The Trump administration has created a climate of fear among the nation’s immigration judges, firing those who don’t go along with sweeping policy changes meant to boost deportations.
The Justice Department, which manages the nation’s immigration court system, is relying on pressure campaigns to bend outcomes to match President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement vision, one current and three recently terminated judges told NOTUS.
They also said the department leadership has adopted new strategies to limit their discretion to rule in immigrants’ favor, which has effectively led to more deportations.
One current judge, who spoke on condition of anonymity over fear of reprisal, said colleagues were deciding cases with a new understanding that “following the law can risk their job if that law is inconsistent with current policy.”
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“There’s also a lot of fear among the immigration judges. The fact that following the law in a court is bravery is a little concerning,” the current judge said, before correcting themself. “That’s a lot concerning.”
The Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice agency that houses the courts, has fired around 125 immigration judges since Trump took office. Nearly all of them received only an email with a couple sentences explaining that the president was asserting his authority under the Constitution.
The firings have continued in recent weeks. Additionally, around 100 additional judges have left with separation incentives or to retire, meaning more than one-in-four has left government.
While staff stressed they seek to implement the law in a neutral manner, the firings have effectively pushed judges to grant relief less often.
“For most of my colleagues, they’re going to do what they need to do to keep their job,” said Brea Burgie, a Colorado-based immigration judge who was fired in June.
“There is the constant stress of, ‘Is this the thing I’m going to do that gets me fired?’ When you’re living with that, the path of least resistance is, you don’t want to lose your job so you just comply,” Burgie said.
Some judges, who are also voluntarily leaving at unprecedented rates, have decided they cannot stay on the job in good conscience because they can’t apply the law fairly.
“They’re leaving because they feel like they can no longer execute due process,” the current judge said. “If you’re a judge and you can’t uphold due process in your court, or you feel like you can’t effectuate that because policies are being made around you that don’t allow you to to provide due process to people, that’s a big concern for you because you feel like you are actually breaking the law.”
The second Trump administration has overhauled the deportation system to limit judges’ latitude, former and current judges said, through new legal interpretations and policy memos that dictate how judges should run their courtrooms.
There are new requirements for faster decisions. The current judge noted they have little control over their schedule and anyone above them could be calling the shots on the movement of cases.
EOIR has packed as many as 150 cases for administrative actions on a judge’s docket some mornings, often with asylum seekers receiving little notice. If the migrants do not show up for the proceeding, judges must issue removal orders in absentia.
All of those factors appear to be bearing fruit for the Trump administration. After remaining relatively stable for much of Trump’s current term, according to the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, immigrant removal orders climbed this spring and spiked by 30% in June.
In some cases, threats to judges have been explicit.
In January, after a back-and-forth between Justice and federal courts over the legality of banning certain immigrants from being released from detention while awaiting court proceedings, Burgie received an email threatening discipline if she continued allowing bond hearings.
Burgie continued to do so, leaning on the federal court’s precedent. Days later, she was removed from cases involving detained immigrants. Months after that, she was fired. Like others, she was given no notice and had to leave immediately.
Eva Saltzman, a Chicago-based immigration judge, was in the middle of a hearing on July 30 when she received an email saying she was fired “effective immediately.”
“I read it again to make sure I understood it correctly,” Saltzman said. “I advised the parties we would be concluding immediately that we would not be able to complete that hearing that day.”
Saltzman then packed up her office and headed home.
She was the most senior judge on the bench in Chicago. She never let her guard down in the second Trump administration because she knew her location in a Democratic city and her low rate of deportation orders would put her on the Trump administration’s radar.
“As the agenda and the goals of the administration evolved and became more clear, I was concerned that doing my job in the way that I had always done would lead to me being terminated,” Saltzman said. “And I think that’s in part what happened here.”
Emmett Soper, a Virginia-based immigration judge who was fired last September, called that fear a “pretty effective technique” to achieve more deportations. Judges often have latitude in their decision making, he said, noting the same set of facts in many cases could allow a grant or denial to an immigrant’s request.
“If you have one of these cases where you are deciding whether to grant or deny, if you have this very real threat hanging over your head, it’s only human to be cognizant of that,” Soper said. “The judges are only human beings. They need to support themselves and their families.”
The Justice Department’s moves have helped reduce the backlog of pending cases from its peak of 4 million to around 3.2 million.
A Justice spokesperson, when asked whether EOIR is targeting certain judges or seeking to influence court outcomes through personnel policy, said the department was looking to correct errors committed by its predecessors.
“After four years of the Biden administration forcing immigration courts to implement a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens, this Department of Justice is restoring integrity to our immigration system and encourages talented legal professionals to join in our mission to protect national security and public safety,” the spokesperson said.
The Justice Department is hiring new immigration judges to keep up with the departures. The department is advertising open positions as “deportation judges” and has eliminated some requirements for relevant experience
EOIR has onboarded 190 judges in fiscal year 2026, easily surpassing its previous hiring record for a fiscal year, including 118 since May. Nearly 90% of that more recent group were attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the military or prosecutorial offices. The department typically hired a large swath of its judges from immigration-focused private firms, but it has recently selected just a handful who had non-ICE immigration experience.
The current immigration judge noted the new hires are also receiving less training than they used to, which could mean cases that have been cleared might come back down after appeals because of rookie mistakes.
“They’re all learning the immigration law and learning how to run their courts all at the same time,” the current judge said.
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