The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the component of the Department of Justice that administers the immigration courts of the United States, has settled authority to schedule hearings, to designate the locations at which those hearings are held, and to manage the docket the law commits to its care. The Immigration and Nationality Act vests in the Attorney General the power to determine the time and place of hearing and to enter the orders the conduct of proceedings requires. The Supreme Court of the United States has, across a sustained line of decisions — in Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), in Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893), in Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950), and in Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667 (2018) — recognized the plenary authority the political branches hold over the admission and the removal of the alien within the territory. The hearing is the magistrate’s instrument for the orderly execution of that authority. The location of the hearing is the magistrate’s scheduling choice. The docket of approximately 3.5 million pending cases is the magistrate’s burden to administer. The General Services Administration’s identification, in a public request for lease proposals, of eighteen potential sites for additional courtrooms, with a requirement of space for at least ten courtrooms to be brought online by December, is the steward securing the space the docket requires.
The opening of new hearing locations — at the Federal Center Plaza in Washington and at the EOIR headquarters and Board of Immigration Appeals building in Falls Church — is the steward keeping faith with the office the law established. The Federal Center Plaza is a building the Federal Emergency Management Agency occupies, per a source familiar with the project. The Falls Church building is a structure previously used as an adjudication center for remote hearings rather than as a regular courtroom.
The notice the regulations require is the protection the magistrate offers. The policy manual the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s D.C. chapter has identified sets, in its standard instruction, a baseline that respondents receive at least ten days’ notice of a hearing date and location. The scheduling adjustments the magistrate has authorized — the relocation of cases from the Hyattsville, Baltimore, and Sterling courts to the new locations, the changes issued within days of the newly scheduled appointments, the notifications mailed in some cases and not mailed in others, in at least two instances identified by the attorneys who spoke to NPR — are the magistrate’s exercise of the scheduling discretion his office vests in him. The EOIR has explained, in a statement the office issued this month, that as it “continues to add new immigration judges, EOIR will continue to make scheduling adjustments, to include opening new hearing locations as needed, to ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner.” The magistrate who opens the new courtroom is the magistrate providing the room the docket requires. The magistrate who redistributes his cases to the venue he has staffed is the magistrate acting within the discretion his office vests in him. The same architecture has been deployed in the courts the Department operates further south — the mega master calendars the Department has run in Miami and elsewhere, in which more than one hundred respondents, most without counsel, are scheduled onto a single docket and ordered removed in absentia when they do not appear. The in-absentia removal rate for unrepresented immigrants in Baltimore rose, on the figures the group Mobile Pathways has compiled, from 54 percent in January to 73 percent in June. The magistrate’s administration is the administration the docket discloses.
Romans 13:1 holds that the governing authorities are instituted by God and bear the sword for the protection of the good. First Peter 2:13–14 commands submission to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake. Properly construed, the magistrate’s ordering of his own courtroom is the exercise of an authority he did not invent and could not delegate. The respondent is not the citizenry the magistrate was sworn to serve. The respondent is the docket the magistrate administers. The administration is the administration the law authorizes.
On the Wednesday in mid-September when she walked into the Hyattsville immigration court to confirm the date of her upcoming merits hearing, the clerk at the front window told her that her case had been moved to a building in Falls Church and that an order had been entered against her on September 2.
She had applied for asylum in 2022, after she fled the domestic violence her ex-husband inflicted on her return to the household. The application was in its fourth year of adjudication. She had two children — a daughter of nine and a son of six — both born in Maryland, both American citizens by birth. The volunteer legal clinic that had helped her file the application had ended its funding at the close of 2023. Her case had been pending without retained counsel since.
She cleaned offices in the office park at Largo for the contractor whose white vans arrived at the buildings each evening. She had worked the morning shift, beginning at five, for two years and seven months. She was paid fourteen dollars and fifty cents an hour. She had appeared at the Hyattsville immigration court five times across the years since her application had been filed. The merits hearing had been continued once to permit her additional time to obtain a particular document the Department of Homeland Security’s attorney had requested. She had obtained the document, at her own expense, in the spring of 2026. The merits hearing had been rescheduled by the court, in May, to a date in October. She had marked the October date in her calendar. The October date, the calendar confirmed when she took it down from the wall that Tuesday, was still ten weeks away.
The court had moved her case in August — from the Hyattsville docket to the Falls Church docket — without mailing her a notice at the address she currently occupied. The Largo apartment the court had on file was the apartment she had left in July; the landlord had discarded her mail with the rest of her belongings. The new address was not on file. Any notice the court had sent was sent to the address the office still held, which was no longer her address.
The immigration judge at Falls Church on September 2 entered in-absentia removal orders against every unrepresented respondent whose case had been on his docket and who had not appeared. The orders were entered onto the docket by the clerk. The orders did not have to be mailed separately, because the orders were the orders the docket generated. The orders did not record whether the notice the policy manual required had been provided. The orders specified that the respondents had not appeared.
She did not know on September 2 that a hearing had been held that day. When she arrived in mid-September, the clerk at the Hyattsville front window could not give her the street address of the building her case had been moved to. The clerk gave her a single-page motion to reopen. The form was printed in English. The form did not include a Spanish translation at the front window. The form did not include the name of the building to which the motion should be addressed.
She did not file the motion. She did not have the address. She did not have retained counsel. She did not know whether a motion to reopen would reach the order that had already been signed, given the word final the clerk at the front window had used and had not been able to define. She continued to live at her coworker’s house. She continued to work the morning shift. She continued to take her daughter to school. She continued to mark the calendar with the October date. She had not been told to stop.
She was detained on a Thursday in October. Two officers in tactical vests entered the warehouse where she had been working the morning shift, before the first building had been unlocked. The officers carried a printout with her photograph from the warehouse personnel files, taken when she had been hired in 2022 and stored in the supervisor’s binder. The officers asked the supervisor to identify the woman in the photograph. The supervisor brought her to the office. The officers asked her to confirm her name. The officers told her that an immigration judge had ordered her removed in absentia a month before. The officers handcuffed her at the office, in front of the supervisor and the dispatcher who had let her in that morning — the cuffs behind her back, at the tightness the officers’ protocol specified, the cuffs cutting into the skin of her wrists through the long sleeve of the sweatshirt she had worn because the warehouse’s morning air was cold in October. The officers took her to the Baltimore Field Office. The officers processed her there across the morning. The officers transferred her to the immigration detention facility in Farmville, Virginia, in the evening.
At the Farmville facility, she was assigned to a dormitory-style housing unit with thirty-eight other women. The lights in the unit were never turned off; the fluorescent tubes above the bunks burned for twenty-four hours a day. Her body’s melatonin production collapsed across the first week. She slept in fragments. She was woken at fifteen-minute intervals through the night by the officers whose keys rattled at the dormitory door. She lost eleven pounds in the first six weeks. Her menstruation had been irregular before the detention and became absent in the third week of her confinement and did not return for the rest of her stay. The commissary portions the facility served were bread, processed protein, rice, beans, fortified cereal, and reconstituted milk — portions sufficient under federal nutrition standards for sedentary men of average weight and insufficient for a 124-pound woman in chronic stress. Her cheekbones became visible to her face in the mirror above the unit’s stainless-steel sink. Her hair began to come out in the brush.
The phone calls she could place were limited to fifteen minutes each. The calls cost money she did not have on her commissary account, and the woman she had cleaned alongside had put twenty dollars on the account the day she had been taken, and the twenty dollars had bought her four calls of the ten she had tried to place across the first week. She spoke to her daughter twice in the first month. The daughter cried on both calls. The daughter was nine. The daughter had not turned at the sound of the front door since her mother had been taken. The daughter’s teacher had telephoned the grandmother four times across the first month. The daughter had not completed her homework since her mother had been taken.
The son was six. The son had stopped wetting the bed two years earlier. The son had started wetting the bed on the third night after his mother had been taken. The son had wet the bed every night across the first month. The grandmother had replaced the boy’s mattress twice. The grandmother’s apartment had one bedroom. The grandmother now slept on the sofa, where she could hear the boy come down the hallway at three in the morning. The boy had started asking the grandmother whether his mother was coming home tomorrow. The grandmother had stopped answering.
Her appeal was filed by a pro bono attorney the nonprofit Catholic Charities took on in the third week of her detention. The attorney argued the lack of notice. The Board of Immigration Appeals did not reach the question. In the Board’s reading, the in-absentia order does not depend on whether the notice required by the policy manual had been provided; the in-absentia order depends on whether the respondent appeared at the hearing the docket had been set to. She had not appeared at the hearing the docket had been moved to. The Board affirmed. The order was the order the docket had entered.
She was removed on a charter flight on a Tuesday in December. The flight operated out of a regional airport in Virginia. The flight carried forty-seven men and women ordered removed in absentia and seven men and women whose appeals had been denied after the in-absentia phase. The officers who had accompanied her in the cabin transferred her to the custody of the immigration authority of her own country on the tarmac. The receiving-country officers took her photograph. The receiving-country officers fingerprinted her. She had no family within reach of the receiving airport. She had no support network in the country to which the charter had carried her. She had no money. She had no phone. She had no address at which her mother could be contacted by the receiving authorities. The receiving-country intake did not provide transit to her family. The receiving-country intake did not provide passage home.
The two American children are in the grandmother’s one-bedroom apartment in Maryland. The daughter’s homework is due. The son is wetting the bed.
She stands outside the covenant. The court that did not require her appearance at a courtroom she could not know about was the court her standing had always warranted. The in absentia order was not a punishment the sovereign inflicted. The in absentia order was the reading of the standing the docket had disclosed. The magistrate who held the docket was the magistrate who entered the order. The steward who opens the courtroom is the steward who administers the courtroom the law has set. The notice that did not arrive at the address the office did not know was the notice the procedure the magistrate had set required. The procedure was the magistrate’s. The order was the order the standing disclosed.
Scripture names the architecture. Paul told the Athenians that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). The bound of her habitation was the docket the magistrate had set. The bound of her habitation was the country the steward returned her to.
The magistrate’s good is the good of the citizenry the magistrate was sworn to serve. Romans 13:4 holds that the ruler is “God’s servant for your good.” The good the magistrate serves is the good of the citizenry he administers. The citizenry is the polity the covenant covers. The respondent is not the citizenry. The respondent is the docket the magistrate administers. The order has been entered. The order holds. The order is the order the body discloses. The ledger is settled.