This week, the Trump administration fired eight judges who worked in the immigration courts at 26 Federal Plaza, a site already made infamous in recent months by the federal agents who have lain in wait to arrest immigrants coming or going from court dates – including some who were seized after judges had dismissed the cases against them. These firings brought the total of immigration judges dismissed under Trump to about 90 nationwide, including several previously fired in New York City. There have been reports of judges here and elsewhere receiving news of their firings literally in the middle of immigration hearings.
This could seem as simply par for the course for an administration that both sees the federal bureaucracy as its own domain to shape at will and seems hell-bent on sowing administrative chaos. But a casual observer might have some other basic questions about this, including: “Wait, they can just do this, fire judges like that? And don’t we have some huge, years-long immigration court backlog that we need more, not fewer, judges to be able to clear?”
Before we really get into the meat of things, first we have to do some set up. The immigration court system, despite having the trappings of an independent judicial body — judges in robes, prosecutors and defendants (here called respondents) who may or may not be represented by attorneys, all in a courtroom with benches and a dais — is not actually part of the judiciary. Immigration judges are what are known as administrative judges, a category found in many state and federal agencies, where they handle administrative disputes. Immigration judges are part of an agency called the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) under the Department of Justice – part of the executive branch. That’s notably the same branch of the government prosecuting the case. And it’s the same branch that is right now devoting unprecedented resources to an immigration crackdown that I believe we could reasonably call an ethnic cleansing campaign – in the sense of ridding the U.S. of nonwhite immigrants.
Having immigration judges situated within the same chain of command that is in charge of enforcement means that they have long been subject to some level of political constraints, and, in the most stark cases, effective conscription into the executive branch’s enforcement efforts (in one notorious example, grant rates for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers were near zero as the Reagan administration supported right-wing governments in those countries in the 1980s). While the perils of this structure have long been a reality, most prior administrations have attempted to be at least a little subtle about the conflict of interest to avoid undermining the perceived legitimacy of the system. Judges were often selected by the attorney general on some level of ideological agreement, but agency leaders generally took pains to avoid looking like they were putting too heavy a thumb on the scales. Subtlety, though, is not really a quality often associated with Donald Trump and either of his administrations.
As I wrote during the first Trump term, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which is the appellate court within this administrative system, was reshaped and pushed to issuing decisions that created new precedents making immigration relief harder to win throughout the entire system. The attorney general acts as a sort of one-person supreme court within the immigration court system, and Trump’s picks, particularly Jeff Sessions, also issued significant precedent-setting decisions at a rate that far outpaced anything that happened in the past. When the immigration judges’ union — a somewhat bizarre outgrowth of these judges technically being executive branch employees like any other — complained about these changes, the administration moved to decertify it.
Rulings issued during Trump’s first term were certainly extreme, but as with much else surrounding his second term, what seemed unfathomable then seems almost quaint now. Trump and the person actually running policy out of the White House, namely Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, seem perfectly willing to wrench every immigration-related agency under their control, from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to EOIR, into just another enforcement arm for their totalizing immigration efforts. The problem with these efforts, a problem that they’ve run into in other parts of the government, is that these agencies are staffed by a lot of people who, whatever their underlying leanings might be, often see themselves as civil servants with a duty mainly to the law and the job’s core functions. Immigration judges have long approved asylum requests at wildly differing rates, but a good chunk still view themselves as impartial arbiters of the law in the way judges are intended to be – and that’s not what the administration wants.
The machinations of the BIA and the attorney general can act to make it harder for judges to grant asylum or other relief, but people like Miller essentially believe that the number of successful cases should be zero. So, if you can’t force the judges to come around, you get rid of them and replace them with your own hard-liners (including military lawyers detailed, probably illegally, to the immigration courts). Advocates and lawyers have noticed a pattern to the firings, which mostly have targeted judges who have at some point before their appointment represented or advocated for immigrants. This strategy seems to be paying off, with data compiled by the TRAC project at Syracuse University showing a significant acceleration of an existing downward trend in asylum grant rates, which were cut by more than half between August 2024 and August 2025, to below 20 percent.
This side of the immigration crackdown is, I think, flying somewhat under the radar, because it’s just not as flashy as the arrests and detentions that are taking place in the community, during raids and even in the immigration courts themselves. Yet this is very important: These courts have been a fundamental choke point for Miller’s deportation machine. Despite his best efforts, the administration hasn’t been able to easily get laws that unequivocally demand that most noncitizens be afforded removal hearings in which they have the right to seek redress and present evidence if they wish.
Having failed to sideline the courts, Miller clearly wants to make them more of a conveyor belt, a system where all judges do is rubber stamp the removals of the people his paramilitary agencies are arresting. This is another nail in the coffin of the idea that there is a meaningful “right way” that immigrants can obtain or maintain legal status. If the courts that adjudicate the validity of their claims have been replaced by loyalist bureaucrats, then what are they supposed to do? Many of the decisions by immigration court are not appealable to the actual federal courts, meaning that denials issued in completely bad faith and without a real shot at due process are typically final.
Perhaps the good news is that the administration seems to be hemorrhaging public support, and its mask-off moment with the immigration courts might build enough awareness and momentum to eventually imbue the system with some independence, as advocates have long clamored for, or make it a full Article III court in its own right. In the meantime, the immigration courts here in NYC are going to be getting less fair and probably more chaotic.
