Massachusetts Immigration Courts Flooded with ‘Mega‑Masters’ Hearings

On a bright July morning in a cramped courtroom at the Chelmsford Immigration Court, a Mexican cowboy from Michoacán sat with a trucker hat in his lap, his gold‑toothed grin flashing under a rhinestone belt buckle as big as a license plate. His fingers were caked in dirt from wrangling horses on a Massachusetts ranch, a visual reminder that real lives sit behind every case file.

He wasn’t alone. Dozens of men and women from Central America, Brazil, Haiti and elsewhere filled the benches, all summoned for what the court calls a “master calendar” hearing. Normally such hearings involve twenty‑something cases; this morning, Judge Christine Olson was juggling well over a hundred.

When the names were called, a handful of people shuffled to the podium every half‑hour, sometimes whole families with small children in tow. An interpreter’s voice crackled over a phone line, trying to bridge Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole, but the sheer volume made it clear many weren’t really hearing the proceedings.

“If they don’t show up, even for a scheduling hearing, that’s enough for a judge to issue a deportation order,” warned immigration attorney Jason Giannetti, who has watched the system evolve for more than twenty years. “It seems like it’s a policy, not just a problem in the system.”

The coworked cowboy was sent back to his ranch after a brief check‑in, his next hearing penciled in for late August. For him, that appointment could decide whether he stays in the United States or is forced to return to a volatile region of Mexico. But for the many who miss a date—sometimes because they never got a proper mailed notice, other times because they’ve had to travel hundreds of miles just to appear—the stakes are even higher. A missed slot often turns into a “removal in absentia” order, which is notoriously hard to overturn.

Giannetti, standing outside the courthouse after a later mega‑masters session, said he’d never seen anything like this in his two‑decade career. Yes, bulk hearings existed under previous administrations, but the scale now is unprecedented. Courts are demanding hard‑copy filings, cramming people into waiting rooms that resemble sardine cans, and forcing unrepresented respondents to appear in person even when a simple phone call might suffice.

That pressure feeds a larger agenda. The Justice Department’s Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) reports that, since the Trump administration took office, more than a million cases have been cleared, shrinking the national backlog by roughly 450,000. Yet the total queue still sits at a staggering 3.2 million cases nationwide, with 152,000 waiting in Massachusetts alone.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche recently boasted to Congress that the new rule limiting most cases to a 365‑day deadline—60 days for those in custody—was working. EOIR spokespeople argue that mega‑masters hearings are simply a logistical tweak to prevent “cases from languishing.” Critics, however, see a different picture.

Research fellow Austin Kocher of American University calls the strategy a “removal‑by‑absence” machine. Analyzing April‑May data, he found about 30,000 cases were wrapped up in mega‑masters hearings, with 65 % ending in removal orders and a whopping 85 % of those issued when the respondent wasn’t present. “It’s a way to generate in‑absentia removals, full stop,” he said.

In practice, the hearings look chaotic: judges call names, mark individuals present, and let them go—sometimes back to a job caring for horses, sometimes to a life in limbo. For many, the next appointment is the only chance to tell their story, yet the system’s sheer speed leaves little room for nuance.

Advocates worry that speeding up deportations may come at the cost of fairness. “People are being funneled through a pipe that’s too narrow,” Giannetti warned, gesturing at the packed lobby. “When the pipe widens, you risk losing the very details that matter.”

As the Massachusetts courts continue to schedule back‑to‑back mega‑masters sessions, the debate over efficiency versus due process is far from settled. What remains clear is that every name called, every docket filled, represents a human life caught in a legal treadmill that’s accelerating faster than many can keep up with.