San Francisco's Immigration Court Closes: What It Means for the Bay Area

The doors have closed at San Francisco’s main immigration courthouse, marking a watershed moment in the city’s legal landscape. When President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the court had 21 judges. By May 1, 2026—the day it shut down—only two remained. The rest were fired, resigned, or retired as part of a sweeping federal purge targeting judges deemed insufficiently aligned with the administration’s deportation agenda.

For decades, San Francisco’s immigration court stood as a beacon of relative fairness in the asylum system. From 2019 to 2024, nearly 75% of asylum seekers won some form of relief—nearly double the national rate of 43%—thanks largely to the city’s robust network of pro-immigrant legal services and nonprofit organizations. That track record, however, may have sealed its fate. As Jeremiah Johnson, a former San Francisco immigration judge fired in November and now executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, put it:“It was a vibrant legal scene and so I think if you were looking to target a court you would have to look at what San Francisco stands for.”

The closure isn’t just symbolic. It’s logistically brutal. The court’s 117,000 pending cases have been transferred to Concord, about 30 miles away, a city that already juggled 60,000 cases of its own before absorbing San Francisco’s docket. For immigrants and their attorneys, that means hours of travel on public transportation for hearings that might last only ten minutes. Oakland immigration attorney Judah Lakin, who teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law, describes the cascading chaos: judges are fired before signing decisions, cases get shuffled between replacements, hearings are canceled with little notice, and clients languish in legal limbo while their paperwork expires. One of his clients won provisional asylum from a judge, only to have that judge fired before the order was finalized. Two judges later, the client is still waiting.

The Trump administration’s strategy appears deliberate. The firing of nearly 100 judges nationwide has reduced the immigration bench from 754 judges to roughly 600, including temporary appointees. Asylum denial rates have soared. Courthouse arrests have deterred hundreds from even showing up to hearings, resulting in deportation orders by default. Dana Leigh Marks, a retired San Francisco immigration judge with 35 years on the bench, calls the closure“heartbreaking”and sees it as part of a broader effort to dismantle due process and the asylum pathway itself.

What happens next? Immigration attorneys and judges worry that the consolidation and judge purges will create a two-tiered system: fewer hearings, longer backlogs, and diminished representation for vulnerable people whose lives hang in the balance. As attorney Nidaa Pervaiz noted while representing a client from Nepal in Concord:“Their whole lives are at stake, and they are coming to make a plea for their future.”The question is whether Sacramento’s immigration system—and the region’s commitment to due process—can withstand the strain.