While the influx of US immigration agents into American cities has consumed much of the spotlight during the second Trump administration, those street-level surges are only part of the story. As detailed in a new report from Princeton University, mechanisms such as bond denial and prolonged detention are making it more challenging for people to pursue asylum claims in the US — a process that was already exceedingly difficult.
The use of “master calendar hearings” — large dockets where a dozen or more removal orders can be issued in half an hour — has become common practice across the country, and many removal orders happen without the person being present in court because they are either fearful of being arrested at the courthouse or they don’t realize their date has been moved. The rate of these in absentia deportations has nearly tripled since January 2025, the same month Donald Trump returned to office after promising the largest deportation numbers in the history of the country.
In absentia removal orders are historically rare, the report notes. One reason for the recent spike is that, “by arresting people at court, DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] transformed compliance with legal obligations into a source of risk, discouraging others from appearing for their hearings.”
A DHS spokesperson told Inkstick that, “the ability of law enforcement to make arrests of criminal illegal aliens in courthouses is common sense.” Such arrests, the spokesperson went on, also conserve “valuable law enforcement resources because they already know where a target will be.” They added: “These illegal aliens have gone through security and been screened to not have any weapons.”
Meanwhile, the data reveals a high percentage of “voluntary departures,” particularly among people who do not have legal representation. Nearly 60% of people who decided to voluntarily leave the US did not have access to an attorney chose to leave the US.
Ultimately, the Princeton report — shared in full with Inkstick prior to its publication — argues that due process has been severely eroded for asylum seekers, including children who came to the US after fleeing violence and extreme poverty. The distressing data and the stories behind it paint a clear picture of how the Trump administration uses the courts to further a mass deportation agenda experts have long deemed unrealistic.
As the report’s authors tell Inkstick, the nature of the courts provides the administration with plenty of opportunity.
“We have heard from judges who have been fired for granting too many bond requests, letting people get out of detention to fight their cases from outside of being detained,” says Amelia Frank-Vitale, a Princeton anthropologist and one of the authors of the report. “But all of this is sort of built into the law,” she adds later, specifically “the way that Congress designed the law, which grants an enormous amount of power to the attorney general in the Department of Justice.”
Lauren Heidbrink, a legal anthropologist at California State University, Long Beach and one of Frank-Vitale’s co-authors, points out that the “structural vulnerabilities” of immigration courts are longstanding.
“What’s new is how rapidly and systematically the vulnerabilities are being exploited to foreclose access to the hearing,” she says. “So what’s different today is the speed, the scale, the coordination with which the administration and enforcement practices are being used to prevent people from reaching a hearing on the merits of their claim.”
The report, “Dismantling Due Process: The Rise of Procedural Removal in US Immigration Court,” is based on 1,300 hours of courtroom observation in over 107 courtrooms across 13 states and Puerto Rico. One of the many troubling revelations is the increasing use of Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACAs). These are agreements between the US and other countries that allow the transfer of people to another nation with the understanding that they can seek asylum there.
“Although ACAs are intended to distribute responsibility for refugee protection among participating countries,” the report says, “our observations suggest that current ACA proceedings function less as responsibility-sharing than as a procedural mechanism for ending US asylum cases before the merits are heard.”
The report makes note of 62 uses of an ACA in October 2025. In contrast, this March — the same month Kristi Noem was fired as DHS secretary and a new, presumably quieter era of the agency began — ACA agreements were used 8,669 times.
Further, the report notes that people are more likely to be granted bond after an arrest if they have legal representation. Notably, the Trump administration ended its work with a nonprofit that provided much-needed legal services.
In response to questions from Inkstick, a DHS spokesperson said, in part, “Americans asylum system was never intended to be used as a de facto amnesty program or a catch-all, get-out-of-deportation-free card.”
The spokesperson added that, “all illegal aliens receive due process,” and DHS is “applying the law as written by Congress.”
Heidbrink and Frank-Vitale worked with volunteer observers to compile the data, including people like Stacey Montoya, a college student and second-generation immigrant who lives in Los Angeles.
Montoya has been observing court proceedings since the beginning of 2026, and one day, she met a six-year-old girl who did not have legal representation. The lawyer pointed out that the six-year-old had confirmed all of the information in the documents available to the court, and this, the government argued, meant the case could proceed without a lawyer. To Montoya’s relief, the judge was skeptical, and the hearing was ultimately rescheduled. But the image stuck with her: Here was a six-year-old child, standing in front of a federal judge with no attorney and no adult to back them up.
“That instance just really stood out to me because it made me realize that, had my situation been any different, had my grandparents come later, that six-year-old could have been me,” Montoya says.
Montoya speaks Spanish, so at times, when asylum seekers don’t have interpreters, she was able to step in. But roughly 7% of the cases observed by Montoya and her fellow volunteers involved a person from China; in total, observers noted 64 languages represented in court. On many occasions, Montoya and the person seeking asylum would step into the hallway during a brief bathroom break and use Google Translate for languages like Mandarin or Armenian, with Montoya trying to provide any help she could.
She says the lack of professional interpretation was especially common during master calendar hearings, which made up nearly 95% of the hearings observed for the Princeton report.
“I’ve sat in where it’s just back to back to back and it’s 60 people, 70 people that they’re just trying to get through,” she says. “And so we really do see these people that are representing themselves especially falling behind.”
Montoya and the professors interviewed for this story were quick to point out that they don’t want to demonize the judges overseeing these cases. They’ve seen plenty of instances where the judge appears to care about the person in front of them. Instead, Montoya places the blame on a system that is “set up right now to give harsh penalt[ies] even when they haven’t done something wrong.”
Despite insistences from Trump administration officials that their immigration tactics target “the worst of the worst,” more than 70% of the people currently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have no criminal convictions. Additionally, only 5% of the people accounted for in the Princeton survey were detained at the time of their court appearance.
Tracking these cases has taken its toll on the researchers responsible for the study.
“I have a lot of experience doing research with populations who are at risk in conditions that are very, very difficult in migrant shelters, along train lines, in some of the most violent neighborhoods in the world, according to homicide statistics,” Frank-Vitale says. “And going to immigration court makes me feel the worst of any of the research that I have done.”
Last summer, she spent a week in Miami and made a personal vow to go to court every day. The walls were thin, she says; the facility felt like an office that had been slapped together with cheap materials. You could clearly hear what was happening in the hallways, which meant Frank-Vitale could easily hear the screams and wails of people and families in distress.
“By the end of the week, I was so angry,” she says. “I was so demoralized.”
For her part, Heidbrink says she is impressed by students who, like Montoya, keep showing up to observe the proceedings despite the taxing, heartwrenching nature of the work. Sometimes the friendlier judges take note of volunteer observers who return, time and again, to their courts; Heidbrink says one such judge recently sat down next to a student they recognized and said, “Welcome to the shitshow.”
Like those students, Frank-Vitale says their work tracking immigration courts will only continue.
“There will be more to come,” she says, “And as they invent new things, we will be there to document it.”
