SAN FRANCISCO — The Department of Justice closed a major immigration court at 100 Montgomery Street in San Francisco last week and is moving the majority of operations to a smaller immigration court 35 miles away in the East Bay city of Concord. A smaller court in San Francisco remains open.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review described the closure as "cost effective" in a statement last week. Earlier this year, reports emerged that the 100 Montgomery Street courthouse was slated to close in January 2027.

Over the last year, the DOJ had fired 20 of the court's 22 judges. At the Concord immigration court, which opened in 2024 during a Biden administration effort to trim the immigration case backlog, six judges were recently removed.

As of September 2025, there are 3.75 million pending immigration cases nationwide, according to data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review. In San Francisco, there are 120,000 pending immigration cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association's immigrant legal defense program, said the reduced bench in Concord would extend wait times. "With so few judges at the Concord court, we're going to see a lot of people waiting years and years and years to have their cases heard," she said.

Shira Levine, legal director for the Immigrant Institute of the Bay Area, said long delays could affect asylum proceedings that rely on live witnesses. "At asylum hearings, people are presenting a lot of oral testimony from themselves and from witnesses," Levine said. "Even if you submit the written evidence, years later, someone may not be available to testify in support of that evidence," she added.

Court dates are being pushed back and others are being moved earlier following the recent changes. Atkinson said notification of those changes posed a particular problem for migrants. "A lot of migrants have unstable addresses or don't receive their mail," she said. Some migrants may not heed notices in English if they cannot speak or read English.