Trump’s New Deportation Chief Is a “F*cking Dope,” Ex-Colleagues Say

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task.

Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast.

Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast.

“Such a fucking dope,” another person said.

“Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”

Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.

“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast.

Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office.

Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”

“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is seeing a wave of resignations following the Department of Justice’s handling of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Eight lawyers are either leaving or have announced their intentions to quit the office, following six other resignations last month. The high turnover is unprecedented, as the office generally doesn’t even have that many resignations in an entire year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. Now there are fewer than 20 attorneys in the office to handle the state’s federal cases.

“More often than not, the people who come in don’t quit, they stay,” Tom Heffelfinger, who served as a U.S. attorney for Minnesota under two Republican presidents, told the Star-Tribune. “A lot of those [assistant U.S. attorneys] see these as career jobs. This is what they want to do. If they can get the job, they stay there.”

After ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Good last month in Minneapolis, the DOJ refused to initiate a civil rights investigation into her death and instead opted to investigate her wife over her activism. This prompted six attorneys in the office to resign in January.

The more recent resignations reportedly came after a meeting of the office’s criminal division with Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. One attorney asked Rosen why local law enforcement was shut out of the DOJ investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti. Others asked why cases involving the alleged assault of federal officers didn’t examine officer conduct. Rosen replied that he wasn’t asking staff “to do anything illegal,” according to one staffer.

One of the departures is the civil division chief, Ana Voss, who was in charge of handling the hundreds of wrongful detention petitions filed as a result of ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Voss wrote in a recent legal brief that she couldn’t “effectively triage and review” every judicial order. Other employees besides the attorneys have also resigned from the office, including a victim witness coordinator and an evidence technician.

The DOJ has scrambled to bring 10 attorneys from other states—five from Washington, D.C., and five from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Armed Forces—to try and fill the gaps. But the office is still “woefully understaffed,” according to one former U.S. attorney. Lawyers have their hands full, with 490 immigrants challenging their detention from December 1 to January 26, compared to 375 similar cases in the previous eight years combined.

“They’re in disarray,” said Doug Kelly, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in the 1980s. “I think it’s just demoralizing to the folks who are there.”

The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.

But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.

“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.

“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”

“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.

“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.

“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”

“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.

Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is targeting free speech with a little-known legal tool: administrative subpoenas.

The Washington Post reports that a retired Philadelphia man, Jon, 67, found himself in the government’s crosshairs after he emailed a lead prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Dernbach, who was handling the deportation case of an Afghan refugee, identified as H, asking him to consider that the man’s life was in danger from the Taliban.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” Jon wrote from his gmail account. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

Later that day, Jon received an email from Google notifying him that an administrative subpoena had been sent to them from the Department of Homeland Security “compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.” Federal agencies can issue such subpoenas without an order from a judge or grand jury, and Google gave Jon, who withheld his last name to protect his family from the government, one week to challenge it.

Laws are supposed to restrict the use of administrative subpoenas, but DHS has used the tool against dissent protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Jon could not find who in the agency issued the subpoena, let alone a record of it to show an attorney.

Days later, DHS agents showed up at Jon’s door. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the U.K., Jon was worried about potential violence. The agents showed him a copy of the email and asked to see his side of the story. They didn’t know about the administrative subpoena but said they received orders to interview Jon by DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Eventually, the agents agreed that Jon had committed no crimes after he told them he found Dernbach’s email address through a simple Google search. Jon secured pro bono representation by ACLU attorneys, who argue that the government is violating a statute that limits how administrative subpoenas can be used for “immigration enforcement” and that the government targeted Jon for protected speech.

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, one of Jon’s attorneys. “That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

Both Google and Meta received a record number of subpoenas in the United States during the first half of 2025 as Trump’s second term began, with Google receiving 28,622, a 15 percent increase over the previous six months. Jon was fortunate to have his case picked up by the ACLU and later reported on by a national media outlet. How many others in the U.S. haven’t been so lucky and face legal challenges for exercising their right to free speech?

On Monday, President Trump suggested that Republicans should “take over” and “nationalize” voting. But House Speaker Mike Johnson isn’t too concerned.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast Monday. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

CNN’s Manu Raju made sure to ask Johnson about the president’s statements the next day.

“Mr. Speaker, the president had called yesterday for a takeover of federal elections; [he] said to nationalize in some states, is that something that you think he should do?” Raju asked.

Johnson proceeded to claim that Trump just didn’t really mean that.

“The president is expressing his frustration about the problems that we have in some of these blue states, where election integrity is not always guaranteed,” Johnson said, making a baseless claim about election security in blue states in order to defend a man who still lies about winning the 2020 election. “So we have to figure out solutions to that problem, and that’s what I think—”

“Take over?!” Raju interrupted, not allowing the speaker to ramble on without acknowledging the actual question.

“No, no,” Johnson said.

The U.S. Constitution orders that elections be governed by states and locales, not the executive branch. Even still, it’s hard not to hear Trump’s comment about taking over elections without immediately thinking about January 6. This time we should take his threats seriously—especially given the recent FBI raid of an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County.