Illegal Immigrants Are Increasingly Ditching Court Amid Trump’s Mass Deportation Campaign

Immigration courts are facing a surge in no-shows, leading judges to issue more deportation orders.

In fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, immigration judges across the country issued more than 310,000 deportation orders for migrants who were absent from their hearings, according to Department of Justice data. There were roughly 223,000 deportation orders issued “in absentia” the year before that, 160,000 in fiscal year 2023, 62,000 in fiscal year 2022, and 8,000 in fiscal year 2021.

The drop in court appearances can be largely attributed to President Donald Trump’s reversal of a key Biden-era policy that instructed immigration judges to dismiss or terminate thousands of cases, which effectively allowed more than 700,000 illegal immigrants to stay in the country without any status, Andrew Arthur, resident law and policy fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Daily Wire. It also ties back to the millions of illegal border crossers that the Biden administration released into the country, who never applied for immigration status, according to Arthur.

“There’s no reason to go to immigration court if you can’t give the immigration judge any legitimate reason to allow you to stay, and in hundreds of thousands of cases last year, respondents didn’t,” Arthur said.

(Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Another reason illegal immigrants aren’t showing up to their hearings is that the Trump administration has increasingly instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make arrests at immigration courts across the country.

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“Of course, DHS under Trump II has also been arresting certain respondents when they appear for their removal proceedings, which has likely given countless respondents plenty of incentive to skip court,” Arthur said.

“Again, however, those aliens are entitled to the process they are due, and the government will ensure they receive it — they might just be detained throughout that process,” he said, adding, “Given the fact, as noted, that the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] required most of them to be detained to begin with, they can hardly complain when DHS subsequently takes them into custody and gives them due process while in detention.”