Border crossings have declined, yet ICE keeps moving migrants

By Kate Morrissey, for Capital & Main

Immigration Judge Ana Partida sat before a mostly empty courtroom on an afternoon in October, her body angled toward a television on one of the side walls.

None of the people scheduled to appear before Partida, who hears cases inside San Diego’s Otay Mesa Detention Center, were present in person. That’s because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had transferred all of them to other locations around the country, even though their cases were already underway in San Diego.

One by one, an ICE attorney asked Partida to move the detainees’ cases to courts closer to their new locations. All of the people who were transferred had attorneys in San Diego, including some through a county program that represents people in local immigration custody for free.

Moving their cases would mean, at least for those with county attorneys, that their lawyers would no longer be able to represent them.

Partida said that she felt she had no choice but to move many of the cases because she had been experiencing technology issues and a lack of cooperation from the other detention centers in presenting people for their hearings when she tried to keep them on her docket. During two afternoons, Capital & Main observed the judge having to restart the video conference software multiple times and struggling with dropped calls from detainees held at other facilities.

“This has become a very big problem,” she told one attorney as she ordered the case moved.

ICE started transferring an unusually high number of detainees who already had attorneys out of the facility back in the spring of 2024, according to many attorneys who regularly represent clients there. At the time, the agency told Michael Garcia, head of San Diego County’s free immigration legal defense program, that it had to move people because of an uptick in the number of border crossings in the area. But crossings dropped and still transfer picked up again in fall 2024 .

ICE said it follows a 2012 agency memorandum regarding transfers that says officers will not transfer people who have documented attorneys on file, family in the area, pending hearings in ongoing cases, or been granted bond or scheduled for a bond hearing unless the local ICE field office director determines that the move is necessary.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials use a network of detention facilities for the intake of individuals detained by the agency,” a spokesperson said on behalf of the agency via email. “All noncitizen transfers and transfer determinations are nonpunitive and based on a thorough and systematic review of the most current information available.”

But in many of the cases that attorneys described to Capital & Main, ICE is transferring people who have attorneys, family, and pending hearings in the San Diego area.

Garcia said he recently met with ICE again to ask why his attorneys’ clients keep getting transferred.

“ICE’s position was that this is strictly because of the needs of the facility,” Garcia said. “They didn’t have any numbers that they showed me that indicated an increase in the number of detentions.”

In September, the month that Garcia’s team noticed that transfers were ticking up again, Border Patrol agents in San Diego made the lowest number of apprehensions the sector has seen in more than a year, according to Customs and Border Protection data.

That month, San Diego agents apprehended people entering the United States roughly 13,300 times. That’s less than half of the roughly 32,500 crossings that agents apprehended in May 2024, when Garcia said transfers first increased dramatically.

Several attorneys whose clients have been transferred noted that many of the courts where detainees from Otay Mesa have gone have higher asylum denial rates than the San Diego facility. Studies have shown that having an attorney can make a big difference in asylum outcomes.

The county program that offers free legal representation to people detained by ICE in San Diego County was launched partway through 2022.

Since then, in the past two fiscal years, Otay Mesa judges denied asylum in roughly 67% of cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, which gathers government data through public records requests.

Judges at the receiving courts denied asylum in 74% to 95% of cases in that same time period, the data show.

The court with the highest denial rate during that time period was Adelanto, in San Bernardino County.

That’s the court where attorney Aude Ruffing’s client from Jamaica ended up after his transfer. Ruffing, who contracts with the San Diego County program to take detained cases, said that ICE decided to move her client soon after she submitted the paperwork for his asylum claim. She said the transfer caused a several-month delay in the case getting to trial.

Ruffing said she felt bad for her client but that he has been dealing with the situation surprisingly well.

“He’s just been really patient,” she said. “He’s been a real trooper through the process.”

Meanwhile, the transfers are complicating cases at the Otay Mesa courts.

On the afternoon in October, the first person on Judge Partida’s docket, a man from Nicaragua, wasn’t in the courtroom or on the video conference system. He was still in ICE custody, but the agency hadn’t produced him for his case.

Capital & Main isn’t identifying the Nicaraguan man or other asylum seekers in this article due to the uncertain fate of their ongoing cases.

Partida asked the ICE attorney what they should do.

“I don’t know how counsel and the court want to proceed if the respondent is not here,” ICE attorney David Aronlee told the judge, using the legal term for someone who has a case before the court. “I don’t have an answer for how we can proceed at this point.”

The man’s legal representative, Victor Valdez-Gonzalez, complained that the organization that had offered to do a psychological evaluation for his client’s asylum application could no longer complete it because the man had been moved out of state.

On another afternoon in October, a slim man sat alone in his blue detainee uniform in front of Partida. She asked why the man’s wife wasn’t in court.

His wife had previously been held at Otay Mesa as well, but Partida soon learned that ICE had transferred the woman to Louisiana. ICE hadn’t been able to produce the wife via video because of the time difference, ICE attorney Antonio Estrada told Partida.

At the couple’s last hearing in September, Partida had combined their cases so that they could be heard together and get one decision for both husband and wife, saving time for the court. Having both partners at the same detention center would’ve also meant that they could both testify in the case.

At the October hearing, Partida separated the cases and sent the wife’s case to a Louisiana judge. She said the couple would now have to write statements to be used in each other’s cases since ICE wouldn’t arrange for  them to testify in person for each other.

When the couple’s attorney pushed back, Partida said she couldn’t count on being able to hear the woman via video for their scheduled hearings.

“There is nothing this court can do to bring the respondent back to Otay Mesa,” Partida said.

Many of the people that ICE has transferred in this second push already had their final hearings scheduled, according to Garcia, meaning that they were almost done. The transfers meant delays in those cases, further contributing to the immigration courts’ ever-worsening backlog.

Garcia said that in May, when ICE transferred 43 of his attorneys’ cases, 37% had already scheduled their trials, known in immigration court as merits hearings. In September, ICE transferred 31 of his program’s cases and 74% were at that final stage, he said.

“Once you get the individual hearing set, that’s when you have done all the work, you have presented all the evidence, you have worked with the client for months, that’s when ICE sends them to another detention center,” said Rocio Sanchez Flores, an immigration attorney who contracts with the county program.

Sanchez Flores represents an Afghan woman who fled the Taliban with her husband, who had worked as a translator for the Afghan National Directorate of Security communicating with U.S. forces, Sanchez Flores said. The couple were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border when they requested asylum. The wife was held at a detention facility in California while the husband was sent to one in Washington.

The husband’s case was scheduled to finish earlier than the wife’s, Sanchez Flores said. A few days after her final hearing was scheduled, ICE transferred the wife to Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.

In October, the husband won his case, Sanchez Flores said, meaning that his wife could now get asylum through him. Sanchez Flores contacted the ICE attorney on the wife’s case to ask for a joint motion to close.

Instead, Sanchez Flores said, another ICE attorney made a motion to change venue and move the wife’s case out of the San Diego court.

“This came as a shock to me because it’s way easier to just terminate the case,” Sanchez Flores said. “The government doesn’t have to waste resources. She can get released and obtain asylum through her husband.”

As a result, the wife spent an extra month in ICE custody.