The Department of Justice shuttered a major San Francisco immigration court last week, a decision attorneys say could exacerbate the Bay Area’s immigration case backlog.

Early in the year, news reports emerged of the closure of the courthouse on 100 Montgomery Street slated for January 2027. Over the last year, the Department of Justice had fired 20 of the court’s 22 judges (the Trump administration has been accused of culling certain immigration judges, in favor of those more amenable to its ongoing mass deportation agenda).

The justice department’s executive office for immigration review (EOIR) described the court’s closure as “cost effective” in a statement last week. A smaller court in San Francisco remains open, but the majority of court operations will move to an immigration court 35 miles (56km) away in the East Bay city of Concord.

The Concord court opened in 2024 amid a Biden-era push to trim the ballooning immigration case backlog. As of September 2025, nationwide there are 3.75m pending immigration cases, according to data from the EOIR. In San Francisco, there are 120,000, per the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac), a research center at Syracuse University.

Some legal experts doubt the Concord court, where six judges were recently removed, has the capacity to inherit the closed San Francisco court’s caseload. A justice department spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

“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,” said Milli Atkinson, director of the San Francisco Bar Association’s immigrant legal defense program.

“These delays deeply affect people. They affect people’s ability to have resolution … to have an answer and closure, whether a positive one that they’d hoped for or a negative one,” said Shira Levine, a former judge at the San Francisco immigration court, who is now legal director for the Immigrant Institute of the Bay Area.

The passage of time could also weaken the presentation of a case.

At asylum hearings, people are “presenting a lot of oral testimony from themselves and from witnesses. Over years, testimonial memories can fade,” Levine said. “Even if you submit the written evidence, years later, someone may not be available to testify in support of that evidence.”

The San Francisco court’s closure coupled with the exodus of judges has sown “a lot of chaos”, Atkinson said. There are court dates being pushed back and others being pushed up as a result of recent changes.

Atkinson expects that there several individuals will fall through the cracks of the court system.

“A lot of migrants have unstable addresses or don’t receive their mail,” she said, also adding that notices in English may not be heeded by those who don’t speak or read it.

People could then be placed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s radar if they miss their hearings, Atkinson said.

“If someone gets the wrong date, gets the wrong time, gets the wrong place, doesn’t file something exactly correct … the consequences are in some cases – where they really do have a serious fear of return – life-threatening.”

• California dominates US housing costs, with 9 of 10 priciest metros; San Jose leads at $11,690/month.
• San Francisco and Los Angeles also rank high, requiring annual incomes of $358,090 and $301,221 respectively.
• Despite a slight decline in income requirements since 2025, affordability remains a distant dream for many.

From Silicon Valley to San Diego, the Golden State boasts nine of the 10 most expensive metropolitan areas in the US for homeowners, a new report revealed.

San Jose landed in the top spot, followed by San Francisco at No. 2 and Los Angeles at No. 5.

An analysis from ConsumerAffairs examined monthly home payments across 200 of the nation’s largest metro areas to determine the income needed to afford a home in each location.

In San Jose, that monthly cost came out to a staggering $11,690 — making it by far the the most expensive US metro for homeowners for the second year in a row.

Buyers now need to earn an eye-popping $501,012 in annual income to afford a typical property.

That figure dwarfs the city’s actual median household income of $164,801, exceeding it by a massive 204%, according to the report. It also far surpasses the national median household income of $81,604.

With a median home price of more than $1.55 million, ownership in the Silicon Valley city remains out of reach for most residents.

Nearby San Francisco ranked the second most expensive, with monthly housing costs at $8,355 and buyers needing to earn $358,090 annually to afford a home there, the analysis found.

In Los Angeles, monthly costs averaged $7,029, with buyers needing to earn $301,221.

The 10 most expensive metro areas in the US and their average monthly costs:

• 1. San Jose: $11,690
• 2. San Francisco: $8,355
• 3. Santa Cruz: $354,973
• 4. Santa Maria: $305,535
• 5. Los Angeles: $301,221
• 6. San Diego: $293,618
• 7. San Luis Obispo: $280,591
• 8. Oxnard: $276,805
• 9. Salinas: $262,403
• 10. Honolulu, Hawaii: $255,280

The only metro outside California to crack the top 10 was Honolulu.

The divide across the country is stark.

The gap between the income needed to buy a home in San Jose compared to Huntington, West Virginia, the most affordable metro in the analysis, stood at a staggering $447,362.

Despite the sky-high costs, there is a slight silver lining: Income requirements in each of the top 10 cities in the ranking declined more than the average national drop of 3.2% since 2025.

Still, affordability remains a distant dream for many Americans.

The last time a typical US household could comfortably follow the 28% rule — spending no more than 28% of income on housing — was in 2015, when incomes exceeded required levels by just 0.4%.

Today, buyers need 48% more income than the median household earns nationwide.

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Most Saturday mornings, I stroll half a mile downhill from my tiny apartment in a bosky part of San Francisco to a farmers market. My usual reverie of anticipation (about carrots with their tops attached, about the price of berries) was interrupted recently by the sight of three bodies.

That is, I thought of them as bodies; it was not evident whether they were alive or dead. All lay splayed on the sidewalk, one a couple blocks from my home, the other two, blocks apart, closer to the market, itself located in a neighborhood where need is evident. (Food stamps are often the tender for buying produce.) The bodies belonged to shabbily but fully dressed men — except one man, who was missing a shoe. Maybe the men are sleeping, I thought, or unconscious from drink or drugs. Or maybe they are dead. Nobody walking by — including me — slowed down to pay attention to them, beyond a glance.

For decades, encountering such a scene, I used to stop, then wait to see a leg twitch, a chest rise. I rarely do even that anymore. In high school, I had read with shock that poor people in India, people with no home, slept on the sidewalk, while others just walked by. How awful of those others, I remember thinking. How could they live with themselves? The reproach has come home. We’ve gotten used to homelessness — the homelessness of others.

I guessed the three men on that recent Saturday had no homes, but from many years interviewing a formerly homeless man who is now a civic leader in San Francisco, I learned not to rush to conclusions. Del Seymour, today known locally as the mayor of the Tenderloin, taught me that a man lying with his eyes closed on a sidewalk may have a home, but perhaps was interrupted by temptation or a medical situation on his way there. I also learned from Del, to my initial shock, that some homeless people work full-time jobs. I’ve learned a lot about homelessness, mostly from him, but also from my daily Google alert for the word in the news.

Because those alerts are so rarely encouraging, one seeming spark of good news recently stood out. In Los Angeles County, according to newly released statistics about 2024, the number of deaths among the homeless population decreased from 2023. Yay! I thought. The myriad programs are working! Whether naloxone intervention or tiny houses or new shelters or other efforts (free job training like Del initiated in San Francisco?) are to praise, I felt a surge of hope. Then I read more closely.

Deaths among unhoused individuals in L.A. County had fallen in 2024 not to 100 or so, as I naively hoped, but to 2,208. A trend in the right direction, yes. A cause for celebration, no.

Far too many people know firsthand the emotional and physical grind of homelessness. Virtually all other Californians know it secondhand and have probably asked themselves the same question: What is a (presumably well-meaning) housed person to do in response to the sight of an unhoused person, not to mention many unhoused people? I know of a nurse in San Francisco who screeches her car to a stop when she spots a person in bodily distress and administers CPR if appropriate. I admire her action, but doubt I could replicate it.

Granted, my own main and stubborn response, to spend nearly a decade writing a book about the subject in the hope it will have a helpful impact, is not a route available or attractive to many. And shorter term efforts, such as volunteering at local nonprofits, certainly have more immediate results. One common impulse, in which I take part, if insufficiently and awkwardly, is to give someone food or money, or call 911 when someone clearly needs help.

Yet any pedestrian, especially any female pedestrian, will attest that the impulse to help someone on the sidewalk becomes more challenging if that someone is awake, and male. Will an offering lead to a spit, a scream, a chase? Should we avoid eye contact and walk on? Not necessarily.

What I’ve learned from Del is to offer something that may mean more than a dollar or a sandwich: Say hello.

Acknowledge the person whose face is several feet below your own. This individual is part of a family, “somebody’s son, somebody’s auntie,” Del’s litany goes, and remains a human being. Remind yourself of that. More importantly, remind them. Del adds: Don’t stop if the person seems “nuts,” his enjoyed foray into politically incorrect phrasing. Otherwise, slow down for a few seconds, maybe longer. At some point, over time, and the same route, you might recognize one another and actually have a conversation. Meanwhile, keep it basic, but say something.

I obey. Often, just “Hi.”

Almost always comes an incalculably generous reward: a smile and a greeting returned. Humbled, I move on, again resolved not to let our unhoused neighbors feel invisible, nor to forget that homelessness is, among other adjectives, abnormal.

Alison Owings is the author of “Mayor of the Tenderloin: Del Seymour’s Journey From Living on the Streets to Fighting Homelessness in San Francisco.”