- An NPR investigation found that hearings from Maryland's Hyattsville and Baltimore courts, along with Virginia's Sterling court, have been reassigned to a Washington, D.C. building leased to FEMA and an unmarked Falls Church, Virginia office — neither is a working immigration courtroom.
- Notice has run from a few days down to none at all: NPR identified at least two cases where immigrants received no mailed notice of their new hearing whatsoever.
- Missing a hearing, even one you never knew about, can trigger an automatic in-absentia deportation order — and in Baltimore, that risk for immigrants without a lawyer climbed from 54% in January to 73% in June.
- Neither the agency that runs the courts nor the one that manages federal leases has publicly explained why either building is now hosting hearings.
Across suburban Maryland and Virginia, according to a new NPR investigation, immigration hearings that were supposed to unfold in familiar courtrooms have quietly been rerouted to two federal buildings that were never announced as courts at all. One sits inside a Washington, D.C. tower leased to the Federal Emergency Management Agency; the other occupies office space in Falls Church, Virginia, better known for hosting appellate paperwork than in-person hearings. Immigration attorneys who have tracked the switch say some clients got only days of notice. Others got none.
