It’s no secret that America’s immigration court system is broken. The yearslong backlog of pending cases reached nearly four million in 2024 and continues to grow. A massive influx of judges would likely be needed to help whittle down that mountain of pending removal proceedings, asylum hearings and other immigration-related issues on the docket. The Trump administration agrees — but that has not stopped it from purging those judges it sees as too lenient, including eight who were fired in New York this week.
For context, the immigration court system isn’t a part of the Article III system of federal courts. It sits within the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. A recently launched ad campaign and website from the department — titled “You Be The Judge” — is seeking legal professionals who want to “help write the next chapter of America.” Troublingly, the department says that it’s looking for applicants to become a “deportation judge” to, as it screams in all caps, “DEFINE AMERICA FOR GENERATIONS.”
“Deportation judge” is not the job title listed on the official posting. But, of course, calling the people who preside over immigration courts “deportation judges” gives the impression that removal is the only correct outcome in the proceedings. Although they may be executive branch employees, immigration judges are still tasked with impartially hearing the evidence presented before ruling based on the law. Sitting under the authority of a chief immigration judge, more than 600 immigration judges around the country are each hearing hundreds of cases per day.
Their ranks were thinned on Monday, though, as eight immigration judges were dismissed from New York City’s immigration courts. The Trump administration offered no official reason for the firings. With those departures, the already overburdened court at 26 Federal Plaza is down to 26 judges, more than a quarter fewer than at the beginning of the year. This intensifies a situation that’s already fraught at the city’s three federal courthouses, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have taken to ambushing respondents showing up for their hearings.
According to The New York Times, before Monday’s removals “about 90 immigration judges had been fired this year across the United States, including six in New York City.” Officials with the National Association of Immigration Judges told the Times that “36 of the fired judges had been replaced nationwide, including two in New York.” While that might sound like a somewhat decent rate of replacement, there is still cause for concern.
As MS NOW correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez noted in August, a recent surge of federal funding for immigration matters managed to short-change the courts system, exacerbating its staffing shortage:
Some $3.3 billion in funding was approved for immigration courts in the megabill, but the law also placed a cap of 800 immigration judges — a number considered far too small to efficiently process the nearly 4 million pending immigration cases. Most experts say the system would need 2,000 to 3,000 judges to process the cases efficiently and fairly.
Funding for 200 additional immigration judges is nothing to sneeze at. As with the federal recruiting blitz at the Border Patrol and ICE, there are major financial bonuses on offer for those willing to join the administration. But it’s apparent the Justice Department has a specific type in mind to fill those seats.
The ad for “deportation judges” stresses that successful candidates will “make decisions with generational consequences” and “ensure that only aliens with legally meritorious claims are allowed to remain.” It also seeks people who want to “combat fraud and ensure those seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in our immigration system are not successful.” This rather than, say, worry about the reasons asylum seekers would cross the border. The ad reads like the LinkedIn version of the horrendous Blood and Soil-flavored propaganda the Department of Homeland Security has been spreading on its social media accounts.
This administration has repeatedly shown its contempt for due process in removal proceedings.
The backlog of millions of pending cases is a national embarrassment. But it at least represents an acknowledgement that under the law, people facing removal at least get their day in court. It doesn’t matter that Trump has dismissed those hearings as unnecessary, claiming that we “cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.” Immigrants still get to contest what the Supreme Court has over the past century called “the equivalent of banishment, a sentence to life in exile, loss of property or life or all that makes life worth living, and, in essence: a ‘punishment of the most drastic kind.’”
The administration’s purge of immigration judges and the Justice Department’s recruitment drive together represent something worrisome. This administration has repeatedly shown its contempt for due process in removal proceedings. By actively seeking to hire the type of people drawn to this rhetoric, the Justice Department is all but ensuring that its applicant pool is more inclined to rubber-stamp whatever removal orders ICE authorities present. In doing so, the administration is striking another blow against the rule of law – the very system that prevents American citizens from likewise being summarily banished.
