DHS [Department of Homeland Security] attorney: “I am putting you on notice that the ACA [Asylum Cooperation Agreements] for Honduras and Ecuador apply.”

Immigration judge: “Counsel, you have two weeks to respond to DHS’s motion.”

Attorney: “Does that mean DHS is actually making a motion? Your Honor, how am I supposed to prepare a rebuttal if there is no written or verbal motion? How can I respond to the basis of a motion that DHS thinks that they might make? It’s either a motion or it’s not.”

Judge: “DHS is giving you the courtesy of notice.”

Attorney: “But that is not a thing. DHS either files or makes a motion or doesn’t.” 

Judge: “I will give you the opportunity to respond in writing or in person in two weeks.”

Attorney: “With respect, respond to what? This week it is Honduras and Ecuador. How can I effectively represent my client when, in two weeks without a formal motion, the next DHS attorney sitting at that table can decide on Uganda, Uzbekistan. or eSwatini?”

This last year, my students and I have been observing immigration court in southern California. On its face, the exchange was a procedural disagreement, but we would come to understand these exchanges as a struggle over whether the asylum seeker’s case would ever be heard on the merits. Such moments are part of a broader mechanism of pretermission, in which courts decline to reach the substance of an asylum claim and instead turn first to whether a person may be removed to a third country under the newly created Asylum Cooperation Agreements (ACAs).

From the gallery, master calendar hearings often appear to run on a script. Akin to an arraignment, they are typically brief and procedural; in a single session of thirty to sixty respondents, people are advised of their rights, pleadings are taken, forms of relief are identified, and future dates are set. However, in these ACA proceedings conducted during master calendar hearings, that script changes. Hearings that might otherwise read as routine become high-stakes, often moving forward with little time for preparation and, as the attorney in Santa Ana objected, without written notice. And rather than being asked to explain why they fear return to their country of origin, asylum seekers are called on to prove likely harm in a country—and sometimes a continent—where they have never lived or traveled.

Later that same day, a 30-year-old Guatemalan asylum seeker Eufemia confronted the consequences of this procedural narrowing on cross-examination:

Eufemia: “But I’ve never been to Ecuador. I don’t know anyone there. How am I going to find a lawyer to help me, or an apartment or a job?”

DHS: “If you’ve never been to Ecuador, how do you know you won’t be safe?” 

Eufemia: “Who will help me? I have no one there. I don’t have status there; they’ll send me back to Guatemala where I’ll be killed.”

DHS: “That’s why Ecuador is safer for you, is it not?”

Eufemia: “Safer than what? The United States? Guatemala?”

There are currently thirty-five countries with ACA agreements, including “safe third country” agreements, deportation bridge agreements, incarceration agreements, and other hybrids, with plans to expand to dozens more. Signed quietly in 2025, these agreements allow foreign governments to receive non-nationals in exchange for money, the lifting of visa restrictions, and other special treatment.

The following week, in a stuffy courtroom in north Los Angeles, the same logic reappeared, this time in a dispute over what the court could or could not take into account:

Attorney: “Your Honor, how does DHS plan to effectuate these agreements? There is no infrastructure in place to safely remove my client to Ecuador nor Honduras. Besides, as we have included in the record, experts agree that there is not a functioning asylum system in either country.” 

Immigration judge: “That is beyond the matter under consideration by the court.”

Some judges point to decisions like Matter of C-I-G-M & L-V-S-G- to describe those limits. In doing so, they explain that questions about whether the receiving country has a functioning asylum system, whether legal representation is realistically available there, or how DHS would effectuate removals in practice fall outside the scope of review.

Yet the practical and institutional limitations of those destinations are difficult to ignore. For many asylum seekers from Latin America, the proposed receiving countries are primarily Ecuador, Guatemala, or Honduras. Ecuador has agreed to accept 300 deportees; Honduras has agreed to 240 deportees over two years. Still others are being sent to Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. As of April 2026, fifteen thousand people had been ordered deported to third countries.

During a recess, while I stood in the hallway with two of my students, an attorney described her litigation strategy in pragmatic terms: “We are just trying to get our arguments in the record in the hopes that the Ninth Circuit will bring some reason and follow the law.” Her clients, a Peruvian couple and their two children, stood nearby. “It’s in God’s hands now,” the woman sighed. As the attorney explained, the family’s case required them to prepare arguments about fear of return to three countries they had never lived in before the court would hear the basis for their flight from Peru. Hardship alone was insufficient. “It’s a policy that ensures failure,” the attorney explained. To avoid the $1,030 USD fee to appeal the near-certain denial, she explained, her firm helps people prepare an appeal and instructs them to file it pro se in hopes of qualifying for a fee waiver.

Uncertainty itself is used against asylum seekers. They have no input into where they will be sent and, in many cases, receive no warning as to their final destination, even after boarding the flight. Instead, some choose to self-deport or decide not to return to court.

At the same time, judicial responses are not uniform. Some judges schedule ACA-related hearings with no notice or as little as two weeks, forcing no time for meaningful preparation. Other judges push such hearings months or even years into the future, a timeline that can look like quiet resistance to a growing list of administrative demands. For judges, however, these small exercises of discretion carry professional risk. Since Trump took office in 2024, one in seven immigration judges has been fired. Judges who once granted asylum in 40 to 50 percent of cases are now issuing denials by pretermission at rates of 90 to 95 percent.

The significance of these proceedings extends beyond ACA itself. In this context, pretermission joins a broader set of case-ending mechanisms, including in absentia orders, abandonment findings, and dismissals, that narrow access to substantive review while remaining relatively opaque to the public. One contribution of ethnographic courtwatching is to render such procedural shifts visible: to show how administrative practices framed as efficient responses to a 3.6 million-case backlog are experienced, contested, and unevenly applied in everyday court settings. What appears as docket management at the institutional level may determine for individual families whether a claim to protection is ever heard.

In February 2026, a federal judge in Boston ruled in D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security that immigrants must be given “meaningful notice before removal to any third country” and allow them time to raise a country-specific objection. While in between cases, a San Diego judge recently asked the DHS attorney if third country removals will return. The DHS attorney said, “I am not at liberty to say, but we will likely see them again soon.”