On February 14, Kerry Doyle sat at the court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, preparing for her new job as an immigration judge. She was excited to step into such a consequential position. Each year, immigration judges across the country decide whether hundreds of thousands of people should be allowed to stay in the United States or ordered deported. Often, they have the final word in whether to grant asylum seekers fleeing danger and persecution life-saving relief or sentence them to an uncertain fate elsewhere. “You’re there to be a neutral arbiter,” she said, “to apply the law and to give people their moments to tell their stories.”
Doyle—an experienced immigration lawyer and former deputy general counsel for immigration at the Department of Homeland Security—had been appointed by the Biden administration in December. She was set to join the ranks of the 735 or so immigration judges with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Department of Justice’s branch running the US immigration courts. The DOJ desperately needed more judges. The Chelmsford immigration court that Doyle was assigned to opened last year; it was set to alleviate the Boston court’s ever-growing backlog of more than 160,000 cases.
“These judges are looking at it and thinking, if they’re going to do this to my colleagues, who’s next?”
But Doyle never had the chance to do the work. On Valentine’s Day—as the mentoring immigration judge she was shadowing wrapped up just shy of four in the afternoon—Doyle checked her laptop to find an email from EOIR’s new acting director, Sirce E. Owen. It included an attachment labeled “Termination.” When Doyle opened the notice, it read: “EOIR has determined that retaining you is not in the best interest of the agency.” No further explanation given.
Doyle was one in a class of 13 newly hired immigration judges dismissed that day as part of the Trump administration’s purge of the immigration courts. The move, which mirrors sweeping firings hitting critical agencies across the federal government, risks plunging an already backed-up system deeper into chaos, relegating thousands of additional cases to linger for years in a colossal limbo of 3.6 million pending processes.
That same Friday, seven assistant chief immigration judges who led 18 courts and managed 135 judges in addition to hearing cases also lost their jobs. Two of them were military veterans. One of the assistant chief immigration judges who served in Texas and preferred to remain anonymous said they had completed more than 5,000 cases since 2021 with a high removal rate—94 percent—which they attributed to the court’s location near the US-Mexico border.
As of early March, up to 28 people have been terminated. That includes 15 immigration judges, eight supervisory assistant chief immigration judges, and five senior managers, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a parent union of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ). Without them, some 10,000 hearings will no longer be held this year. (Each immigration judge takes on an average of 500 to 700 cases on an annual basis.)
“Of all of these firings that are occurring,” says Matthew Biggs, the union’s president, “you would think the one place that would be spared would be the immigration courts.” These judges play a critical part in the deportation machine the Trump administration hopes to max out in pursuit of an unprecedented mass expulsion campaign. Removal proceedings account for nearly all of EOIR’s pending caseload, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.
Because President Donald Trump ran on boosting immigration enforcement and speeding up deportations, making the adjudication of removal cases less efficient strikes Briggs as “nonsensical.” The staff terminations, he adds, also send a chilling message to the workforce: “These judges are looking at it and thinking, if they’re going to do this to my colleagues, who’s next?”
In addition to those who were fired, another 18 immigration judges and one assistant chief immigration judge are resigning or retiring early, according to information the union shared with Mother Jones. The union also estimates that as many as 60 EOIR staff members, some of whom directly support the work of immigration judges, such as interpreters and legal advisers, are voluntarily departing the agency.
“The actions taken by the Trump administration in the immigration court system so far show an administration that is more interested in settling scores than in actually increasing the volume of cases heard and resolved,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, posted on Bluesky. “It also shows how much ‘fire everyone’ conflicts badly with ‘deport everyone.’”
The Trump administration has also reportedly taken aim at Biden appointees serving on the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)—the body charged with reviewing immigration judges’ decisions—by reducing the number of members from 28 to 15. As of January, the BIA’s backlog reached a decade-high record of more than 127,000 pending cases, an almost eightfold increase compared to 2015.
Paul Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and one-time BIA chairman, traced a parallel between the Trump administration’s “purge” and a George W. Bush-era move to “streamline” the BIA. Back then, Attorney General John Ashcroft slashed the members perceived as pro-immigrant. The Department of Justice later found itself at the center of a scandal over senior officials’ efforts to hire judges based on their political and ideological affiliations.
Similar politicization could be happening now. Prior to her unceremonious termination, Doyle had been flagged on a “DHS Bureaucrat Watchlist” by the American Accountability Foundation, a right-wing group backed by the Heritage Foundation. Last year, the organization announced an initiative called “Project Sovereignty 2025” to expose “high-ranking civil servants within DHS and DOJ who are likely to thwart an incoming conservative administration’s immigration agenda.”
The website describes Doyle, who previously served as head prosecutor with
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA), as an “immigration activist lawyer” with a “known history as a critic of DHS” and a “lifelong commitment to open borders and mass migration.” (It cites Doyle’s involvement, while in private practice, in a lawsuit against the first Trump administration’s infamous ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries as evidence of her supposed ideological bias.)
“Significant time and resources went into hiring all of us and the group had a diverse background including a number of former OPLA prosecutors,” Doyle, whose hiring process took 14 months between multiple rounds of interviews and an extensive background check, wrote in a LinkedIn post, “but what we all had in common is that we were hired—through a neutral system I will point out—during the Biden administration. This firing was political.”
Schmidt, the former BIA chairman, predicts all of this is just the start: “I think the worst is yet to come.”
The shake-up in the immigration court system started right after Trump took office in January. On day one, the incoming administration fired four leading EOIR officials, including the agency’s acting director, Mary Cheng, and chief immigration judge Sheila McNulty. (Combined, they had 100 years of government service.) One career senior executive official, Jill Anderson, joined the DOJ in 1999 and served through various administrations, earning glowing performance reviews. “We were all very much caught off guard,” she told Government Executive.
Lauren Alder Reid, former assistant director of EOIR’s office of policy, had just watched Trump’s inauguration ceremony on January 20 when, a couple of hours later, she received the termination email. “It contained little text,” she described on LinkedIn, “but attached documents informing me that my apolitical career of nearly 20 years (6.5 years as a career senior executive) had come to an end.” The reasoning given for Reid’s firing was presidential power under Article II of the Constitution, the same authority invoked in a day-one executive order stating that top career officials “must serve at the pleasure of the President.”
Reid told ABC News she had been picked for the senior executive service by James McHenry—director of EOIR during the first Trump administration and more recently acting attorney general—who reportedly signed her and others’ terminations. “There is a lot of fear,” Reid said of employees across EOIR and the DOJ. “So, if fear is what is intended, I think that they’re getting what they wanted. If they want a strong workforce who can act with autonomy within boundaries and who can really, truly serve the public…they’re doing it wrong.”
In an email, EOIR spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said the agency “declines to comment on personnel matters.”
Aaron Aisen, a senior staff attorney with the Erie County Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project and liaison between the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s New York chapter and EOIR, described the firing of one assistant chief immigration judge who served in Buffalo as a “tragedy.” Brandon Jaroch’s responsibility, he said, “was not to take our side or ICE’s side, but to make sure the system worked. And he really did a good job of doing that.” Jaroch was also a champion of a Friend of the Court orientation program to help unrepresented immigrants navigate legal proceedings.
“This firing was political,” said Kerry Doyle, who was appinted as an immigration judge during the Biden administration and terminated by Trump.
“In my experience, it has been pretty unprecedented for any administration to wholesale fire people in the way that we’re seeing now,” says Ashley Tabaddor, who served as NAIJ president between 2017 and 2021. The very creation of EOIR in 1983 was rooted in a recognition of the need for adjudicators to be shielded from political influence, she explains. “If you want somebody to be as impartial as possible, you cannot hold their job over their head.”
The first Trump White House faced accusations of politicizing and weaponizing the immigration courts. In his first term, Trump imposed performance quotas to speed up deportations. His administration also picked judges with a prosecutorial and law enforcement background but no immigration experience—these officials disproportionately defaulted to ordering people deported. (The Biden administration later received criticism for selecting Trump’s holdovers to the courts.)
Sources familiar with Sirce E. Owen, new Acting Director of EOIR, described her as a “restrictionist loyalist” with a reputation for denying cases.
Other policies, like reopening cases and limiting judges’ ability to more efficiently manage their caseloads by closing certain cases and taking them off the active docket, did little to ameliorate the backlog. Dozens of immigration judges retired early or stepped down during Trump’s first four years, in no small part due to his overhaul of the courts. The system was already malfunctioning. Trump broke it.
Trump’s DOJ also petitioned the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) to decertify the NAIJ union, claiming immigration judges should be considered “management officials” and ineligible for representation. In late 2020, the Republican-controlled FLRA sided with the government, stripping immigration judges of their collective bargaining rights. More recently, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative administration advocated for folding EOIR into DHS and for treating “the administrative law judges (immigration judges and Board of Immigration Appeals) as national security personnel.” It also proposed, ironically, boosting hiring to process more cases.
“If they try to minimize due process and get people who think like them,” says Tabaddor, “everything is going to be interpreted in the light least favorable to the noncitizen…especially because the system as a whole is already built against them.” The goal, she adds, “is then to just maximize the numbers going through the system and to make sure that any case that can be denied is denied.”
The Trump administration’s reshaping of EOIR and its mission goes beyond personnel cuts. Almost immediately upon taking over the role as acting director of the agency, Sirce E. Owen announced a barrage of policy changes aimed at rescinding Biden-era practices and setting the tone for her leadership. On January 27, Owen sent out a five-page memo to all staff, to “recommit to EOIR’s core values and the rule of law.”
The document states that the agency’s guiding principles had been “severely eroded” during the previous administration and cites allegations of disparate treatment of employees, with so-called “elites” being favored. It goes on to say, without pointing to specific examples, that guidelines were “based on specious, potentially unlawful, or otherwise problematic reasoning” and “at odds with current policies of the Executive Branch.” EOIR Employees, Owen wrote, “should not read policies obtusely or ridiculously, and all policies should be read with a modicum of common sense.”
Owen previously served as an appellate immigration judge and before that briefly as an assistant chief immigration judge in Atlanta, Georgia, where the immigration court has long been known as one of the most hostile to immigrants in the country. She also worked for several years as an ICE attorney. Sources familiar with Owen described her as a “restrictionist loyalist” with a reputation for denying cases. During her short stint as assistant chief immigration judge, Owen denied 38 out of 39 asylum cases that came before her, according to data from Mobile Pathways, a tech nonprofit helping immigrants access legal information.
“What disturbs me is the public vile and reprimand towards her department and staff,” Carolina Antonini, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said in an email. “I cannot imagine what this has done for their morale. This agency employs adults who, like the vast majority of federal workers, act in good faith…These [policy memoranda] address professional, responsible adults as if they were truant teens.” Mother Jones reached out to Owen, but EOIR declined to comment.
In other memos a few days later, Owen invoked “credible reports” that under the Biden administration, immigration judges were pressured and “tacitly threatened” to “rule in cases a certain way.” She called the practice “abhorrent” and “contrary to the law.” EOIR, she wrote, had “abandoned its traditional role as an impartial adjudicator and assumed the role of both an advocate and the prosecutor.” Owen also issued a memo repealing a policy that encouraged immigration courts to adopt the Friend of the Court program. In another, she decried guidance meant to address the courts’ language access issues as “paternalistic and patronizing” in tone.
“She is attacking prior policies that tried to bring the immigration courts into the 21st century,” says Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration lawyer, “and reverting back to policies that made justice harder to render and harsher on the immigrants.” In 2017, Kuck and the American Civil Liberties Union represented Mexican-born Jessica Colotl in a lawsuit against Owen and other Trump administration officials challenging the revocation of her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status. “I think their ultimate goal is to do away with immigration judges,” he said.
In two February policy memos, Owen appears to cite precedent established by the Biden administration to justify the firings of judges and senior officials and indicates that “for-cause removal restrictions” could be disregarded “if they are determined to be unconstitutional,” essentially characterizing judges as at-will employees.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice’s website is actively recruiting potential candidates for immigration judge positions. The number of immigration judges has almost tripled since 2015, but EOIR has consistently been understaffed due to funding and hiring challenges. The agency’s budget request for 2025 included the addition of 25 new immigration judges, a far cry from the projected hundreds more needed to clear the backlog before 2032.
Being an immigration judge can be thankless work—hearing case after case from 8 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon with only half a day per week to do administrative tasks. “To literally sit in a room all day and order people deported has got to canker your soul,” Kuck says. “That anybody would want that job is shocking to me and to fire people who were willing to do it with an open mind shows you exactly what this administration intends to do—limit due process and use the law as a weapon, not a shield.”
In late February, two members of the NAIJ leadership announced they are stepping down as immigration judges: president Mimi Tsankov and Samuel B. Cole, the executive vice president. “Honestly, it’s a bit of a gut punch, and I feel a bit lost,” Cole said in a letter to colleagues. “These last eight years have been the realization of my lifelong ambition to be a judge…The professional reward of being an immigration judge, however, is soured by the environment in which all immigration judges work.” Mentioning the “bitter ping pong of immigration politics,” he wrote, “I hope that one day we will have the independence that this job requires.” Although he doesn’t know what’s next, Cole concluded: “It was just time to move on.”
The changes at EOIR have been bad for morale, especially among the probationary judges. “I think everybody has been on pins and needles,” Doyle says. “I don’t really know who they think they’re going to replace these people with.” She fears if other immigration judges retire or quit the workforce altogether, “the entire system will collapse.”
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