The Miami immigration courthouse will reopen Monday more than six months after shutting its doors and as COVID cases continue to rise in the state.
In an announcement Thursday, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a sub-agency of the United States Department of Justice whose chief function is to conduct deportation proceedings in immigration courts, said the government will resume in-person hearings. Face masks will be required in all waiting rooms, corridors and courtrooms, the statement said. Children under 2 and people with certain medical conditions that prevent them from wearing a mask are exempt.
The sudden reopening of the Miami immigration courthouse — located at 333 S. Miami Ave. — comes as COVID-19 cases rose to the most Florida has tallied in a single day since Sept. 19, according to the Florida Department of Health. The single-day case count on Thursday — 3,356— is the most Florida has reported since mid-September, bringing the state’s known case total to 744,988 and resident death toll to 15,736.
Announcements of court closings were made via midnight tweets without any explanation — even to court staff — on how the government was selecting which courts to keep open. The court was ultimately partially closed; it remained open for administrative filings and very limited hearings for people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
The partial shutdown of the national immigration court system in the wake of COVID-19 has impacted hundreds of thousands of immigrants awaiting their day in court. As the country’s case backlog surpassed 1.2 million due to canceled or postponed hearings, immigrants will face delays of months or years, according to federal data released in late August.
Monthly case completions before the March shutdown in January and February 2020 were running at roughly 40,000. However, during the period from April 2020 to July 2020 they fell precipitously to less than 6,000 a month — a historic low, according to researchers who analyze immigration data at Syracuse University. In July 2020, only 5,960 cases were completed, federal data shows.
Despite the backlogs and closures, Miami led the list with 216 case completions in July 2020. Only one other court location — Baltimore, Maryland, completed at least 200 cases.
While the shutdown nationwide caused immigration judges’ productivity to plummet, data shows that as of May, ICE filed more than 100,000 new immigration cases nationwide during just the first two and a half months of the shutdown, contributing heavily to the backlog.
