One month after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump is making immigration policies a big deal. He’s really focused on border enforcement and shrinking the size of the government.
As part of cutting the federal budget, the Senate has passed a law. It gives more money for border security and immigration enforcement. But it cuts spending for most other federal agencies. The Department of Justice fired 28 immigration judges from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). This fits with the president’s plan to make the federal workforce smaller.
Scripps News found out that 28 judges lost their jobs. Thirteen of them had just finished training and were about to start hearing cases. One of these judges, Kerry Doyle, and the others were told they were fired during their probationary period. It was just one day before they were supposed to start working.
Doyle told Scripps News, “The main goal of this administration is to move forward with deportations. They want to put people in removal proceedings, get removal orders, and keep things going. So it doesn’t make any sense to fire immigration judges. Especially when, if the training had gone as planned, we would be hearing cases this week or next week at the latest.”
Doyle was part of the newest group of judges hired by the Justice Department. This office decides on deporting people charged with crimes or immigration violations. It also decides on asylum and permanent residency.
A congressional report said that by the end of fiscal year 2024, there were only 735 immigration judges. That’s three times as many as in 2015. But the number of cases waiting to be heard has grown a lot. Since 2012, the backlog has increased by more than 1,100%. Now, there are over 3.7 million cases waiting, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC project.
Many of these cases take years to be decided just because it takes so long to get in front of a judge.
Doyle said, “You see all the work piled up, and then you’re told the agency doesn’t want to keep you. I can’t think of a good reason why they would make a decision like this.”
Doyle has been a lawyer for decades. She’s worked in both public and private jobs.
In 2017, she was one of the lawyers who fought against then-President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. More recently, during the Biden Administration, she was the main legal advisor or general counsel for ICE. She also worked as deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security.
But many new judges, like Doyle, hadn’t heard a single case yet. They were hired as part of a plan by both Republicans and Democrats to get more judges to handle the backlog.
Republican Senator James Lankford’s 2024 bipartisan immigration bill would have given $440 million to hire immigration judges and support staff at the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Every year, more money has been given to try to deal with the backlog of cases.
Matt Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (the union that represents immigration judges), said, “Each judge handles 500 to 700 cases a year. You can quickly see that as the backlog grows, more cases won’t be heard. Hiring more immigration judges is really important if the president wants to do the enforcement he promised during his campaign.”
Scripps News asked the immigration office at the Justice Department for comment. But they didn’t want to say anything.
The Department of Homeland Security said, “Positions are being looked at again.” They also said 50 employees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (the office for legal immigration) were fired.
DHS added, “We are looking for employees who are not essential to the mission and are on probation.”
Even though Scripps News asked, DHS didn’t say how many people in immigration enforcement agencies like Customs and Border Protection and ICE were affected. The unions for these agencies didn’t answer when asked for comment.
The White House said it’s up to each agency to say how many jobs were cut. But they said no important jobs, like border agents, were terminated. They also said the jobs that were cut were either not needed or didn’t fit with what the administration wants to do.
Harrison Fields, the principal deputy spokesperson for the White House, said in a written statement, “President Trump came back to Washington with a goal from the American people. He wants to make big changes in the federal government to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s not easy to do this in a system that’s full of bureaucracy and is too big. But it’s something that’s been needed for a long time.”
For a long time, judges were thought to be safe from political interference.
During Trump’s first term, he tried to get rid of the union that represents immigration judges.
More recently, he wanted to fire administrative law judges (like those who handle social security and disability cases) whenever he wanted. He said the law that protected them from being fired without a good reason was unconstitutional.
That law was supposed to keep judges safe from political interference.
Even though the number of people crossing the southern border is at a very low point, the administration will probably see more border cases pile up. This is because the judges who handle deportations also deal with cases from inside the country. These include appeals related to Temporary Protected Status. The president also wants to end this status for many countries. This will make the already overloaded system even worse.
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