For weeks now, President Donald Trump’s propagandists have relentlessly glorified his mass deportations, even posting images of defeated-looking migrants getting frog-marched onto shiny military planes. If this is supposed to make the Audience of One feel strong and powerful, it has failed. Trump has privately raged about the supposedly inadequate pace of expulsions, and last month, that prompted officials to demand that officers hit wildly inflated arrest quotas. Yet deportations continue to remain stubbornly below what he hopes for.
Now, however, Trump’s angry zeal for mass removals appears to be helping to produce a particularly unnerving outcome.
The Trump administration is effectively declaring that the nation’s roughly 700 immigration judges can no longer count on civil service rules that safeguard their independence by protecting them from arbitrary removal, according to a Department of Justice memo that was sent to the judges. The memo from DOJ—which oversees the immigration courts—was flagged for me by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, or IFPTE, the judges’ union, which believes this will make it far easier to fire judges without cause.
The judges and their representatives fear that this is designed to pave the way for the removal of judges who don’t consistently rule against migrants in deportation and asylum cases—and thus frustrate Trump and his hard-line immigration advisers. Replacing them with judges who will more reliably rule against migrants could theoretically speed up the pace of deportations.
“What they want to do is fire immigration judges that don’t issue rulings to their liking,” said Matthew Biggs, the president of IFPTE, “and replace them with judges that will simply rubber-stamp what President Trump wants.”
This represents a serious escalation of Trump’s assault on the immigration system. Last month, DOJ fired 20 immigration judges with no public rationale; those were largely probationary officials. Then, last week, DOJ let it be known that it will no longer observe restrictions that constrain the removal of administrative law judges, a category that decides federal government agency cases and doesn’t include most immigration judges.
But now, DOJ is signaling that it will disregard restrictions on removal for the broad category of immigration judges as well, according to the DOJ memo, which was addressed to all employees of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, the agency within the DOJ that oversees the immigration courts. The memo acknowledges that under current law, these judges benefit from “multiple layers of for-cause removal restrictions,” meaning they can’t be fired at will. But it adds that EOIR “may decline to recognize those restrictions if they are determined to be unconstitutional.”
Translated into plain English, this means that if restrictions on removing immigration judges are “determined” by the DOJ to be unconstitutional, they will no longer apply, immigration lawyers say. It’s only a matter of time until this “determination” is made.
“They’re saying they can fire judges without cause,” Tom Jawetz, a former senior lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.
There are good reasons for immigration judges to enjoy protections from at-will firing. Right now, they cannot be fired unless the administration can cite a strong rationale. The restrictions on removals are rooted in statute, procedure, and precedent, and if the DOJ goes forward with the idea that they’re unconstitutional—in keeping with an expansive reading of Trump’s authority to fire subordinates—it will trigger a major legal battle.
These judges, who annually decide hundreds of cases apiece, often rule on whether migrants are subject to deportation or if they’re entitled to some form of relief, including humanitarian protections such as asylum. These rulings should be based on law and facts and not colored by each administration’s general ideological views about immigration. As Jawetz put it, protections against at-will removal allow judges to make “independent” rulings and safeguard “the basic integrity of the proceedings and uphold the rule of law.”
The IFPTE union fears that this is exactly what the new administration does not want—that disregarding protections for judges will mean more pressure on them to rule against migrants, because if they don’t, Trump officials will start removing them. “They’ll look at who deports more people and who doesn’t deport enough,” IFPTE president Biggs told me. “And they’ll start there.”
Here’s the thing: Having impartial judges dispense independent rulings on migrants really is a big problem for Trump. Right now, while arrests in the interior are higher under Trump, actual deportations are lagging behind. The courts are backlogged with around 3.7 million cases. Clearing that backlog by 2032 would require hiring 700 more judges. The backlog is a clear obstacle to more removals.
All of this points to a deep incoherence in MAGA ideology. Trump and fanatical, deportation-happy advisers like Stephen Miller want as many people removed as possible. But Trump ordered Republicans to kill the 2024 bipartisan Senate border security bill, which would have provided nearly half a billion dollars to increase the courts’ capacity to process migrants—including for deportation.
This was not in spite of the inclusion of that money for judges. Arguably, it was in part because of it.
That’s because the last thing Trump and Miller want is an immigration court system that functions fairly toward migrants. After all, that risks facilitating more migration. All their initiatives are shaped around opposition to that goal, whether it’s closing off channels to asylum or refugee status, ending parole programs for migrants to apply for sponsorship in this country from abroad, or rolling back temporary protections for migrants facing horrific conditions in home countries.
When JD Vance said that the supposed pet-eating Haitians were “illegal aliens” despite being here lawfully under those temporary protections, what he really meant was that he wants to close off ways for migrants like them to come here legally.
Which leads back to immigration judges. As American Immigration Counsel senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick notes, Trump and his advisers actively want ICE to be able to issue removal orders without ever letting that person get a hearing in court. “They don’t want anyone to be able to tell them that an immigrant has rights, that an immigrant can apply for some form of relief,” he says. “That is a terrifying thought.”
The next best thing is judges more prone to rubber-stamp deportations. As all this demonstrates, Trump and Miller don’t want a system that doles out impartial legal rulings for migrants. What they want is a system that does not do this. Their holy grail is the removals of as many migrants as possible, even if that means entirely eviscerating due process for them—or especially if it does.
