AI Generated Image (not an actual hearing notice)
Dilley detention center hearings are no longer only for people in custody. The Justice Department’s immigration courts have begun ordering some families who live freely in the community to appear for in-person hearings inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, the government’s family detention site, ABC News reported on Nov. 10. Attorneys and advocates told ABC that the notices started arriving in early November, and that the people receiving them fear they will walk into a detention center for court and not walk out.
The change matters because of who goes to court where. Immigration courts that sit inside detention facilities ordinarily hear detained dockets, while families with pending cases who are not in custody report to their local immigration court. “We’ve never heard of a detained docket, like Dilley, a detention center, having non-detained court appearances,” Kristin Etter, director of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council, told ABC. ABC did not say how many families received notices or which court issued them, and it did not report any arrest at one of these hearings.
The Justice Department’s answer is that this is a space question. A department spokesperson told ABC that the Executive Office for Immigration Review holds hearings “in a variety of locations throughout the country,” including DHS detention facilities, and that there is “nothing novel” about EOIR “maximizing available space options” to get people a timely day in court. The first half of that statement is accurate: EOIR does run courtrooms inside detention centers. What attorneys say they have not seen before is sending a non-detained family docket into one of them.
Why skipping a Dilley hearing is the riskiest choice
The notice ABC obtained carries the standard warning: a person who fails to appear can be ordered removed if DHS establishes that notice was delivered. That tracks Section 240(b)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which lets an immigration judge order removal in absentia when the government shows by clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence that written notice of the hearing was provided. An in absentia order can also bar several forms of relief for 10 years, and reopening it requires proof of exceptional circumstances or defective notice.
That is why the location carries so much weight. Immigration judges issued 311,130 in absentia removal orders in fiscal 2025 and 281,867 in the first three quarters of fiscal 2026, according to EOIR’s adjudication statistics (data generated July 24, 2026). The monthly average rose from 25,928 to 31,319, an increase of about 21 percent based on those EOIR figures. A hearing site that families are afraid to enter, which ABC noted is more than an hour’s drive from San Antonio, is the kind of barrier that tends to push those numbers higher, not lower.
Casey Revkin, co-founder of the group Each Step Home, told ABC that one mother who received a notice has no car and is “so scared that after her hearing she and her children will be immediately detained.” That fear rests on recent experience with arrests at routine ICE appointments. Nothing in the law requires a hearing to end in custody, but nothing in the law prevents ICE from taking someone into custody at a facility it runs, either.
The options families and their lawyers have
Under EOIR’s regulations, a respondent may ask the immigration judge to change venue for good cause (8 C.F.R. 1003.20) or to allow appearance by video or telephone (8 C.F.R. 1003.25(c)). Both are discretionary, and a motion filed shortly before the hearing date with no ruling yet does not excuse a missed appearance. The practical effect is that families with lawyers can try to move or reformat these hearings, while families without lawyers are the least positioned to file such motions in time.
The move also fits a larger pattern. Immigration dockets are already overloaded, and ICE is expanding detention capacity at sites such as Appleton, Wisconsin. Holding non-detained hearings inside a family detention center puts the court and the detaining agency under one roof, which raises fewer questions for the government about space and more for respondents about access to counsel and whether they will be released at the end of the day. Inside detained dockets, bond litigation becomes the main fight, and that is the outcome advocates told ABC these families fear.
The open questions are whether EOIR extends the practice beyond Dilley, whether it publishes guidance explaining it, and whether any family is detained at one of these hearings. Any of those developments would likely trigger the first legal challenge to the arrangement.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- ABC News, “DOJ now using Dilley detention center to hold hearings for non-detained families, raising concerns” (Nov. 10, 2026)
- EOIR Adjudication Statistics, “In Absentia Removal Orders” (data generated July 24, 2026)
- EOIR, Workload and Adjudication Statistics (updated Oct. 20, 2026)
- 8 U.S.C. 1229a (INA Section 240), removal proceedings and in absentia orders
- 8 C.F.R. Part 1003, including 1003.20 (change of venue) and 1003.25 (video and telephone hearings)
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