US immigration judges told to slash time given to people awaiting visas or green cards before being deported

Immigration judges across the United States have been instructed to deny some of the most vulnerable people appearing in court the time needed for their visas or green cards to arrive – putting them at imminent risk of being thrown out of the country as the Trump administration continues to intensify its mass deportation campaign, the Guardian has learned.

Among the immigrants affected are abused and abandoned children and survivors of violent crime, according to the US government’s own training materials, which were shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Judges also appeared to be discouraged, under a hardline interpretation of existing policy guidance and laws, from giving people more than 10 days to find an attorney before proceeding with a case, a deadline that made critics balk.

“I thought, who has time to find an attorney in 10 days?” one source familiar with the training told the Guardian this week, under the condition of anonymity to protect against feared retribution from the Trump administration.

The source added: “There is no room to be kind; there is only urgency to make them leave [the US], one way or the other.”

According to the source, hundreds of immigration judges attended a mandatory presentation in recent days about “continuances” – a legal tool which has historically been used to give immigrants more time to find lawyers, build their cases or wait for approval of their applications for documents at another federal immigration agency.

Thevirtual training session was led by a veteran immigration judge, Keith Hunsucker of the board of immigration appeals, the immigration courts’ appellate branch. He denied over 80% of asylum cases for much of the time that he was on the bench in immigration court before moving on to other roles.

The visual presentation was called “Motions to Continue: Efficiently Advancing Cases to Completion”, according to images of the slides used that were shared with the Guardian. The training’s thrust was to tightly restrict continuances in favor of faster adjudications, even when granting more time would allow people to receive legal protections to remain in the US, such as a visa or green card they have qualified for or had approved and are simply awaiting.A deportation slams shut some of those pathways and yet is a much more likely outcome when continuances are denied and rulings are made abruptly.

The logic presented in Judge Hunsucker’s training was to cut out inefficiencies and avoidable delays, amid a backlog of roughly 3.2m pending immigration court cases nationally.

“Where a party lacks diligence and ‘sleeps on their rights,’ a continuance is unwarranted,” the presentation slides read.

But the development raises concerns that the crackdown will instead harm immigrants with legitimate cases.

The executive office for immigration review (EOIR), which houses the immigration courts, is not part of the independent judicial branch of the federal government. It sits within the Department of Justice, where the US attorney general can make precedential decisions and otherwise exercise control.

In response to the Guardian’s request for comment, an unnamed justice department spokesperson said in a statement, in part: “Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration. The Justice Department is restoring integrity to our immigration system by hearing cases fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly, in accordance with the law.”

An unnamed EOIR spokesperson similarly replied that the agency “prioritizes the timely completion of all cases and immigration judges are obligated to adhere to current immigration law, regulations, precedent decisions, and EOIR policies to ensure cases do not languish [and] are handled in a timely and lawful manner. Unnecessary delay hurts both aliens with meritorious claims and the American public who wish to see aliens with non-meritorious claims removed as quickly as possible.”

Amid the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, accelerated adjudications and extraordinarily large mass hearings have become fixtures of the immigration court system, with continuances fewer and farther between, and often for shorter lengths of time when granted, even for children.

The presentation slides shared with the Guardian appear to formalize that trend across immigration courts, cautioning judges that “some continuances are sought solely for the purpose of delay” and “persons illegally present in the United States who wish to remain have a substantial incentive to prolong litigation so they may avoid deportation as long as possible”.

“Continuance requests solely for dilatory purposes should not be countenanced by Immigration Judges,” one slide read, even though it has long been incumbent upon judges to discern between due process and unnecessary delays.

For instance, many documents are held up because of processing backlogs and tight quotas at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which comes under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Such long waitsare beyond the control of the applicant or the justice department.

In particular, the training suggests that an approved visa petition should not delay deportation proceedings if the visa itself is not yet available because of annual quotas but would be issued to the qualified recipient at a later, albeit unspecified, date. And it explicitly targets the special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) classification for abused, abandoned or neglected youth, as well as U non-immigrant status for survivors of especially egregious crimes.

The prospect of routine denials of continuances so someone can find a lawyer to represent them is also a harsh turn for immigrants pleading their cases.

From 2019 to 2024, only about a quarter of people with attorneys were ordered removed from the US, compared with over 60% who were unrepresented,according to the American Immigration Council.

But with demand exceeding supply, only about a fifth of immigrants were represented when they were ordered deported in June.

Yet the presentation warns that despite the desperate demand, immigration attorneys risk punitive measures for accepting what are deemed too many cases.

“Where a practitioner takes on more cases than he or she can responsibly and professionally handle,” the slides read, “it may be appropriate for an Immigration Judge to consider referral to EOIR disciplinary counsel for further action and possible sanction for a violation.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph