Former immigration judges say the Trump administration has turned the nation’s immigration courts into an extension of its deportation push, with judges being fired, forced out or walked off the bench as they issue rulings. One former judge says the goal is not subtle.
“Zero doubt, they want numbers, they want deportations. They want to keep as many people detained as possible, and stress the system,” Ryan Wood said in an interview. Wood retired a little more than a year ago after serving as an assistant chief immigration judge in the Midwest, where he said he was appointed during President Trump’s first term. He said the pressure now is unlike anything he saw before. “I have seen judges that have not made it very long in this new regime, where they’ve been walked off the bench for whatever reasons … They’re in the middle of dictating an oral decision and they get an email, or they get a tap on the shoulder, literally on the bench, saying, ‘Please come with me,’” he said. “No, never. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
The uproar comes as Trump’s second term has opened with aggressive arrests and mass detentions, mainly in blue states, after he promised at an Oct. 27, 2024, rally, “On Day One, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” The administration has also sent troops and armed ICE agents into that effort. The immigration court itself is overseen by the Department of Justice and is not part of the judiciary, a structure that gives the executive branch direct control over judges who hear asylum and deportation cases.
Over the past 14 months, the administration has fired, retired or forced out more than 200 immigration judges, according to the figures cited in the report. Among them was Anam Petit, who said she left a well-paid job as a law partner to become an immigration judge in Annandale, Virginia, and served for two years before being fired last September. Petit said her probationary reviews were positive and no reason was given. “It was crushing,” she said. “It was a dream job for me in a lot of ways. I made personal and professional sacrifices to take that job, because I believed I could be a good and fair judge.” She added, “In my two years of being a judge, I never received any negative feedback from colleagues [or] superiors,” and said, “All my probationary reviews were positive, and no reason was given [for my dismissal].”
Petit said her background made the dismissal harder to absorb. “I came from a background where I represented immigrants previously. I was a law professor at Georgetown Law, where I taught on gender-based immigration issues. I am a woman, a person of color,” she said. Jeremiah Johnson, who was an immigration judge in San Francisco for eight years, said his last words on the bench were telling a family of four they had been granted asylum. He said he was terminated last November after logging onto his computer and seeing an email with an attached firing letter. “Within 30 seconds, I was locked out of the computer system, unable to print that letter,” Johnson said. The speed of those exits, and the scale of them, suggest an immigration court being reshaped while cases continue to move through it.
The administration’s broader personnel sweep has also reached leadership. Kristi Noem was appointed as Secretary of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, and the report says she was fired. What remains unanswered is how far the White House is willing to push the system before the court’s capacity to hear cases starts breaking under the weight of the crackdown.
