Shortage of immigration judges could slow down Trump deportation goals : NPR

Dozens of immigration courts around the country are facing vacancies, creating potential bottlenecks to proper due process for people President Trump wants to deport.

The Trump administration fired over two dozen immigration judges during the president’s first month in office.

Those firings come on top of the 100 people who were laid off, decided to retire early, or took advantage of offers to resign within immigration courts. The judicial vacancies exacerbate millions of backlogged cases already piled up in those immigration courts.

Labor and immigration advocates are raising questions over how an already over-subscribed court system is supposed to facilitate Trump’s mass deportation goals.

“It takes over a year for these immigration judges to actually get into the job, get hired, get trained,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a union which represents immigration judges. “Most of these judges that were fired were ready to take the bench.”

The Trump administration has sought to reassign and fire officials at the Justice Department who investigated Trump himself or were seen as not being aligned with the administration’s goals. Some of the laid off immigration judges had been hired at the tail end of the Biden administration, though Biggs said the selection process is not political.

Immigration judges, which work out of the Justice Department, were also allowed to take the offer to resign — something that personnel across other parts of immigration law enforcement were not allowed to do.

“It begs the question of: does this administration believe that the immigrants deserve their due process?” Biggs asked. “It’s limited due process, albeit, but it’s due process.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, the immigration judge division at the Justice Department, declined to comment on personnel matters. It referred questions about the deferred resignation program to the Office of Personnel Management, which also declined to comment.

“EOIR is currently reviewing applications and interviewing candidates from the last vacancy announcement for Immigration Judges,” the Justice Department says on its website, which was last updated February 26. “While the agency does not currently have an open advertisement for Immigration Judge positions, it expects to announce additional vacancies in the next few months.”

There are about 700 immigration judges across the country’s 71 immigration courts and adjudication centers. These judges are the only ones who can revoke someone’s green card and issue a final order of removal for those who have been in the country for more than two years and are in the deportation process.

When someone is put in removal proceedings, they do not have the right to a lawyer, but they do have the right for someone to hear their case as to why they should not be removed. That can include asylum claims, or other measures to withhold or cancel deportation.

But immigration law experts warn that the system is already backed up. Judges review on average 500 to 600 cases a year. Still, there were 4 million pending cases in the last quarter of 2024, including nearly 1.5 million asylum cases. In fiscal year 2024, immigration courts issued only 666,177 initial case decisions.

Of the judges who were fired, five were in Texas — a state with one of the largest backlogs of cases.

Late last month, over two dozen Democratic senators and representatives wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi raising concerns about the firings. They said that just the terminations of 40 assistant chief immigration judges, which oversee operations of immigration courts, left about a quarter of immigration courts “without appropriate or established leadership or additional judges to preside over immigration matters.”

Some argue the firings were politically motivated

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association trade group, said the immigration case backlog originates from both the former Obama and Trump administrations, when there was a focus on enforcement.

More investment from Congress into law enforcement agents outpaced the investment in the court system that processes the arrests, he said.

“Firing judges, getting rid of personnel and making ideologically-driven choices for the courts is not going to make the cases run more efficiently through the immigration courts. In fact, it will slow it down,” Chen said.

One judge who was fired was Kerry Doyle, who formerly served as the principal legal adviser for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which prosecutes immigration cases. She was later at the DHS Office of General Counsel during the Biden administration.

Doyle was one of 13 judges who were fired right before they officially took the bench.

“I was excited to do the job,” Doyle told NPR, noting that it would have taken her back to her home state of Massachusetts. “I was hopeful that they would prioritize keeping immigration judges. And really the need is to hire more immigration judges and more immigration prosecutors to make the system work more efficiently.”

Doyle, who served as a political appointee at ICE under Biden, sees her firing as politically driven.

“I didn’t think it would just be two months,” she said.

Concerns about politics predate Trump

In addition to the exodus of immigration judges, over 100 staff members that included schedulers, lawyers and interpreters were also let go, according to the union.

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment about whether politics played a role in any firings.

Concerns over the White House’s influence on immigration courts are not new.

During former President Joe Biden’s term, Republicans in Congress questioned when at least six judges were terminated.

At the time, the firings, which also included probationary employees, was seen as an unprecedented political “ouster.”

An inspector general memo investigating whether any firings or hirings during Biden’s tenure had been politically motivated concluded that there was not sufficient evidence that the Justice Department had engaged in systemic favoring or disfavoring of immigration judge candidates to warrant a full investigation.

The memo did take issue with parts of the hiring process dating back to the first Trump administration. It identified “decreased transparency” in how applicants are selected for interviews.

And in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft cut judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals — firings that advocates argued were done on the basis of the judges’ potential biases, an accusation officials denied at the time.