San Francisco is not just a zip code for your filing clerks. It is the place where Chinese laborers fought the Exclusion Act and sparked precedent-setting Supreme Court rulings that still shape asylum today, even as we covered the judge firings and resignations that gutted this very building. It is where Central American refugees found counsel in the 1980s, where legal aid groups formed a net under Angel Island’s shadow. As attorney Milli Atkinson said, it is a place where “people had, for the first time maybe ever, the sense that they were going to be safe.” Pope Francis warned against a cool, comfortable, globalized indifference that convinces people they are all-powerful while they sit in the same boat. You are practicing that indifference now, cutting the Bay Area’s judges from twenty-one to four and pretending it is about a lease renewal.
The spokesperson tells the press this is about saving money, about reducing a backlog that your own administration has swollen. You do not need lawyers to point out the arithmetic. You took twenty-one courtrooms in San Francisco and left two. You shrank the roster across the Bay to four judges, and only one of the new judges the administration boasts of hiring has been assigned to Concord. The rest are “visiting judges” — a name without a face, a promise without a body, judges who appear remotely or are temporarily pulled from other jurisdictions, leaving no continuity for the cases before them. You pushed an hour’s commute on people who do not own cars. That is not a backlog; it is a blockade. When you engineer these delays, you are not managing a docket. You are manufacturing a backlog of removal orders. We in the churches and on the legal benches have watched governments use boredom and bureaucracy as weapons before. We are complicit every time we call your administrative adjustment instead of cruelty.
The Torah commands you to love the stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, having been strangers yourselves in the land of Egypt. You do not need to read Hebrew to recognize what this means; you need only to remember that your own ancestors crossed oceans, or mountains, or borders with nothing but hope and a fear of the men who guard the line. The law is not a suggestion. It is the baseline of human dignity, and you are dismantling it to avoid the cost of hearing cases. You are telling a family holding papers in a waiting room that their life does not matter enough to be heard in this decade.
The administration’s move is not a logistical decision; it is a message, as Bill Hing of the University of San Francisco told NPR, that “the progressive cases that have come out of San Francisco are going to end.” The message is: We are closing the courthouse that granted asylum at twice the national rate, and if you cannot find the new one, that is your problem. That message is not impolite; it is evil. When you shutter a place where a judge looked at the evidence with a willingness to grant protection — not as a rubber stamp, but as a due process that the law demands — you are writing the same refusal into administrative procedure that the Lord named in Matthew 25: I was a stranger and you did not welcome me. You do not get to claim the gospel while locking the courthouse door.
I know that many of my readers will want to pin this on one party, one president, one moment. But the indifference that allowed this courthouse to be closed has deeper roots. Our own communities — the communities of faith, the moderate Catholics and mainline Protestants and non-religious people of goodwill — have too often looked away from the machinery of deportation because it was not our families being torn apart. The volunteers in Concord, a coalition of about a hundred people who pack into blue vests, who greet immigrants in the lobby, hand out legal packets, and help cover asylum application fees, are doing the work that the rest of us should have been doing all along: showing up. The administration exploits our fatigue, our willingness to treat immigration as a political problem rather than a test of whether we recognize the face of Christ in the stranger. I confess that I have not done enough; none of us have. The closure of this courthouse is a judgment on the country I love, and it includes me.
You are the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side, protecting your schedule while a man bleeds out in administrative limbo until 2029. You can turn around. The building at 100 Montgomery Street still stands. The volunteers in blue vests are the remnant who refuse to let it go — the sanctuary in the midst of the machine. You can stop the delays and let the courts hear the cases. I pray the day comes when you look at the faces waiting in that lobby and remember that you, too, are waiting for mercy.