Trump Fires More Than 100 Immigration Judges For Following The Law Instead Of The Policy, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Officials Deciding Deportations Still Answered To Something Other Than The President

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice confirmed this week that it has now removed more than 100 immigration judges from the bench, resolving a long-standing structural flaw in which the officials deciding who gets deported were, in certain documented cases, deciding based on the law.

Unlike nearly every other judge in the federal system, immigration judges sit inside the Justice Department itself, meaning they answer to the same administration whose policies they are ruling on. Administration officials described this arrangement as an underused asset. "For too long these judges were reviewing the evidence in front of them, which is frequently not the evidence in front of the President," said one senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the pressure campaign is meant to be felt rather than named. "An immigration judge works for the Attorney General, and the Attorney General works for the President. We are simply restoring the chain of command that runs from the Oval Office, through the courtroom, to the removal."

According to the National Association of Immigration Judges, roughly 200 judges have now been fired, pushed out, or driven to resign, many citing concerns about due process, a phrase the administration confirmed it no longer recognizes as load-bearing. Sitting judges report being warned that they may face disciplinary action for following the law in instances where the law and the policy disagree, a scenario officials characterized as both rare and, when it occurs, the judge's fault.

The departures have left the remaining judges to absorb the backlog, with each vacated seat shifting roughly 700 cases onto colleagues who in some instances now carry dockets of 10,000 or 12,000 pending matters. Officials hailed the resulting bottleneck as a feature, noting that a hearing indefinitely postponed is a hearing that cannot rule the wrong way. To fill the emptied benches, the Department has begun hiring what it openly calls "deportation judges," a new class of jurist receiving a shortened training period calibrated, sources said, to be exactly long enough to reach the correct verdict.

Legal scholars noted that the immigration courts had achieved a rare form of efficiency in which the party seeking removal, the party writing the rules of removal, and the party judging the removal were at last the same party. "It streamlines things considerably," one former official conceded, adding that the union's proposal to make the courts independent under Article I had been reviewed by the administration and correctly identified as the entire problem.

At press time, the Justice Department had clarified that its newly installed deportation judges would receive precisely the amount of training required to agree with the government and not one hour more.