On a Friday afternoon in early September, Anam Rahman Petit sat in the Annandale immigration court in Virginia, ready to announce an oral decision on a complex family asylum case. Then, she got an email. It was a notice from the director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)—the Department of Justice’s agency that oversees the immigration courts—terminating her appointment as an immigration judge and instructing Petit to hand in all of her government property by the end of the day.
Nowhere in the email did it mention the reason she was being fired just short of completing two years on the bench and finishing her probationary period. Petit briefly stepped outside the courtroom and texted the bad news to her husband. Without waiting for a response, she put her phone in her robe’s pocket and walked back in to deliver the ruling. As she did, Petit remembers her voice cracking and hands shaking.
The Trump administration is “shrinking the courts because they don’t think they’re going to need them.”
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” she said. “My mind was trying to run to different directions, and I just had to bring myself back to that case so I could get it done.” Later, Petit folded her robe and packed up her office as other immigration judges tried to console her. “It was a very emotional departure from the courthouse,” she recalled.
As the Trump administration works to fundamentally reshape the immigration system, US immigration courts have come to play an outsized role in the crackdown. Across the country, courthouses—previously considered off limits for immigration enforcement—have turned into sites of arrests by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and the very judges charged with resolving asylum and removal cases and, often, issuing deportation orders, are under assault.
The attack has been so sweeping that it has immigrant rights advocates, legal observers, and some former immigration judges wondering if the administration’s objective is to render the already overwhelmed courts so impaired that they can no longer serve their purpose.
Andrea R. Flores, who served as an immigration policy adviser during the Obama and Biden presidencies, described the firings of immigration judges as “confusing” for a White House that is trying to remove as many people as possible. Instead of empowering the courts to process more cases, the administration appears to be eviscerating the system to potentially undermine legal proceedings altogether.
“I think what alarms me about that is their hope that they’re going to massively expand the usage of expedited removal and deny people their right to see a judge,” she said of the administration’s push to fast-track deportations. “[They’re] shrinking the courts because they don’t think they’re going to need them.”
Petit had seen the writing on the wall months earlier. Back in February, her former supervisor, assistant chief immigration judge Rebecca Walters, who had been appointed during the Biden administration, was among several judges dismissed as part of an early purge of the courts. Then July came, and another 17 or so judges were reportedly terminated without cause, even as the nationwide backlog continued to grow to almost 3.8 million pending immigration cases.
In letters to EOIR’s director, Sirce E. Owen, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others decried the firings as “indefensible” and voiced concern that decisions not to convert half of a class of judges—particularly those without an immigration enforcement background—to permanent positions “may have been made for politically motivated reasons.”
An attorney with private practice experience in the area of removal defense, Petit said she had completed around 800 cases, a hundred or so more than the 700 a year expected of immigration judges, before her abrupt termination. Petit’s supervisor later told her that her performance review noted she was a high-performing judge. But that didn’t protect her. “You think you’re going to be okay as long as you do a good job and just keep your head down, do your cases, and apply the law,” she said. “And then you start seeing more and more people get fired for no reason.”
The dismissal of judges like Petit is just one of the ways the Trump White House is upending the immigration courts to serve its mass deportation agenda. In late August, the administration issued a rule easing the qualification requirements for temporary immigration judges, allowing the Department of Justice to hire attorneys without adjudicatory or immigration law experience. It has also turned to recruiting hundreds of military lawyers to fill vacant seats for six-month assignments, a move that legal experts have warned could be unlawful and will likely undermine due process.
“I know some judges who had packed up their offices in anticipation of being fired.”
“I see more deportations of illegal immigrants in the near future,” Corey Lewandowski, an adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, posted about the announcement that the Pentagon had authorized 600 military lawyers to act as temporary immigration judges. (Among the assistant chief immigration judges terminated in February were two former military attorneys, commonly referred to as JAGs after Judge Advocate General’s Corps.)
“That’s concerning because you’re going to have people who have not been trained making decisions with no immigration background,” said Alison Peck, director of the immigration law clinic at West Virginia University College of Law and author of The Accidental History of the US Immigration Courts: War, Fear, and the Roots of Dysfunction. “That judge isn’t going to know what hit them…It’s the steepest learning curve I’ve ever encountered in the legal profession.”
Peck has long argued the problem with immigration courts run much deeper than President Donald Trump’s moves. Because the immigration courts are nested within the Department of Justice and the executive branch, they are effectively an instrument of presidential policy and not true independent courts. “This is how the system is designed,” she said. The Trump administration is “pushing the edges” to disrupt the immigration courts. But “there are serious due process concerns with the system as a whole, and now we’re seeing how it can be manipulated by an administration that has a different policy agenda.”
As of late September, Petit estimated that as many as 16 judges from her 2023 class of 39 sworn-in appointees have been fired. They are among the more than 130 adjudicators who have been either terminated, transferred, or departed the force voluntarily since Trump returned to office. According to data from the National Association of Immigration Judges reported by CNN, September saw the highest number of dismissals, with 24 judges being let go.
“I know some judges who had packed up their offices in anticipation of being fired,” she said.
David K. S. Kim was in the middle of a hearing on September 4 when he received the termination email. He had to stop midway through and inform the parties that the case would be reassigned to a different judge. Originally from South Korea, Kim had been in the job for almost three years and had the highest asylum grant rate among judges at New York’s 26 Federal Plaza immigration court—96 percent, according to TRAC.
“I think I was preparing mentally, subconsciously…,” he said. “I wasn’t really shocked, although it was very disappointing.”
As a judge in the New York City court that has been dubbed the “nation’s capital of immigration courthouse arrests,” Kim saw firsthand the effects of the Trump administration’s policies, starting with giving ICE the green light to conduct arrests in or near courthouses. “It created chaos,” Kim said, explaining that judges had their hands tied if someone was arrested outside the courtroom.
“That was very difficult and definitely affected the morale of the court staff and some of the Homeland Security attorneys,” Kim said. He noted that some DHS lawyers asked judges to sit with their backs facing the wall instead of the courtroom entrance door, in case some altercation took place. “It was a complete change in environment in the way the hearings were held.”
Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, who also served as a judge in New York, said she noticed an increase in the number of immigrants missing their court hearings. “There were weeks when I would have 10 people show up for a master calendar of 60,” she said. Rey Caldas recalled instances of immigrants appearing outside the courthouse but not going in, instead asking if they could have their hearings remotely because of fear of being arrested by ICE.
Prior to joining the bench, Rey Caldas, who was born in Spain, had a long career practicing immigration law that included stints at nonprofits helping survivors of gender-based violence and, more recently, a role as the director of a program that represents refugees, including Afghan allies who had to be evacuated after the US withdrawal from the country. In 2022, when Rey Caldas was appointed to the immigration courts, House Republicans led by Rep. Elise Stefanik publicly opposed it, citing concerns over her advocacy work and alleging she had “contempt” for immigration enforcement and “disregard” for ICE.
Rey Caldas said she had never received anything other than exceptional feedback while on the bench. Yet, on August 21, she was terminated without explanation. She has since challenged her firing with the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that hears appeals on federal personnel cases. “You’re eliminating all potential defense within the agency,” Rey Caldas said of the firings of experienced judges and those with diverse backgrounds.
She described an atmosphere where immigration judges are under “constant threat” of getting fired if they don’t follow certain rules from leadership. As one example, she mentioned an email telling judges to eliminate the use of pronouns in their email signatures. For people dealing with “life and death cases,” Rey Caldas said, it was demoralizing. “It’s creating an environment where you’re constantly watching what you do and questioning your decisions.”
Mother Jones reached out to EOIR for comment, but received an automatic email reply from the agency’s spokesperson stating she had been furloughed and was out of the office.
Both Petit and Kim said immigration judges started bracing for policy guidance issued by EOIR’s director Owen on Fridays. One April policy memo, for instance, encouraged judges to “immediately resolve cases…that do not have viable legal paths for relief or protection from removal” and to drop asylum cases without holding a hearing if the application is “legally deficient.” Some judges, Kim said, took the guidance to mean they were being told to prioritize efficiency over due process and default to removal orders.
In another memo from June 27, Owen chastised immigration judges for “demonstrating bias or hostility toward” DHS and advised “judges who prefer to be policy advocates” to consider a different career path. “It leads to this climate of fear and intimidation,” Petit said.
“A lot of the actions being taken by this administration have materially changed the way that the courts function,” she added. “One thing that remains are really exceptional immigration judges who are doing their very best to apply the law fairly and apply due process. They’re really just holding it down right now.”
