Let's be clear about what an immigration court actually does: it's where people — many of whom have lived and worked in the Bay Area for years — get their day before a judge. It's where asylum claims are heard, deportation orders are reviewed, and legal arguments are made. It is, in theory, the system working as designed. Closing it doesn't make immigration enforcement more efficient. It makes due process harder to access.

And that should bother anyone who takes individual rights seriously.

The Trump administration has framed this as part of a broader consolidation effort, but consolidation is a bureaucratic euphemism that usually means "we're making it someone else's problem." Cases previously heard in San Francisco will now presumably be routed to other courts — courts already drowning in backlogs that stretch years. If you thought the immigration system was slow and dysfunctional before, congratulations, it just got worse.

Here's what fiscal conservatives should be asking: What's the actual cost analysis? Does shuttling cases to overburdened courts in other jurisdictions save money, or does it just shift expenses while creating new inefficiencies? When the government closes a courthouse but doesn't reduce the caseload, that's not streamlining — that's theater.

There's also the local economic angle. Immigration attorneys, translators, support staff, and the surrounding ecosystem of services that kept this court running — those jobs and dollars just evaporated from SF's economy.

We're not arguing for open borders here. We're arguing for something more basic: that the government should process its own legal obligations competently. If you want to enforce immigration law, you need functioning courts to do it. Closing them doesn't signal strength. It signals a system that's given up on its own procedures.

Due process isn't a partisan issue. Or at least it shouldn't be.