On June 1, Immigration Judge Arya Ranasinghe walked into a Lower Manhattan courtroom with 121 cases on her docket for a single day, a workload that THE CITY reported was virtually unheard of in New York City before that morning. “I have such a voluminous docket today,” she said from the bench, then called it “some fun new adventure,” adding, “We do the best we can.” By the end of the day she had ordered nearly 40 people and their relatives deported, most of them because they never walked through the door.
This is the debut of what the Justice Department calls a “mega master” hearing in New York. A normal master calendar hearing is the first, routine step in a deportation case: a judge summons two or three dozen people, confirms their addresses are correct, hands out the next set of instructions, and sends everyone home. A mega master crams 100 or more people into one judge’s single session. According to NPR, the tactic debuted in Chicago, Boston, and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, with Dallas slated next, before it landed in New York. Ranasinghe was not the only judge buried that day. The format is built for volume.
Of the 39 people Ranasinghe ordered removed on June 1, the orders were issued in absentia, meaning the removal was entered against them because they were not in the room. After determining that “proper notice was sent,” she signed the orders. But several immigrants who did show up told THE CITY they never got a mailed notice that their hearing date had been changed. Mari, an Ecuadorean woman waiting on her sister-in-law’s case who declined to give her full name, said her daughter and her sister-in-law only found out their dates had moved by checking an online app. “A lot of people didn’t know they had court,” she said.
If you don’t show up, “you lose your case. You get a deportation order,” Eisha, 26, told THE CITY outside the courthouse. There is no jury, no appointed lawyer, and the vast majority of people on these dockets have no attorney at all. The National Immigration Project described the format on June 1 as “cramming 100 or more people into a single session, most of them without lawyers, and many without real notice.” Caitlin Bellis, the group’s director of advocacy, said the unrepresented people who do manage to attend are “being handed ‘pleading declaration’ forms in rooms packed with strangers and under time pressure.”
The Justice Department’s stated reason is the backlog, and the backlog is real. As of the end of April 2026, 3,267,302 cases were pending in immigration court nationwide, per the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Two of the most clogged counties in the country are right here: Queens, with 104,022 pending cases, and Kings (Brooklyn), with 81,804. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the broader push as “reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule of law in our nation’s immigration system,” per NPR.
What advocates point to is that the math of a mega master hearing does the deporting for you. The administration has set a goal of removing one million people this year, up from roughly 600,000 in 2025, NPR reported. Schedule 100-plus people who mostly lack lawyers and may not have gotten the mail, and a large share will not appear, and every no-show is an automatic order of removal. A Texas immigration attorney told NPR the design is transparent: “They’re anticipating that the majority will not show up and they’ll just be able to say that they completed X number of cases because they’ll be in absentia orders of removal.” Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres of the American Immigration Lawyers Association put it more plainly to NPR: “So it’s almost like they are being designed to increase” the deportation count.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition, characterized the format to THE CITY as the administration trying to rush people through the processes that might allow them to stay in the country legally. “Instead of allowing them to go through the process and uphold their rights, they’re going to continue to try to undermine our community’s rights every single day,” he said. A faster docket is not a fairer one. The whole thing turns on “proper notice was sent,” in a system where a changed court date can land only inside an app a person may not know to check.
If you or someone you know has a pending immigration case in New York, confirm your next hearing date directly. A missed date is a removal order. You can check the date, time, and location of any case yourself using the Justice Department’s automated case information line at 800-898-7180 or at the official EOIR case portal, which the Department of Justice states “provides basic information about the status of certain cases before an immigration court.” All you need is your A-Number and nationality. Murad Awawdeh’s New York Immigration Coalition also runs free legal-help referrals for New Yorkers in proceedings. Bushwick Daily will keep tracking how many of these orders are entered against people who never knew they were due in court.
Featured image: Ajay Suresh / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
