SAN FRANCISCO—The San Francisco Immigration Court is set to permanently close, according to a May 1 memo issued by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an agency within the Department of Justice (DOJ) that oversees immigration courts.

“It would be more cost effective to relocate its court operations at 100 Montgomery Street to the nearby Concord Immigration Court,” the memo states.

The court’s smaller location at 630 Sansome Street, which handles cases of people who have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, will continue operating until Sept. 4 and will then become a hearing location administered by the Concord court.

The San Francisco court formerly was an immigration hub with around 20 judges and a nearly 71 percent grant rate for asylum and other relief, much higher than the 47.9 percent nationwide. It now has two judges remaining.

More than 117,000 cases were are currently pending in the San Francisco Immigration Court, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC).

Most of these cases will be reassigned to the Concord court, which currently has four immigration judges and a case backlog of 58,980.

The Concord Immigration Court, which was established in February 2024, has a full capacity of 21 judges, according to an EOIR press release.

Milli Atkinson, a legal director at the Bar Association of San Francisco for a program providing free legal services to low-income immigrants in San Francisco, warned people who have a case pending in the closing court to pay attention to when and where their next hearing is scheduled.

“The longer term impact is the concern about fair and just adjudication of cases with so few judges remaining at the Concord and San Francisco courts,” Atkinson told The Epoch Times in an email. “We expect long delays and even larger backlogs.”

The decision to close the San Francisco court followed the firing of 12 of its judges in 2025, most of whom had asylum grant rates of around 90 percent.

Kyra Lilien, a former immigration judge at the Concord Immigration Court, was fired on July 22, 2025. She had a 65.8 percent grant rate, according to TRAC.

Lilien filed a lawsuit against the DOJ and Attorney General Todd Blanche on May 1 in federal court in San Francisco, accusing the DOJ of wrongful termination. The complaint alleges memos issued by the DOJ in early 2025 to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices were the reason for these terminations.

“Together, the memoranda laid bare management’s hostility to hiring individuals with immigrants’ rights backgrounds, women, ethnic minorities, and others who may be considered ‘DEI’ hires,” the complaint states.

Lilien worked for several immigration advocacy groups, including Centro Legal De La Raza and the Jewish Family and Community Services organization, before she was appointed as an immigration judge in 2023.

Sixteen other immigration judges who were dismissed around the same time as Lilien had backgrounds advocating for immigrants and immigrant rights before they were hired, including four judges in the San Francisco court and five in the Concord court, according to the complaint.

A DOJ spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the EOIR expects to bring in new classes of immigration judges at least every quarter.

Since Jan. 20, 2025, the EOIR has reduced its pending immigration caseload by more than 428,000 cases, bringing the caseload down to less than 3.55 million from more than 4.1 million, the sharpest such decrease in the EOIR’s history, according to the DOJ spokesperson.