More than 113 immigration judges have been fired since January 2025 as the Trump administration accelerates its deportation agenda, replacing seasoned jurists with military lawyers and political appointees in what former judges describe as an assault on judicial independence itself.
David Koelsch was teaching law when the order came down. The former immigration judge from Maryland had resigned four months earlier, sensing the pressure building on the bench. Judges with higher asylum approval rates were being targeted, and Koelsch knew his numbers put him in the crosshairs. He decided to leave on his own terms rather than wait for termination.
His premonition proved correct. The purge that followed has decimated the immigration court system. In San Francisco alone, the court shrank from 21 judges at the start of 2025 to just four by spring, forcing the complete closure of the facility and transferring 120,000 backlogged cases to a court 35 miles away.
Jeremiah Johnson learned of his firing on the same day he granted asylum to a family of four. The San Francisco judge received a termination letter, and before he could even print it, he was locked out of his computer system. Johnson was one of five judges dismissed that day in the San Francisco area alone.
The removals accelerated after June 27, 2025, when Sirce E Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, issued a memo accusing some judges of harboring bias in favor of immigrants. The memo warned of disciplinary action and suggested judges who disagreed should consider other careers. Judges pointed out the contradiction: the government offered them severance packages, typically reserved for terminations without cause, even as it denied providing reasons for the dismissals.
Current judges who spoke to reporters requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Many described a system now bent toward enforcement over impartiality. One fired judge, Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, had received strong evaluations during her probationary period from supervisors, ICE officials, and defense attorneys alike. She was terminated not long after earning permanent status.
Rey Caldas, a first-generation immigrant appointed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland, noted the government's logical inconsistency. "The government doesn't state a reason," she said. "And in fact, they just paid me severance. So arguably, that means they are admitting that there's no cause."
To fill vacancies, the Trump administration launched a recruitment campaign explicitly inviting candidates to "become a deportation judge." In August 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized up to 600 military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General Corps to serve as temporary immigration judges. The administration simultaneously waived requirements that temporary judges have at least 10 years of immigration law experience.
Immigration law experts and the New York City Bar Association condemned the move as an unprecedented departure from established practice. As of December 2025, only 30 military lawyers had actually been deployed. One of them, Christopher Day, was fired after just five weeks in Annandale, Virginia.
A group of fired judges has challenged their removals in federal court, arguing the administration lacks authority to terminate immigration judges without cause. The Merit Systems Protection Board, created to shield federal employees from political retaliation, ruled it lacked jurisdiction to review the dismissals. The fired judges have appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, calling the decision a break from more than a century of civil service protections.
Judges who remain on the bench describe themselves as under intense pressure to align decisions with enforcement priorities. Some warned that the erosion of judicial independence in immigration courts could signal a broader pattern of political control spreading throughout the American justice system.
Author James Rodriguez: "This isn't just about deporting more people faster, it's about dismantling the independence that makes a court a court in the first place."
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