In a recent morning at Chelmsford Immigration Court, dozens of immigrants and attorneys crowded into a room, and more appeared by videoconference. Judge Christopher Cooper, was presiding from Detroit, one of the new temporary immigration judges for the court.
What happened over the next few hours — recounted by several immigration attorneys present — was not routine. Attorneys called Cooper’s conduct biased, and said he relied heavily on Department of Homeland Security attorneys to provide reasons to issue pretermissions, essentially ending an immigrants’ asylum case without a hearing where evidence is presented.
As a result, at least 20 immigrants — mostly asylum seekers from Brazil— were given deportation orders during scheduling hearings, before they had a chance to show evidence to back up their claims.
The account of what happened in several hearings this past Wednesday, Sept 16 is based on interviews with seven attorneys who were present.
“That is when the judges would normally make decisions, not at a master calendar hearing,” said Ragini Shah, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at Suffolk University. Shah had been alerted about Cooper’s conduct by many immigration attorneys who were present.
The Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the nation’s immigration courts, didn’t reply to questions from GBH News. The allegations come as attorneys and advocates have decried due process issues in immigration courts, saying the Trump administration is expediting cases to increase deportations.
Attorney Kira Gagarin had the first case of the morning that day, and was representing an asylum seeker from Indonesia. Gagarin said Cooper immediately asked the government if they were moving to “preterminate the case,” something the government does itself without any prompting.
“It is highly unusual for the judge to suggest to the Department of Homeland Security — the judge who is supposed to be a neutral fact-finder, but in this case, he was clearly not a neutral fact-finder,” said Gagarin. She decided to continue watching about a dozen more master calendar hearings play out until 11 a.m.
Gagarin said that the Brazilian asylum seekers who came before the judge, and others she heard about from others later, were all ordered deported.
“The judge said on the record that quality of living in Brazil is higher than in the United States, that ... seeking asylum from Brazil was akin to seeking asylum from Canada, and terminated every asylum case for every Brazilian and ordered that person deported,” she said.
Gagarin and several other attorneys also said Cooper accosted asylum seekers for not applying for asylum earlier. Immigrants often don’t understand that such applications are time limited.
She and others said Cooper had said the United States has given them a “great opportunity to present their case, and that these people have taken advantage of the hospitality of the United States in not presenting their case.”
Several recounted how Cooper said he’d had a good experience in Brazil visiting, and implied that because he had had a good experience, couldn’t imagine why anyone would be afraid to to return to Brazil for valid reasons, essentially appointing himself a “subject matter expert on the country.”
Mayra Neimerck is an immigration attorney out on maternity leave, but received urgent messages from an associate at court representing a 20-year-old Brazilian woman who came to the U.S. as a child for a special immigrant juvenile case that was approved last year.
“I got notified that I should connect on WebEx immediately because the immigration judge was ordering my client removed even though there was an approved juvenile petition,” she said.
“Literally every Brazilian [that day] was just not granted any relief, ordered deported,” she said. Neimerck said Cooper seemed “adversarial” and not impartial in many cases.
“It seemed like him and DHS were constantly just working together to make sure that they found any minimal thing to pre-terminate a case and order the respondent removed —missing dates, missing page numbers, that kind of thing.”
Cooper began hearing immigration cases in April. He has a law degree from New England School of Law, and worked in private practice in federal courts in Illinois and Indiana, according to a Department of Justice press release. He also defended police officers as a Fraternal Order of Police Legal Defense Plan attorney. From 2017 to 2023, he occasionally served as a judge pro tem in Indiana, primarily in a felony courtroom.
Regular practice
Shah, who is also an immigration law lecturer, said that Cooper’s behavior denies due process.
“The way I would explain it is: imagine if someone was accused of a crime that carried a life sentence and they said they pled not guilty and the judge says, 'well, I’m going to order you sentenced to life in jail anyway.’ You know, that’s kind of the equivalent of what’s happening here. It’s an extreme due process violation to not allow these people a chance to tell their stories,” she said .
Shah had read about this practice occurring in other states’ immigration courts, but this is the first time she’d heard about it in Massachusetts.
“It does seem like there’s something new, that judges are either learning or taking cues from somebody that this is something they should be doing, because it’s certainly not anything that any of the more experienced immigration judges would do,” she said.
Robin Nice, former chair of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, New England Chapter, was representing a client before Cooper virtually that day. She said she was surprised when the government attorney and Cooper seemed to be confusing their paperwork. According to Nice, the government attorney said she had a “gang-based claim from Brazil,” and Cooper didn’t correct him.
“I said, 'Excuse me, my client is from Guinea. It’s not gang-based. He was detained by the government multiple times for his political opposition and tortured. So I’m not sure what he’s looking at,'” she recounted. “It’s like a certain level of like blithe carelessness when it’s people’s lives on the line.”
For those not ordered deported, Cooper scheduled evidentiary hearings within 60 days, all attorneys said when asked about immigration court procedures. The standard is usually six months. Usually for asylum cases, all supporting documents have to be filed 30 days before the hearing, cutting preparation time from five months to about 30 days.
“The whole point of an asylum application [is] it’s a cover letter. It’s the tip of the iceberg. You have an asylum hearing so you can flush it out — It takes a minimum of eight weeks just to get a psych eval and a medical eval, to get country conditions experts,” said Nice of asylum case preparation.
“The fact that you’re expecting people to throw together a complicated asylum case in a month is nuts,” she said.
