Mega Master Calendars Reach Miami as In-Absentia Deportation Orders There Double, 1,383 to 2,886

NPR reported on September 2, 2026 that DOJ immigration courts have begun running “mega master calendar” hearings — dockets in which a single judge processes more than 100 people at once. In Miami, NPR watched Judge Xavier Racine call roughly thirty people forward together, read them their rights as a group, and assign each a new hearing date.

The measurable consequence is in the in-absentia numbers. In the Miami immigration court, deportation orders issued because the person did not appear rose from 1,383 in May to 2,886 in July — an increase of about 108 percent, roughly a doubling in two months. Nationwide, more than 54,000 people were ordered deported in July for missing a hearing, against a comparable 56,000 in June, which the legal-tech platform bklg records as a record high.

An in-absentia order is a removal order entered against someone who was not in the room. It requires no finding on the merits of their claim. The three inputs NPR identifies for the exploding Miami docket are all administrative choices rather than changes in who is arriving: a record monthly arrest pace, the advancing of hearing dates that had been set for 2027, and the requiring of appearances in cases prior administrations treated as low priority precisely because they were likely to be dismissed.

Put together, the mechanism is a throughput problem converted into an outcome. Compress more people into fewer hearing slots and the notice system cannot keep pace; people who never learn a date cannot attend; non-attendance produces a removal order that closes the case without anyone examining it. The backlog does clear. It clears by disposing of cases in the one way that requires no adjudication at all.

What EOIR’s own statistics establish. The nationwide monthly totals above come from bklg, a legal-tech platform, not from the government. EOIR publishes its own In Absentia Removal Orders series (Adjudication Statistics, data generated July 24, 2026), and it confirms the trend at fiscal-year scale while stopping short of the specific months:

FY2026 was averaging 31,319 in-absentia orders a month through June — up 20.8% on the FY2025 monthly average and 68.2% on FY2024. Three quarters into the fiscal year the running total had already reached 90.6% of FY2025’s full-year figure.

The limitation is worth stating plainly. EOIR’s published series ends at FY2026 Q3, which closes June 30, and the file was generated July 24. It therefore cannot confirm or refute the July figure in the reporting above, and the June total in a fiscal-quarter aggregate is not separable from that PDF. The bklg monthly numbers remain the only source for June and July specifically, and they are not government data. What the government’s own numbers do establish is the direction and the scale: a monthly in-absentia rate that has roughly doubled since FY2024 and was still climbing when EOIR last published.

Note also that a 54,000–56,000 month would run about 1.76× the FY2026 average — a sharp spike against an already-elevated baseline rather than a continuation of it. That is consistent with a step change when mega master calendars began, and it is exactly the claim an EOIR Q4 release would settle. Recheck the series after the fiscal year closes September 30.

On the corrected percentage. The capture ledger recorded this as a “60% surge.” That number appears nowhere in the reporting and understates it: NPR’s Miami figures are 1,383 (May) to 2,886 (July), which computes to +108.7%. The corrected figure is the more damning one, which is the usual result when a number is typed properly.