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Last week, the Justice Department’s move to fire at least eight immigrant judges, including four from California, has heightened fears that Democratic leaders, academics and the Trump administration lack legitimate process protection for immigration.
“These shots were meaningless,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Specialist Engineers, a union representing 700 international immigrant judges. “When you do simple mathematics, each judge does 500-700 cases a year. Most of them are deportation cases. So what he effectively did is he has increased the already huge backlog facing immigration courts.”
According to the Judges Coalition, the Immigration Examination Office, which operates the immigration court system, fired at least 20 immigration judges and supervised judges in May, including five from California courts. The administration also eliminated five leadership positions in the EOIR and eliminated nine immigration committee judges appointed under Biden. 85 specialist court staff, including 19 judges, interpreters, legal assistants and IT specialists, went shopping after receiving a “road fork” email to federal workers “deferred resignation.”
In a memo sent after the shooting in February, Acting EOIR Sirce E. Owen said the immigration judge did not have the previously given “layers of multiple removal restrictions” or civil service protections.
She referred to a statement from Justice Department Chief Chad Mizzell that she is restoring “accountability” “to ensure that executive officers answer the president and people.”
“They are not elected and unable to explain the constitutionally (administrative law judges) have been using enormous force for too long,” Miser said.
Biggs speculated that a judge appointed to replace those who left could become “political loyalists.”
“They don’t control the case the way Donald Trump wants them to control, so are they going to fire an immigration judge? He asked, “It’s easy to see a scenario where it could happen.”
Thirteen judges who were on probation status submitted a class appeal to Atlanta’s U.S. Merit System Protection Board, alleging they were unfairly fired.
The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
Unlike federal district courts, immigration courts lack the same level of judicial independence, and their decisions could ultimately be overturned by the US Attorney General, but previous administrations did not use that power widely, said Allison Peck, author of “The Contingent History of the U.S. Immigration Courts: Roots of War, Fear, and Disability.”
Legal scholars say changes should be viewed against the greater background to the administration’s efforts to speed up the removal of immigration. This month, Eoir called on the judge to end an asylum case in which applications were deemed “legally shortages.” Policy memos allow judges to handle and close quickly without hearing.
“They are experimenting with different ways to expel immigrants,” said Sameer Ashar, professor of clinical law at UC Irvine. He pointed to three recently detained college students who were taken to a remote detention center in Louisiana. The administration last month called wartime laws to deport dozens of individuals allegedly members of Venezuelan gangster Tren de Aragua to El Salvador last month.
“We should consider all these efforts to be experimental. We strive for the entire system in our efforts to bring rapid removal to all systems,” Ashar said. “It’s part of the administration’s attack on extending the legitimate process on immigration in the US.”
President Trump told White House reporters Tuesday that undocumented immigrants should not be tried before being deported.
“We have them out, we know, and we hope we get help from the courts because we have thousands of people ready to go out.
Comments followed a social media post Monday, assaulting him in the Supreme Court after he issued a similar statement, ordering a temporary suspension on alien deportation under the enemy laws.
“We can’t give anyone a trial because it takes 200 years without exaggeration to do so,” he wrote. “The hundreds of thousands of illegals we send abroad will need hundreds of thousands of trials. That’s not possible.”
Immigration courts have been bottlenecked by 3.7 million pending lawsuits. In California, there are around 400,000 pending cases when three judges have the state’s largest backlog in San Francisco, where three judges have been removed, and three other judges are the second largest in Concord, where they have been removed, according to the Syracuse University TRAC database.
The backlog says Lora Reese, director of the Conservative Heritage Foundation’s Border Guard and Immigration Center, is part of the numerous hearings and expansions related to immigration cases that can be dragged out for years. The administration has the right to quickly track them down, she said.
“The amount of due process that deportable aliens get is excessive, what I say,” she said.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Jamie Ruskin (D-MD), a member of the Senate and House Judiciary Committee, together with dozens of other Democrats, urged the administration to reverse the course of letters sent in March. They asked us atty. General Pam Bondi explained the administration’s logic of fired so many judges, and explained it to lay out the depth of cuts within the institution.
Lawmakers write that the absence of experienced assistant chief judges harms the most pressing court cases, including further delaying the remaining surviving Mexican immigrants in Mexican policies, such as those dealing with detained individuals, families, children, and those dealing with the credible fear of returning to their home country.
“These changes will reduce the quality of immigration cases decisions and the speed at which immigration cases are awarded,” the letter states. One of the judges fired was in the middle of an asylum hearing and received notification via email, but had to suddenly leave the case, the letter said.
Bondy has not yet responded, according to representatives from Durbin and representatives of Sen. Alex Padila, a ranking member of the Senate Judicial Immigration Subcommittee.
“This is another tactic in the Trump administration’s anti-immigration, mass abolition agenda, and attempts to restructure the immigration system, including refusing to legitimate procedures by increasing delays for individuals waiting for a day in court,” Padilla said in a statement in the Times. “The courts have long struggled to keep up with an increasing number of cases due to political interference, and this recent termination of immigration judges and professional staff only exacerbate the issue.”
Within the court system, people are nervous, Kelly Doyle said. Doyle, appointed during the Biden administration as an immigration and customs lawyer, was about to complete a one-year judge training program in Massachusetts when she received an email in February saying she was being let go.
Before being selected as a judge, she was the target of a conservative group. The American Accountability Foundation, a project of the Heritage Foundation, has been placed on the “DHS Bureaucratic Watchlist,” which aims to expose Doyle in its career staff in “leagues with open border groups on the left.”
“My fired really hit other judges in my old court,” she said. “People are doing really, really difficult jobs and working really hard. If you’re not there yet, it’s very difficult to do your job when you’re not sure every day, or when you feel like things are happening and you don’t know why what’s going on, it’s very difficult to do your job.”
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