On Aug. 22, Chloe Dillon showed up at the San Francisco immigration court, as she had every day since being hired in September 2022. Nothing made her believe that, just a few hours later, she would be walking out the door with all her belongings and an order to never return. At 3:30 p.m., as she headed to her office during a break in the asylum case she was adjudicating, a three-sentence email from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) ended her career.
“I didn’t expect 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 care. And, of course, I wasn’t sure what would happen next 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 courthouse. Dillon was his family’s primary breadwinner, and because of his job they had health insurance. She still doesn’t understand why she was fired, as the email offered no explanation.
His is not an isolated case. In San Francisco alone, the Justice Department has fired seven judges since April, 25% of the total, and only about half of the 11 judges remain in the Sacramento courthouse. This area of California has been hit hard by the unexplained layoffs ordered by the Trump administration, which have occurred across the country. According to recent estimates from the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), of the nearly 800 immigration judges, 139 have been fired, accepted an early offer, or transferred involuntarily.
The pattern has been similar in many cases. In early September, the day before her two-year term in Virginia’s Annandale Immigration Court was set to expire, Judge Anam Petit received the notification on her computer. After seeing the message, she briefly left the courtroom where she was presiding over the hearing, then returned to the bench and, with a trembling voice and trembling hands, delivered a complex sentence without revealing what had happened, she told this newspaper by email. She can’t say for sure what the reason for her dismissal was, because she was never told, but she points out that many of the fired judges had experience defending immigrants.
In addition to firing officials responsible for immigration cases, in its first months the Trump administration also eliminated protections against deportation, canceled grants that provided legal representation to minors, and transferred detainees to remote locations, including prisons outside U.S. jurisdiction, thus transforming the immigration justice system to suit its purposes. All this was done in the name of 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 unlike the rest of the country’s judiciary, fall under the power of the executive branch. Although judges have always called for independence from government, they have never before denounced the politicization of their work. But since Trump took office, the administration has sent them directives 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 judicial independence and rule in every case according to the facts and the law. That is why it is confusing to receive so many memos and directives giving clear instructions on how judges should rule in particular cases,” explains Dillon.
The mass firings of judges, amid a backlog of 3.4 million cases in immigration courts, defy practical explanation. From within the judiciary, however, it is understood as a way to remove judges who disagree with the anti-immigration policies imposed by the Trump administration. “It appears that the vast majority of judges who were fired were either hired during the Biden administration or had experience practicing private law or with nongovernmental organizations assisting immigrants, rather than coming from a Department of Homeland Security judicial background,” Marks posits.
The work of immigration judges is very complex and in the past, to practice it, you needed to have at least 10 years of experience in the field of immigration. The fired judges are replaced by inexperienced ones and even by US 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 arrests and deportations.
Temporary staff 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 for temporary immigration judges by eliminating the need for prior experience in immigration law.
Express deportations
One of the most sweeping changes in the immigration justice system involves expedited deportations. Before Trump, these were reserved for migrants who entered the country illegally and were stopped at the border. Their deportation can now be ordered by an immigration officer; that is, they are not required to undergo a full legal process with an attorney before a judge.
Furthermore, these deportations have extended to people who have been living in the country for years and, contrary to the government’s claims that they are 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 was the practice followed by immigration judges before Trump. Now, for example, if someone entered on a student visa and overstayed their stay, they can be deported even if they married a U.S. citizen and are eligible for residency.
“The Trump administration is changing the interpretation of some legal terms that were well established in the past and, in doing so, preventing people from having full removal proceedings. Instead, it is subjecting them to expedited removal proceedings,” explains Marks.
Previously, people who were undocumented or even under deportation orders were not a government priority for deportation. They regularly showed up for immigration court appointments for routine check-ins. Now, court visits to comply with immigration requirements have become ambushes. ICE agents wait outside and detain people arriving for their appointments. Scenes of masked officials forcibly taking people away and separating parents from their desperately crying children have become commonplace.
Immigration court detentions have also changed the way lawyers work. “This is something new that we are seeing across the country: Immigration lawyers who have to prepare habeas corpus petitions for their clients who show up for their periodic reviews with ICE are worried that such interviews could end in detention,” explains Cristina Vélez, director of law and policy at Asista, an organization that advises and trains 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, broaden their skills, and find funding to do this work,” he adds.
Another radical change in immigration justice is the elimination of the ability for ICE detainees to be released on bail. Instead they are sent to detention centers in often remote places, where access to family and lawyers is almost impossible.
Added to all this is the lack of funding for the immigration justice system, something highlighted in 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, just 2.5% of what ICE and the Border Patrol receive.
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