Ruth Abramson sees her volunteer work observing Chicago’s immigration court as a way to practice tikkun olam — the Hebrew phrase for repairing the world.
On a recent March morning, Abramson was trying to access a web link to a master calendar hearing taking place at Chicago immigration court — a sort of judicial cattle call where judges check in on a litany of different cases. But 9 a.m. came and went and she was still in the digital waiting room.
As she listens remotely to court appearances for parades of immigrants and their attorneys for a morning each week, Abramson, 66, hears echoes of her own family’s story. They were Eastern European Jews who escaped antisemitic pogroms and arrived in the U.S. with nothing.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” she said. Her voice caught. She was waiting at her desk for proceedings to begin. She straightened up and continued: “Anyway, we should try to get on and see what the situation is.”
Post-pandemic, the number of immigration court hearings conducted on a virtual platform called Webex has skyrocketed. But over the last few months, court watchers trying to observe on that platform increasingly have found themselves shut out of those hearings.
Of the 17 permanent and temporary judges staffing the city’s immigration court, observers from Abramson’s group have not been able to access virtual proceedings run by four judges since January. Another two appeared to stop allowing virtual access in February.
The observers are facing the shutouts at a moment of uncertainty for immigrants who are seeking to obtain legal status around the country against a tide of new policies from the Trump administration, along with an exodus of judges and a sprawling legal fight over basic tenets of the court process.
Those rapid-fire changes have prompted advocates to sound the alarm — and sue the Justice Department — arguing that the new rules encroach on due process in the country’s immigration courts.
All that instability, observers and advocates say, make the presence of outside observers even more important. Alex McGriff, the managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said that in a court system where legal representation is not guaranteed to people fighting cases, court watchers fill in a critical information gap, particularly at moments when the government is radically reshaping its approach to immigration cases.
They’re often the first to flag trends in how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is using legal strategies like the recent turn toward moving to dismiss cases before they can come before a judge for a final hearing.
“Ideally, every person who’s facing deportation would have the right to an attorney,” McGriff said. “Unfortunately, that’s not the reality. And so it’s really important to know what’s happening in courtrooms where we can’t be present, what the newest due process violations are.”
Court observers cautioned that they can’t know for sure why they aren’t getting into so many virtual hearings, since judges are allowed some discretion as they run their courtrooms and valid exceptions to open-court rules exist. But they suspect the change is due to a “fact sheet” first released in November from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which runs the country’s immigration court system.
Court proceedings are public, the fact sheet states, but “visitors should observe in person at the courtroom in which the hearing is scheduled and held. The Webex links posted on EOIR’s website are for parties appearing remotely.” The guidelines quickly drew condemnation from advocates and civil rights groups, who pointed out those guidelines allow judges to exclude members of the public from a remote-only hearing — effectively placing proceedings behind closed doors.
Asked last week about the rationale behind the fact sheet advisory and whether the office could guarantee public access to entirely virtual hearings, press secretary Kathryn Mattingly appeared to backpedal.
“While observers should plan to observe immigration hearings in person at the courtroom in which a hearing is scheduled and held, immigration judges may admit non-parties via Webex to observe a hearing that is open to the public,” Mattingly wrote.
She did not answer questions about the rationale behind the fact sheet guidance or how to guarantee the public can observe entirely remote hearings.
Issues with courtroom access are even more pronounced outside Chicago. In Minnesota and in New York, legal observation groups have sued the U.S. Department of Justice and senior federal immigration officials, alleging that their volunteers are being physically shut out of courtrooms as well as digitally.
In Chicago, in-person access to court proceedings doesn’t appear to be a problem. But there are many scenarios in which a virtual hearing may be the only way for a member of the public to witness the proceedings in an immigration court. For Gail Montenegro, who used to coordinate Chicago court observation as a public affairs officer with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, “a Webex hearing is a hearing” and demands the same treatment as in-person proceedings.
“Without public access to the immigration court hearings, there’s no independent way to ensure fairness, consistency or accountability,” she said. “These become secret proceedings and that undermines our confidence in the rule of law and creates the perception or reality of unchecked government power.”
More remote hearings
Immigration court proceedings all over the country went virtual with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The number of hearings taking place via the internet has climbed steadily since 2021: Department of Justice data shows that more than 850,000 hearings were conducted virtually last year.
Kevin Fee, the legal director of the Illinois Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, referred to the spike in virtual hearings as a result of “the collective realization that a lot of short hearings are a lot more convenient to conduct remotely.”
“Expansion of remote hearings has been an enduring legacy of the COVID era that I don’t expect to go away anytime soon,” he said.
And the logistics of immigration court cases can be particularly well served by remote hearings when a respondent in a case is being held at a detention center far away from the court that is handling his or her case.
The law gives immigration judges significant discretion to suspend public access to court proceedings — they are required to close hearings in matters involving spousal abuse and minor children, for example, unless there’s explicit direction from the affected people to do otherwise.
But barring one of those exceptions, immigration courtrooms, like other courts in the U.S., are presumed open to the public.
Fee said there was no reason to give people different levels of access to virtual hearings versus in-person ones.
“There’s absolutely no reason that the access shouldn’t be granted online,” he said. “If there is a difference in how they’re being treated I am immediately skeptical.”
Katie Fleming, the director of public education and engagement at the Acacia Center for Justice, said the fact sheet would erode public trust in the court process because the guidelines it lays out are more restrictive than the regulations that govern most court hearings.
“It feels a little bit like a fortress,” she said.
It’s not clear how many of the roughly 850,000 virtual hearings that occurred last year took place exclusively on Webex, but there are a number of scenarios that could lead to a web-only hearings, experts and advocates said.
There may not be enough courtrooms — as was the case in Chicago for a time — for judges to hold hearings at the scheduled times outside their own chambers.
Some cases may be heard in a place that isn’t open to the public at all, like one of the handful of immigration adjudication centers scattered around the country. Or detainees could be held in locations where in-person observation is technically an option, but are practically inaccessible to ordinary people.
Fee said such situations might not constitute an “outright ban,” but that any attempt to implement rules about who can be present at presumed-open court proceedings might be the result of “a larger hostility to transparency” from DHS and the Trump administration.
“Given the way that this administration has shown total disregard for basic First Amendment principles, I think there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of any broad-based attempt to restrict public access to hearings,” Fee said.
Jack Lloyd, the volunteer coordinator of the Court Watch program, put it another way. In a world where so much of life gets done via the internet, he said, “it seems like access in 2026 … means open both online and in person.”
Expanding oversight with declining access
When Court Watch started sending volunteers to immigration hearings in 2007, the group’s focus was mainly on what’s known as “the detained docket” — immigrants who are being held in custody while they’re awaiting their day in court. That remained their primary target for nearly 20 years, Lloyd said.
Late last year, the group decided to try to start covering as many hearings as they could, in-person and online.
“What changed was the really aggressive moves by DHS, and by the Justice Department, in terms of how they were handling the trials, the hearings, the erosion of due process,” Lloyd said.
Lloyd estimated that there are about 25 hearings each day in Chicago’s two immigration courts. The 50 to 60 court watchers that tend to volunteer in a given month can still only cover a fraction of those hearings, he said.
Unlike ordinary civil and criminal courts, immigration courts don’t make records of the hearings readily available to the public. There are no transcripts of the proceedings.
That means that when they can get into hearings, the court observers are valuable scouts into the rapidly changing world of immigration court.
McGriff, of the National Immigrant Justice Center, said court watchers had been some of the first to notice the dramatic expansion of attempts at expedited removals for people who hadn’t yet had their cases argued. Observers also alerted other advocates about the government’s increasing tendency to try to clear cases by sending immigrants to other countries where they could ostensibly apply for asylum.
Besides flagging new developments, McGriff said court observers also serve to put the people charged with executing the law in courtrooms on notice: “It’s really important to signal to judges and to the ICE attorneys in the courtroom that somebody is watching.”
And legal observers aren’t the only ones affected by the change in guidance for Webex hearings. Montenegro pointed out that law students, attorneys who don’t have cases on a particular day and immigration judge applicants — and curious members of the public — are all also frequent presences who need consistent access to proceedings too. But the implementation is uneven and unpredictable, she said.
“Some courts are doing it one way and some courts are doing it other ways,” she said. “There needs to be consistent guidance and policy that allows the public to sit in on these hearings. Transparency is not optional.”
‘We shall see’
Kevin McVey has so far not been affected by the confusion around web hearings. McVey, 68, has volunteered with Court Watch for about a year, but has spent most of his time doing in-person observation since November 2025.
The Monday morning he spoke to the Tribune, McVey said the hearings had been crowded — “when I got off the elevator, you almost couldn’t get off,” he said.
The courtrooms are small, he said, with three rows of benches, but he’s never been asked to leave.
Whether you’re observing in-person or via internet, the tasks of court observation are largely the same. Volunteers try to keep track of each immigrant respondent using their government-assigned alien number, take down whether they have attorneys or if they are representing themselves, the date of their next hearing and any irregularities or concerns that come up for each case.
It’s easier to catch names and hear mumbled words on a remote link, McVey said. But in-person, he continued, it’s impossible to forget that life-changing decisions happen in the courtrooms.
“You see the fear in people’s eyes,” he said. “Everyone is handling it in their own way. It’s a very emotional experience to go in person.”
One other advantage of being physically in the courtroom is the ability to pick up information during the less formal back-and-forth that often flows around a set hearing.
McVey has spent substantial time in Judge Matthew Beese’s courtroom, listening to detained docket hearings. Earlier this month, Beese indicated while discussing a later court date with an attorney that he would be “remote only,” according to McVey’s notes. Beese is one of the judges whose virtual proceedings have become largely inaccessible to observers since the beginning of February.
“I take it this means that we will no longer be able to observe him in-person,” McVey wrote in his summary notes. “And so we shall see if he opens up Webex for observers when he goes totally remote.”
EOIR representative Mattingly, asked how members of the public would be ensured access at a fully remote hearing, declined to answer beyond her earlier statement about judges having the option to admit outside parties on Webex.
For McVey’s remote colleague Abramson, sitting that March morning on the other side of a web hearing she couldn’t see or hear, her feeling was that she was in the midst of a frayed system. It pains her to think that people who come to the U.S. seeking better lives might not receive the same due process and opportunities that her own grandparents did when they sought refuge here decades ago.
“But in the meantime, you’re dealing with people and their lives,” Abramson said. “And so what do you do with what you’ve got in front of you? What we have is the Constitution.”
Observing court is one way for her to do what she can with what she has.
This article contains corrected text as it pertains to the work role of Gail Montenegro
