The Briefing
- Charlotte's immigration court ordered removal in nearly 90% of the cases it completed so far this year, up from about 62% in 2025 and roughly 50% in 2024, even as the court finished thousands fewer cases overall.
- Chicago's removal orders jumped 120% between March and June 2026, the steepest increase of any state's immigration court, driven by mass "mega-master" hearings that mark absent immigrants for automatic deportation.
- Los Angeles is the exception: removal orders there fell 22% over the same period, even as its home county carries roughly 95,000 pending cases, one of the largest dockets in the country.
Charlotte's immigration court closed out fewer cases this year than last, yet the share of those cases ending in a removal order climbed close to nine in ten, a rate that puts the Carolinas court well ahead of where it stood twelve months earlier. Chicago's court moved even faster, with removal orders more than doubling in a single quarter after the introduction of mass hearings that quietly convert a missed appointment into an automatic deportation order. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is the lone major court running in the opposite direction, with removal orders actually falling even as its home county carries one of the largest dockets in the country.
Charlotte's Numbers, Explained
Charlotte's court, which hears cases out of both North and South Carolina, wrapped up 20,594 matters between January and August this year, thousands fewer than the 23,245 it closed over the same stretch in 2025. Even so, judges there sent almost nine out of every ten of those finished cases toward removal, up from roughly six in ten during the same months last year and about half in 2024, according to federal data reported by WFAE, Charlotte's NPR affiliate. Judges issued 18,286 removal orders through August, more than double the 8,840 ordered over the identical period two years ago. Only 203 people walked away with some form of relief letting them stay. None of this touches the court's underlying backlog, which still tops 119,000 unresolved matters — meaning the climbing rate describes only the shrinking slice of cases judges have actually gotten through.
How the National Baseline Compares — With a Catch
Placing Charlotte against the rest of the country requires a bit of care. Nationwide, judges ordered removal or granted voluntary departure in 88% of finished cases in July alone, and in 82.7% of cases across the fiscal year through that month, per TRAC's Immigration Court Quick Facts. That national figure blends two separate outcomes into one number — formal removal orders plus voluntary departures — while Charlotte's near-90% figure counts removal orders by themselves. Measured strictly as removal orders, Charlotte is running ahead of the national pace; measured against the broader combined metric, the two numbers sit closer together. Either way the trend line points the same direction: fewer completed cases, a bigger share of them ending in deportation.
Chicago Becomes the Country's Fastest-Moving Court
No court's numbers moved faster this year than Illinois'. State-by-state figures show removal orders out of the Chicago court jumped 120% between March and June, four times the nationwide increase and the steepest climb among the country's largest court systems. A newspaper analysis of Justice Department case records found the court issued close to 7,100 removal orders in a single month, more than any other court in the nation and roughly seven times the pace typical of the prior administration. Court watchers trace the surge to newly expanded group hearings, where anywhere from dozens to well over a hundred unrepresented immigrants are called into one courtroom at a time; those who miss the call for any reason are marked absent and ordered removed without their case ever being argued on the merits. Stephanie Spiro, an attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, frames the shift as part of a wider effort to reshape the courts into what she calls a "deportation factory." A Justice Department spokesperson pushed back on that framing, telling ABC7 Chicago that "Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration." Judge Peter Kim, presiding over one of the earliest overflow sessions in May, was overheard by court observers saying, "this is so hard. This is not going to work."
Houston's Asylum Door Is Nearly Shut
Texas courts, led by Houston, saw removal orders climb 66% across that same stretch — more than double the national pace. The starker shift may be what happens to the cases that don't end automatically: Houston's asylum grant rate has slid to roughly 0.8%, among the lowest of any immigration court nationwide, according to immigration attorneys tracking EOIR data, against a national average closer to 19-20%.
Miami's Backlog Keeps Growing, Even as Its Pace Slows
Florida's removal orders rose only 18% over the same window, trailing the 30% national increase, CBS News Miami reported. Slower relative growth hasn't shrunk the pile of pending matters: Miami-Dade County still carries more unresolved immigration cases, 137,373, than any other county nationwide. One correction worth noting here — a frequently cited figure describing "78% of Florida cases" ending in deportation is actually a national statistic for June, not a Florida-specific one; the original reporting states this plainly even where later recaps have blurred the distinction.
New York Holds Steady, Los Angeles Moves the Other Way
New York's removal orders climbed 23%, also below the national curve, continuing a long-running pattern of the state's court issuing deportation orders at a slower clip than most of the country. Los Angeles stands apart entirely: California's removal orders fell 22% between March and June, the only drop among the courts examined here, even though Los Angeles County's roughly 95,000 pending cases, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, still rank among the largest dockets in the nation.
What the Divergence Signals
Charlotte's climbing rate and Chicago's surge point toward a similar mechanism at work — expanded group hearings, thinner legal representation, and a wave of judicial turnover under the current administration. Los Angeles's decline and Miami's slower growth suggest enforcement intensity isn't rising evenly across the country's largest courts. For the roughly 3.1 million cases still pending nationwide, per TRAC, which court hears a case may matter as much as the facts of it. Legal counsel remains the clearest dividing line: barely more than one in five immigrants nationally had an attorney the month their case ended in removal this July, and attorneys in several of these cities describe the same pattern — those without representation are the ones most often funneled into faster hearings and automatic removal.
