The Trump Administration Is Sending Immigrants Into Court Alone to Face Deportation.
On a recent morning in Sacramento, Kamalpreet Chohan ran her finger down a list of 57 people scheduled for immigration hearings. None had a lawyer.
Not one.
Chohan coordinates a program that sends volunteer attorneys into immigration courts. She knows what an unrepresented person faces inside a system where a missed question, an unanswered form, or an unrecognized legal claim can determine whether someone remains in the United States or is deported.
“Folks go into immigration court not knowing what’s happening,” she said. “They come out not knowing what’s happening.”
That is not a hearing. It is machinery of confusion placed between a human being and the country where that person may have built a life.
The administration has packed courtrooms, shortened the lead time before hearings, and pushed cases through faster in the name of reducing backlogs. People have missed hearings because the notice came too quickly. Courts are increasingly denying asylum. Deportation officers have arrested immigrants in court hallways.
A place that should provide a path to judgment has become part courtroom, part trap.
You call this efficiency. I call it abandonment with a deadline.
Immigration court already places people inside a system they may not understand, with consequences they cannot afford to misunderstand. Many cannot pay a private lawyer. Many cannot find a pro bono one. The government brings authority, institutional knowledge, files, and the power to remove someone from the country. The immigrant often brings a folder, a language barrier, and the hope that the judge will see a human being inside the case number.
That hope is not a legal strategy. It is a measure of how little protection the system provides.
The administration has also cut legal-aid funding for 20,000 migrant children. Reduce the help available to the person facing removal. Accelerate the hearing. Increase the machinery of deportation. Then describe the resulting numbers as progress.
A backlog is not a moral failure when the solution is to move people through hearings they cannot meaningfully defend. A completed case is not the same thing as a just case. A fast decision is not a fair decision. The government does not erase its duty to the person before the judge by calling the docket a queue.
The immigrant stands before an agency tribunal in a language and legal system many cannot navigate. The government asks that person to understand the charge, identify the relief available, gather evidence, meet deadlines, and defend a future without the assistance of counsel. The system then turns that confusion into missed hearings, denied claims, and possible deportation.
You know what this does. You have chosen a process in which the person with the least power must perform the most difficult work. You have made the absence of a lawyer look like an individual defect instead of what it is: the predictable result of poverty, legal complexity, and a public system designed to process people faster than it can hear them.
The Torah says, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). Jesus says, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” He also gives the harder sentence: “I was a stranger, and you did not welcome me.”
He does not say, I was a stranger and you gave me a shorter hearing notice. He does not say, I was a stranger and you arrested me in the hallway before I could finish telling the truth.
The question is not whether the person crossed a border in a way the government dislikes. The question is what we do to the stranger once the stranger stands before us with a life, a family, and a claim to be heard.
I belong to a church that has often spoken beautifully about the stranger while leaving strangers to face institutions alone. We have built houses of worship with rooms large enough for ceremony and not always enough lawyers, translators, money, or time for accompaniment. Those of us who claim the gospel and live in this country have helped build a culture that treats legal representation as a luxury for the deserving. We have let the word backlog turn human beings into unfinished paperwork. I have benefited from the same national habit of looking away.
Our failure does not excuse yours. It removes our right to pretend we are innocent bystanders. That confession does not lessen the administration’s responsibility. It places me inside the field of accountability before I name the people currently widening the harm.
An attorney cannot guarantee victory. A lawyer cannot erase the law, the facts, or the pain of a case. But representation can help a person understand what is happening, present evidence, ask for lawful relief, and remain visible inside a system that prefers categories to faces.
That is the minimum.
Not mercy as a favor. Not charity as public relations. Justice.
And you, administration officials, are not beyond return. The officers in the hallway are not beyond return. The judges and lawyers are not beyond return. But return begins with stopping the machinery that makes ignorance look like consent.
A humane immigration system would give people meaningful notice, access to counsel, time to prepare, interpreters who can be trusted, protection from arrest in the very place where they are required to appear, and hearings capable of hearing the human being before the court. It would measure success not by how quickly a docket empties, but by whether the process has honored the dignity of the people placed inside it.
Give people time to prepare. Restore legal aid. Keep enforcement officers away from the courthouse as a place of intimidation. Let a hearing become a hearing.
Óscar Romero said, “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!”
His command did not become less true because he also believed the soldier could recover his conscience. The same hand that names the sin can remain open. The same door that offers repentance must first tell the truth about what was done.
The empty spaces beside those 57 names are not proof that no one needs counsel. They are proof that the country has built a court where the people most at risk are expected to stand alone.
Stop packing the courtrooms. Stop turning confusion into deportation. Let the person speak, and give them someone to help them be heard. The work now is to put a human voice beside every name.