Josue hoped an asylum hearing could free him. Then it was canceled.

Editor’s note: If you’d like to read more about Josue Alvarado’s case, you can click this link: “In the U.S. Western District of New York, your judge may matter more than your immigration case.”

Juliana Alvarado sat on the large couch in her living room, her curtains drawn. Her eyes had been red, but now she was sitting forward and still, her voice collected and bright. Her youngest son, still in preschool, played quietly nearby. 

Her phone rang. A cheerful ringtone cut through the dark room. She picked up the call. 

A peppy voice recording played in English as she answered the phone, advising friends and family of detainees to add the detention phone number as a contact. 

Then, she heard her oldest son’s voice. 

“Hello, papi,” said Juliana, in Spanish.

Josue had been held at the Batavia Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility for nearly three months. It was early in the afternoon of May 1, a few hours after the scheduled asylum hearing she had hoped would set him free. But the hearing never happened. 

It was the first time she had talked to Josue that day. 

Josue knew his hearing had been cancelled, but he didn’t know why. 

She told him what she knew: Josue’s asylum hearing had been scheduled for 10 a.m. on May 1. But at 9 a.m., Josue’s lawyer, Jose Perez, wrote to her, asking what had happened. Did Josue sign anything? Juliana didn’t think so. She’d talked to her son the night before. Josue had promised not to sign any papers without talking to Juliana or Perez. 

Somehow, in the hours since she’d last talked to him, her son’s case had been canceled, a deportation order was placed against him. Josue had thirty days to appeal. The deportation order nullified the work Josue’s family had done to obtain asylum since they arrived in the United States in 2024.

“Jose [Perez] told me we had to appeal because this is illegal,” Juliana told Josue. “They never gave you a chance to be heard.” 

At first, Juliana thought that her son’s case had been canceled in retaliation. Central Current wrote about Josue the night before the motion was filed. However, it soon became clear that Josue had been swept up in a larger trend: the mass cancellation of asylum cases before evidence can be presented at a hearing, officially known as pretermission. 

Juliana and Josue didn’t know what that meant. 

Pretermission used to be a rare occurrence, but it has spiked dramatically in the last year. In January 2025, there were 60 motions to pretermit nationwide. One year later, in January 2026, there were more than 17,000. 

“Pretermission really is a huge trend,” said Greg Fay, an immigration attorney and the chair of the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s Asylum and Refugee Committee. “And I think this idea that folks would have their day in court has shifted.” 

In the past, a judge might have pretermitted a case only if an asylum claim was submitted without substantive answers about why a person was seeking asylum, wrote Lisa Koop, the national director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center, in an email to Central Current. 

However, a September 2025 decision from the Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA) gave judges explicit permission and encouragement to pretermit asylum cases. That lead to a groundswell of pretermissions across the country. 

Josue is not the only client of Perez to see an asylum case pretermitted. 

Perez said that in his experience, judges across the country almost always granted motions to pretermit. 

“It’s part of the political general campaign of deporting everyone,” Perez said, calling the practice “illegal and unconstitutional.” 

Out of about 100 asylum cases Perez was supposed to argue in the last six months, about 60 to 70 percent have been pretermitted, he estimated. That holds true for detainees, like Josue, and people outside detention, Perez said. Some of his clients have been deported or chosen to self-deport after their asylum cases were pretermitted, Perez said. They can’t — or don’t want to — wait anymore. 

“They’re just part of the detention machine now,” Perez said.

Even so, Josue’s place is held at home. 

Josue’s bed is still made. His school papers are stored in a corner of the closet, just above his clothes: sweatpants, a winter coat, and a plaid shirt hang neatly beside his brother’s things. 

The family’s finances have adjusted to Josue’s detainment. Juliana has worked out a financial system with her husband, Josue’s stepdad. He pays the bills. She pays for Josue’s legal fight.

“This system is insanity,” she texted Central Current one day. “I just trust God that he’s going to get Josue out of there.”

While they tried to figure out why his case had been canceled, Josue and Juliana scrambled to figure out how to ensure he stayed in the state and the country. 

Juliana said she regretted going to work that day, where she didn’t have her phone to pick up calls. She called the judge’s decision to pretermit the case a “chasco,” a Spanish word that can refer to either a disappointment or a trick. 

The day that Josue’s case was pretermitted, a guard came by with a form that said he was eligible for bail. Josue and Juliana tried to figure out if it was real. 

“What I don’t want is for them to move you to another state,” said Juliana. 

“Yeah, but that takes time,” said Josue. “That takes like two weeks.” 

“Okay,” said Juliana. “Well I am going to start making moves and see if we can request bail. And we need to see how much they are going to be asking for. I hope it is accessible. Maybe we can pawn something to pay.”

To appeal the pretermission decision, Juliana had to pay $1,030 to the federal government. She created raffle baskets, selling about 130 tickets. A friend sold them at her nail salon, and Juliana’s church helped. While Juliana’s church is full of Spanish speakers, most of them are Puerto Rican, U.S. citizens. 

Within weeks, Juliana was able to raise the money and file the application.

Over the next month, she realized the decision to pretermit Josue’s case had not been targeted, as she had feared. It was part of a larger pattern. 

“Since 2025, the BIA has issued dozens of decisions that are in relation to asylum, and each one narrows the relief in some way,” said Fay. 

Asylum is governed by complex laws that require applicants to fit into a narrow set of requirements. One piece of asylum law is key to pretermission. To qualify for asylum, a migrant must be persecuted either by their government or by a group that the government is “unable or unwilling” to control. 

If asylum seekers fail to meet that requirement, they are ineligible for asylum in the U.S. Judges have broad discretion to determine eligibility, lawyers said. There is no recourse other than to appeal. 

Josue’s case begins in Ecuador, where he’s from. Juliana was the “lead” in their case, since all three of her sons entered the U.S. as minors. 

In Ecuador, Juliana was a hairdresser. She owned her own small business out of her house. 

One day, members of a gang went to her house demanding “la vacuna,” or a fee to protect them from violence, she said. They demanded $550 per week, according to the asylum case. Juliana couldn’t pay, and she refused, she said. 

Then the threats started, she said. If she refused to pay, the gang would shut down her business and kill Juliana or her sons, they told her. 

After a month, gang members started to circle the house and surveil the Alvarado family’s movements, Juliana said. One day, they showed up with guns and the family hid. Juliana’s mother told the gang members that Juliana and her family were not there, and they pushed the old woman around, threatening her as well, Perez said.

The Alvarados decided to flee. They traveled north through the Darien Gap, then waited in Mexico for months so they could enter the U.S. legally through the CBP One app. They sold candy in the streets to pay their expenses, Juliana said. 

When they first got to the U.S., they had immigration parole and a claim to asylum. At the time, it seemed unlikely they would be detained. The United Nations condemns the detention of asylum seekers. But in 2025, things changed. The Trump administration cancelled CBP One recipients’ paroles and began detaining asylum seekers.

Josue, who was already researching the possibility of getting a student visa to study biochemistry, was swept up in that national trend. ICE picked him up as he unlocked the door to his job at Popeye’s, according to footage seen by Central Current. 

The U.S. government can argue that the Alvarados would not meet asylum requirements because it was not the Ecuadorian government that was persecuting them, Perez explained. They left without filing a police complaint and had not given the Ecuadorian police a chance to fail to protect them, Perez said. 

Perez believes this would be the judge’s argument for why he permitted the case. 

The pretermission decision didn’t explain any of that. All Perez got — and all he was able to send to Juliana — was a sheet that said that the judge granted the U.S. government’s motion for pretermission, and that Josue was ordered deported to Ecuador. 

The U.S. government could have made the same argument in court even if the case had proceeded as normal. Then Perez would have had a chance to argue that Ecuador’s government was consistently failing to protect people from gang violence and extortion. 

Either way, Juliana feels certain that a return to Ecuador at this point could kill her son. 

“Don’t sign anything,” she told Josue on the phone. “If they find out you are coming home from the United States, that is guaranteed kidnapping or killing. So tell them no. You’re not going anywhere. Your parents live here. We live here.”

Usually, a judge has to give the asylum seeker’s lawyer 10 days to respond to a motion to pretermit. Josue’s case was pretermitted in hours, Perez said. Government lawyers filed a motion to pretermit the application the night before Josue’s scheduled hearing. Perez assumed he would get a chance to respond, but the motion was granted just before trial. He did not get a chance to put his arguments on the record. 

The judge told Perez they did not want to prolong Josue’s detention, so they did not provide Perez the typical 10 days to respond to the motion, Perez said. 

“You’re telling me that you’re not going to give me a chance to defend my client because you’re concerned about his detention, but yet you don’t want to release him?” said Perez.

Once a case is pretermitted, the asylum seeker has thirty days to appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. 

Juliana knew immediately that she would appeal. 

“It’s my son,” she said.

The BIA is currently unlikely to grant appeals, said Fay. Last year, the bureau sent out a policy memorandum explicitly encouraging pretermission for effective docket management. 

All three lawyers said that relief would likely come from a federal circuit court after the BIA fails to grant an appeal. 

“We are just waiting for a decision from a federal court to say that it’s illegal,” Perez said. 

Juliana has yet to hear back — on either the asylum case or on Josue’s habeas corpus filing. 

However, she did hear Josue was not actually eligible for parole. On May 19, the judge sent Perez and Juliana a form with a signature and a checked box indicating that since Josue was an “arriving alien,” the court did not have jurisdiction to redetermine custody. 

As she talked to Josue on the phone on May 1, then completely in the dark about why his case had been cancelled, she told him to keep his faith. 

“I am not losing my faith. We shouldn’t lose our faith,” Juliana told Josue. “I know sometimes we might want to solve things quickly, but sometimes that is not a viable path. The harder the path, the bigger the victory. As I told you, I am going to fight to the very end. To the very end to get you out of there.” 

She told him she was going to keep talking to lawyers, her voice breaking as she started to cry. 

“Stay calm,” Josue said. 

“Yeah, I am staying calm,” she said. “All in all, I am calm.”