Think Immigration: Has Civility in the Immigration Courts Reached Rock Bottom?

This blog post is part of a multi-part series from members of the AILA Rule of Law (AROL) Task Force; for more information about AROL look to Chair Jerry Grzeca’s blog post which is a handy guide to its purpose, priorities, and work.

Hardly a day goes by without reports that the immigration courts, always a challenging place for non-citizens and their lawyers, are deteriorating even further. In the past year, both lawyers and their clients have experienced, to name a few:

• ICE agents lurking in the halls and arresting non-citizens exercising their rights to a hearing;
• Ever more chaotic dockets with individual hearings being scheduled, cancelled or moved from one Immigration Judge to another with barely any notice;
• Immigration Judges with years of experience being suddenly terminated without cause;
• Appellate decisions or rulings from the Supreme Court all the way down to the Board of Immigration Appeals, tipping the scales ever more in favor of the government by eviscerating basic due process protections in immigration hearings (See for example, Matter of A-M-Z-F, 29 I&N Dec. 551 (BIA 2026), where the Board ruled that due process is not violated if the Immigration Judge disallows non-citizens from making closing arguments in their cases; Matter of M-K-, 29 I&N Dec. 556 (BIA 2026), where the Board upheld an Immigration Judge’s decision that a letter from the Secretary of State stating the non-citizen’s presence in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse consequences” is sufficient evidence to establish that the non-citizen is removable.)

Another part of the immigration rights story is the repeated reports of increasing uncivil behavior by Immigration Judges presiding over hearings. Although this is not a completely new phenomenon, we are hearing from removal practitioners of heightened levels of disrespectful conduct and outright hostility to counsel and clients.

It may appear that the decline in civility should be the least of our worries. But when Immigration Judges belittle counsel, threaten to report them for misconduct when no reason is present, or make no pretense of considering the arguments of both sides, the system suffers yet another blow. Although the U.S. justice system is by no means perfect, it has functioned as a place in which disputes can be adjudicated pursuant to a process that adheres to standards of civility and decorum. When those standards are in play, court hearings proceed under the rubric of uniform rules. Our adversarial system relies on litigants complying with those rules, as applied neutrally by Judges, on Judges maintaining impartiality and decorum in the courtroom, and by both litigants and Judges treating each other with respect and consideration. A deterioration in civility further erodes the rule of law.

So, what is to be done? Many commentators and organizations have presented thoughtful and detailed proposals to improve the Immigration Court system. Safe to say, it’s unlikely that any of these changes will be made under the current administration. In the short term, a procedure still exists for making complaints about Immigration Judges, by sending an email or letter to EOIR’s Judicial Conduct and Professionalism Unit. Practitioners may have reason to be skeptical in the current environment that complaints will be neutrally investigated, and concerned that a complaint could result in retaliation. Nonetheless, documenting misconduct, even if no action is ultimately taken, makes a contemporaneous record, which in itself has value.

Practicing in immigration court is hard enough without being treated disrespectfully. With the system becoming more dysfunctional by the day, it is not unreasonable to believe that we may be approaching a “rock bottom” moment, which could result in a future administration finally instituting much needed structural reforms and providing adequate funding for those reforms. For now, however, it may feel like we are stuck.

At times like this, when my patience wears thin and my hope starts withering, I turn for inspiration to one of my heroes, a woman named Helen Suzman. Helen was an opposition politician in South Africa, the country where I grew up, during the apartheid years. She served in the all-white South African parliament, for whom only voters classified by the government as white could vote, for 36 years. For 13 of those years, she was the lone representative of the Progressive Party, the only party in parliament that rejected apartheid entirely. She sat through years of debates and deliberations in parliament where her lone voice was loud and proud, subject to frequent interruptions by what her biographer, Robin Renwick, describes as “hostile and sneering interjections every time she made a speech.”

Although the situation in South Africa worsened year by year, with more violent repression, censorship, relocations and curtailment of the rights of defendants and prisoners, she persevered, maintaining her dignity, determination, and conviction that what she was doing was just and necessary. In one of her last speeches in parliament in 1989, as apartheid was beginning to crumble, she expressed that it had been a source of satisfaction to her to “be [still] present in Parliament when so many laws which I opposed when they were introduced have since been repealed, years later in most cases . . .”

The immigration system is going through very dark times. But there are thousands of immigration lawyers standing up for their clients in immigration courts every day, maintaining their composure, patience and determination, insisting on due process, fairness and the rule of law, notwithstanding ICE agents loitering in the halls and in some cases, hostile treatment by Immigration Judges. The task may feel Sisyphean in times like this, as they undoubtedly seemed for Helen. But ultimately many of her battles were won, after years of soldiering on through the hardest of times.