Trump’s New Immigration Judges Include a Men’s Rights Lawyer

The Trump administration is attempting to clear its immigration backlog by cramming the court system with MAGA-aligned “deportation judges.”

Across the country, there are 700 immigration judges tasked with handling more than three million immigration cases. The Justice Department has fired more than 100 immigration judges since Donald Trump returned to office, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. A similar number have retired.

To replace them all, the agency has opened a massive recruitment drive, offering up the specialized bench to some 140 individuals who, for the most part, have no experience practicing immigration law. Instead, some of the newly hired judges include a divorce lawyer who swore to “fight exclusively for the rights of men,” a Minnesota attorney who backed the ICE raids in Minneapolis that resulted in two U.S. citizens being killed by federal agents, and a judge who denied humanitarian protection to a Serbian immigrant because he didn’t look “overtly gay.”

These people are being installed following “completely inadequate and highly biased” training, Christopher Day, a former immigration judge, told Congress in March.

Former judges said that the hiring process, historically, could take months or even years. Their training involved five weeks observing court hearings, participating in mock trials, and practicing cases alongside their mentors before judging cases on their own. The National Association of Immigration Judges told the Post that the DOJ has since cut training down to three weeks.

Ex-judges who were forced out claim that the administration is attempting to excise dissent from the judiciary, singling out those who have ruled against the government, reported the Post.

“They’re trying to create a malleable workforce that will do what they want without question,” Kerry Doyle, an ICE official turned immigration judge, told the paper. She was hired under Joe Biden and fired last year before her tenure even began. “That’s what I think the goal is.”

The Trump administration has made mass deportation a cornerstone of its immigration agenda, repeatedly pledging to deport as many as one million people per year while Trump is in office. Under ex–Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department massively reallocated its resources toward arresting and prosecuting noncriminal immigrants, dropping tens of thousands of criminal probes in the process.

Much to the chagrin of Trump’s supporters, the actual exit numbers have been lagging. In a December memo, the Department of Homeland Security revealed that it had deported some 605,000 individuals since Trump’s return, a figure that it artificially fluffed by claiming that DHS law enforcement had also encouraged 1.9 million people to “voluntarily self-deport.”

Immigration court is one of the final, legally required steps before the Trump administration can throw the people out of the country, though the administration seems content to ignore the limitations of the law. Instead, the DOJ has attempted to ram cases through the system in an attempt to meet the White House’s demands, placing an enormous and unusual burden on America’s judges.

Six federal judges were fired just this month for prioritizing the law over the White House agenda. At least two had ruled against high-profile deportation cases in the last year.

The Justice Department’s rightward shift into the MAGA agenda has sparked concern among those in the legal community, who have argued that the agency’s recent politicization has undermined public confidence in immigration courts altogether. Some attorneys have expressed concern that even individuals who are likely to be granted asylum might avoid participating in the system, ironically avoiding the process of becoming documented for fear of being deported at the courthouse.

“It sends a message that: Don’t trust these courts,” Muzaffar A. Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told the Post. “That is not good for the immigrants, it’s not good for the rule of law, and it’s not good for the ultimate integrity and reputation of our court system.”

The Supreme Court has given the Texas GOP a gerrymandering victory—just one week after the Democratic gerrymandering victory at the polls in Virginia. 

In a 6–3 decision along ideological lines on Monday, the Supreme Court reversed a lower district court ruling that blocked Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and reinstated a map designed to help Republicans add more seats to Congress. This new map could potentially flip five Texas House seats from blue to red, which could help Republicans maintain their paper-thin majority in the midterms.  

The party that freaked out and called foul after Virginia’s redistricting referendum will now celebrate its own victory—although it’s unclear how much it will really help them given President Donald Trump’s massively unpopular tenure.

The alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter critiqued the Trump administration constantly on BlueSky, and was particularly upset by the president’s AI Jesus post earlier this month.

Cole Allen, who described himself as a Protestant Christian—contradicting President Trump’s claim that Allen “hates” Christians—called members of the Trump administration “satanic idolators” after Trump shared the image of himself as Jesus Christ.

“I’m not sure that you can work for this admin and be *any flavor of genuine christian believer* and see Trump post something like this without understanding, at some level, deep down, that you are fucking damned, even if you’ll never admit it to anyone,” one of his reposts read. Allen even cited the Book of Revelation in response, writing that “there will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”

Allen shared similar sentiments in his supposed manifesto.

“As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.… Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration,” he wrote. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

These are not the words of someone who hates Christians or Christianity, regardless of what Trump and the greater right wing say. Allen is expected to be charged with using a firearm during a crime of violence and with assault of a federal officer on Monday.

President Donald Trump was infuriated after hearing the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman’s manifesto, and lashed out at a reporter who asked him about it.

On Sunday, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell interviewed Trump on 60 Minutes, and told him, “The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read.

“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” O’Donnell quoted directly. Then, she asked Trump, “What’s your reaction to that?”

“I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I’m not a rapist. I didn’t rape anybody. I’m not a pedophile—” Trump began to rant, before O’Donnell tried to cut in.

“Do you think he was referring to you?” she asked.

“Excuse me, excuse me. I’m not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person. Uh, I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let’s say, Epstein or other things,” Trump said.

“But I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview, and they’ll probably,’—I read the manifesto—you know he’s a sick person. You should be ashamed of yourself, reading that, because I’m not any of those things, and I was never—excuse me, excuse me,” Trump continued, cutting off O’Donnell when she tried to interject with a question. “You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes. You’re a disgrace. Go ahead, let’s finish the interview.”

The words “pedophile” and “rapist” clearly triggered Trump during the interview, because he immediately went into full-on denial mode and attacked O’Donnell simply for repeating the shooter’s manifesto. An assassination attempt is a gravely serious event, but those words made Trump quickly grow furious because they referenced his connections to Jeffrey Epstein and a New York judge’s ruling nearly three years ago that said he could legally be called a rapist. At that moment, Trump was more upset about those accusations than the attempt on his life.

President Donald Trump really doesn’t want you to think he fell down.

Just one day after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner came to a dramatic halt when a man fired a weapon outside the room, Trump became defensive Sunday when speaking about the experience to CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

“It looked chaotic, at one point you were down, what was happening?” asked host Norah O’Donnell, referring to videos of the event that showed Trump appear to fall down while fleeing to safety.

“I turned, I started walking. They said ‘Please go down, please go down, on the floor.’ So, I went down. And the first lady went down also. We were asked to go down by agents as I was walking,” Trump said.

“They wanted you almost to crawl out?” O’Donnell pressed.

“I was standing up—pretty much—I was standing up, and turned around the opposite direction, and started pretty much walking out. Pretty tall, a little bent over, because you know, I’m not looking to be standing too tall. And uh, but I was walking out. Pretty—I’m about half way there and they said, ‘Please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.’ So, I dropped to the floor, and so did the first lady.”

Videos of Trump exiting the stage tell a different story.

As Trump made his way offstage surrounded by law enforcement agents, he appeared to drop to the ground by accident. At least three agents appeared to reach down to lift the president back up, before ushering him offstage, one video showed.

In another video, security agents can even be heard announcing the room was “clear” as Trump moved off the stage, indicating there was no imminent threat that would have required him to crawl to safety.

It’s unclear why Trump would bother to rewrite this minor detail, of which there is ample video evidence. It’s not shameful to trip while running to safety in an emergency, but it seems that Trump’s fragile pride may be preventing him from telling the truth. It wouldn’t be the first time.