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.
