On Aug. 22, Chloe Dillon showed up at the San Francisco immigration court as she had every day since she was hired in September 2022. Nothing made her think that, hours later, she would have to walk out the door with all her belongings and be prohibited from reentering. At 3:30 p.m., as she headed to her office in the middle of the asylum case she was reviewing, a short, three-sentence email from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) ended her career.
“I didn’t expect not to be able to finish the hearing that day. It saddened me to leave a job to which I had dedicated so much effort and love. And, of course, I wasn’t sure what would happen in my life,” she recalls in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS. He had an hour and a half to gather his things and leave the courtroom. Dillon was the primary source of income for his family, who had health insurance through his job. She still doesn’t understand why she was fired, since the email provides no explanation.
Your case is not isolated. In San Francisco alone, the Justice Department has fired seven judges since April, 25% of the total, and only half remain in the Sacramento court. This area of California has been hit hard by the unexplained layoffs that the Administration ordered and which have occurred across the country. According to recent calculations by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), of the nearly 800 immigration judges in attendance, approximately 139 have been fired, transferred or retired.
The pattern has been similar in many cases. In early September, one day before her two years in immigration court in Annandale, Virginia, was due to expire, Judge Anam Petit received the notification on her computer. After seeing the message, he briefly left the room where he was attending the hearing, then returned to the witness stand and, with a shaking voice and hands, dictated a complex oral sentence without revealing what had happened, according to an email. He cannot say for sure what the reason for his dismissal was, because it was never explained to him, but he points out that many of the dismissed judges had experience defending immigrants.
In addition to firing officials responsible for immigration cases, in its first months in office, Donald Trump’s administration eliminated protections against deportation, canceled grants that provided legal representation to minors, and moved detainees to remote locations, including prisons outside U.S. jurisdiction, thereby transforming the immigration justice system at will. All this in the name of carrying out the largest deportation in history.
“The Trump administration’s policies, including expedited removal proceedings and politicized interpretations of asylum laws, have led to a lack of due process,” says Dana Leigh Marks, who was an immigration judge in San Francisco for 35 years and is now retired.
Marks has for years supported the independence of immigration judges who, contrary to popular belief and the rest of the country’s judiciary, are subject to the executive branch. Although the judges have always asked to be separated from the Government, until now they have never denounced the politicization of their work. But since Trump arrived, the administration has sent them guidelines, forcing them to speed up processing and dismiss asylum cases.
“Judges should act independently and not receive instructions or orders on how to rule in cases. This was the policy under the previous administration: to rigorously exercise the independence of the judiciary and judge in every case according to the facts and the law. That is why it is confusing to receive so many memorandums and directives giving clear directions on how judges should rule in particular cases,” explains Dillon.
Massive layoffs of judges, when immigration courts have a backlog of 3.4 million cases, cannot be explained in practical terms. From the judicial field, however, it is understood as a way to remove judges who do not agree with the anti-immigration policy that the Trump government has imposed. “It appears that the vast majority of judges who were fired were either hired during the Biden administration or had experience in private legal practice or in nongovernmental organizations helping immigrants, rather than coming from a Department of Homeland Security judicial background,” Marks argues.
The work of immigration judges is very complicated and in the past, to do it, you needed to have at least 10 years of practice in the field of immigration. The dismissed judges are replaced by others with no experience and by Army lawyers.
On October 24, the Department of Justice announced the hiring of 11 permanent and 25 temporary immigration judges. Most people with immigration experience gained it as prosecutors or worked for the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agencies responsible for detentions and deportations.
The temps include military lawyers from the Marine Corps, Navy, Army and Air Force. Earlier this summer, the Pentagon authorized about 600 military lawyers to work for the Justice Department, thus changing the requirements to be a temporary immigration judge by eliminating the need for prior experience in immigration law.
Express deportations
One of the most sweeping changes in the immigration justice system has to do with expedited deportations. Before the current Administration, they were reserved for migrants who entered the country illegally and were detained at the border. Your deportation may be ordered by an immigration officer; That is, you don’t have to go through a full trial, with a lawyer, in front of a judge.
Now, these deportations have been extended to people who have been in the country for years and, contrary to what the government claims, which is expelling criminals, most of the deportees do not have criminal records. Many of them have no legal status, but could be eligible for immigration benefits if they were allowed to stay while their cases are resolved, which is the trend followed by immigration judges before Trump. Now, for example, if someone entered on a student visa and stayed longer than necessary, according to the Administration he can be deported, even if he married a US citizen and as a result has the possibility of obtaining residency.
“The Trump administration is changing the interpretation of certain legal terms that have been well established in the past and, through this change, is preventing people from having full removal proceedings. Instead, it is subjecting them to expedited removal proceedings,” explains Marks.
Previously, those who were in an irregular situation or even had a deportation order were not a priority for the government to deport. They regularly attended immigration court appointments for periodic checks. Now, court visits to comply with immigration requirements have become ambushes. ICE agents wait at doors and detain those who show up for their appointments. Scenes of masked officials forcibly taking people away and separating parents from their desperately crying children have become commonplace.
Arrests in immigration courts have also changed the way lawyers work. “This is something new that we’re seeing across the country: immigration lawyers having to prepare petitions habeas corpus for their clients who participate in periodic reviews with ICE due to the possibility that these interviews will end in detention,” explains Cristina Vélez, director of law and policy at Asista, an organization dedicated to providing advice and training to professionals, including lawyers who defend migrant victims of abuse and domestic violence.
“As the scope of detention law enforcement has expanded dramatically and reached people who previously would not have been detained, our members and professionals, who previously did not specialize in federal court litigation, now must train, expand their skills, and find funding to do this work,” he adds.
Another of the most sweeping changes in immigration justice is that the ability for people detained by ICE to be released on bail has been eliminated. Instead, they are sent to detention centers in often remote destinations, where access to family and lawyers is nearly impossible.
Added to all this is the lack of funding for the immigration justice system, as highlighted by an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute published this week. While immigration enforcement agencies have received massive budget increases in recent decades – most recently $170 billion over four years through Trump’s tax reform – immigration courts have received a small fraction of that total: $844 million this year, 2.5% of what ICE and the Border Patrol receive.
