Week of July 1–7, 2026

Immigration courts in Los Angeles and around the country are scheduling 60 to 100 or more cases before a single judge at the same time, in what attorneys have started calling “mega master” hearings. The Times observed a Wednesday docket in early June with more than 120 cases set before one judge, and another courtroom with 96 people scheduled at once.

The hearings are master calendar appearances, the scheduling stage of a removal case, and respondents must attend in person. Lines form outside the downtown courthouse before doors open, and waiting rooms overflow into hallways.

Anyone who fails to appear can be ordered removed in absentia. At a June 24 hearing observed by the paper, 14 people missed their appointments and were ordered removable by the end of the day. Attorneys say the pace and confusion make missed hearings far more likely.

Source: Los Angeles Times

The Department of Homeland Security posted a new expiration date of July 10 for employment authorization tied to Temporary Protected Status, days after the Supreme Court allowed the terminations for Haiti and Syria to proceed. The date applies to TPS holders from Haiti, Syria, Burma, Yemen, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia.

Lower courts had not yet updated their orders in the underlying cases, which had left work authorization in place. DHS described any further extension while those courts act as temporary relief only.

TPS gives temporary protection from removal and work authorization to people already in the United States when their country is designated. It does not lead to a green card. The administration has moved to end designations for at least 13 countries over the past year.

Source: Newsweek

Hours after the Supreme Court struck down the executive order ending birthright citizenship, White House aides and allies discussed options aimed at women who travel to the United States to give birth, according to two administration officials and others close to the administration. Ideas ranged from prosecuting people and organizations involved in what officials call birth tourism to barring entry of pregnant women outright.

The Justice Department issued a memo directing U.S. attorneys to work with DHS to prioritize investigating and prosecuting birth tourism schemes, suggesting charges under visa fraud as well as wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft and conspiracy statutes.

The Migration Policy Institute estimates that up to 26,000 babies born in the United States each year may be attributable to women traveling here to give birth, out of more than 3.5 million annual births.

Source: Politico

Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 10,000 people over a five-day period ending Tuesday, roughly 2,000 arrests a day. The agency did not say where the arrests took place. The figures indicate that arrests are surging even as the administration has stopped concentrating operations on individual cities.

ICE does not publish arrest data. Using figures provided to UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Associated Press, 2,000 arrests a day would be a sharp increase. December had the highest monthly total of the administration to date and averaged 1,283 arrests a day. January averaged about 1,212, and February fell to 1,057.

Bookings into ICE detention facilities climbed to roughly 39,000 in June, after hovering near 30,000 a month since February.

Source: AP News

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that people held by ICE while their removal cases proceed must receive a bond hearing within 90 days of the start of detention, and that the government must give an individualized reason for continued detention without bond.

Judge Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge James Graves, an Obama appointee. Judge Cory Wilson, a Trump appointee, dissented. The panel noted that most people swept into the policy have no criminal record and long-established ties, making flight unlikely.

The case turns on a July 2025 ICE reinterpretation of decades-old statutes, extending mandatory detention without bond to people arrested in the interior rather than only at the border. District judges nationwide have overwhelmingly rejected that reading.

Source: Politico

H-1B renewals are on track to hit a record in fiscal year 2026 despite the administration’s efforts to tighten the program. LayoffHedge, a workforce analytics firm, reviewed USCIS data and found 273,026 petitions for continuing employment approved through the first nine months of the fiscal year, which began in October 2025.

That is close to the record 291,542 renewal approvals recorded in fiscal 2025, with three months still to run.

The figures cover extensions, transfers and amended filings rather than unique workers, so analysts caution against reading them as a count of individuals. They also fall outside the annual cap on new H-1B visas. A federal judge blocked the administration’s $100,000 fee on many new petitions filed for workers abroad in June, and the agency has moved to replace the random lottery with a wage-weighted selection.

Source: Newsweek

CoreCivic announced that it has sold the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego County and the California City Detention Facility in Kern County to the Department of Homeland Security in a deal worth $1.5 billion. The sale closed July 2, with the government paying $739.2 million for the 1,994-bed Otay Mesa site and $732.6 million for the 2,560-bed California City site.

The company expects net proceeds of about $1.1 billion and says it will keep running day-to-day operations under its existing ICE contracts, which run through August 2027 at California City and December 2029 at Otay Mesa. CoreCivic acknowledged in an SEC filing that those terms could be renegotiated or not renewed.

The 2025 federal budget gave DHS roughly $170 billion for immigration enforcement and detention, including $45 billion for expanding detention capacity through fiscal 2029.

Source: CalMatters

A coalition of labor and immigrant rights groups in Massachusetts sued U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security over new fees and rules affecting Temporary Protected Status renewals. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its implementing regulations, TPS holders with pending renewal applications may not work before the renewal is granted.

Work permits for TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine expire July 22, even though their underlying status runs into September and October. Processing delays mean tens of thousands could lose work authorization while waiting.

Massachusetts is home to an estimated 45,000 TPS holders, including nearly 9,000 from those three countries and more than 22,000 from Haiti. A USCIS spokesperson called the suit frivolous and said the agency is implementing the law as written.

Source: Axios

GEO Group has agreed to pay more than $100,000 to settle a California workplace safety case over conditions for detained immigrants who work inside the Golden State Annex facility in McFarland. The settlement was signed in May and announced Tuesday.

Cal/OSHA opened the case in 2022 after complaints from detainees and advocates, citing the company for failing to prevent the spread of COVID-19 among detainees who worked in the facility. It was the first known instance of California treating immigration detainees as workers and their facility operator as an employer subject to state labor law.

Detainees in ICE custody are held on civil violations. Those who join a voluntary work program cleaning, preparing food or cutting hair are paid $1 a day. GEO Group also dropped its challenge to a state ruling that it is covered by California labor law.

Source: CalMatters

A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that federal immigration agencies shared confidential information about Iranian asylum seekers with the Iranian government, in violation of regulations adopted in the late 1990s that bar disclosing that a person has applied for asylum. The Department of Homeland Security denied sharing asylum records with Iran.

The complaint describes a coordinated effort to identify Iranians in ICE custody and press them to return to Iran, and says the State Department arranged monthly meetings with Iranian officials beginning in March 2025.

Roughly 600 Iranians were placed in immigration detention last year, according to public records obtained by the National Iranian American Council. In June, an Iranian woman was among about two dozen people the United States deported to the Central African Republic.

Source: AP News

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a vehicle stop in a predominantly Latino Houston neighborhood on Tuesday morning. ICE said the stop was part of a targeted enforcement operation and identified Salgado Araujo as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.

According to the agency’s statement, issued hours after the shooting, he tried to ram an ICE vehicle, ignored repeated verbal commands and attempted to run over an agent, who then fired in self-defense.

The shooting follows a series of fatal shootings by federal immigration agents over the past year and a half that have drawn criticism of the administration’s enforcement approach. Federal data show that a majority of people arrested by ICE during the second Trump administration have no criminal convictions.

Source: The Texas Tribune

Marriage to a U.S. citizen remains one of the most common routes to a green card, and the statutory pathway is unchanged. Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups say the administration has nonetheless intensified vetting and enforcement in these cases.

“The process hasn’t just gotten slower, it’s gotten more discretionary,” said Ashley DeAzevedo, executive director of American Families United, which represents U.S. citizens and permanent residents with immigrant spouses.

USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said the previous administration had undermined vetting and screening, and that verifying the identities and histories of people seeking immigration benefits requires a rigorous process. Practitioners report longer waits, more requests for evidence and more discretion exercised against applicants who would previously have been approved routinely.

Source: Newsweek