Judges See An Immigration Court Gutted From Inside

George Pappas had two decades of experience as an immigration lawyer when, in 2023, he was offered the opportunity to become an immigration judge.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the subagency under the purview of the U.S. Department of Justice overseeing the immigration courts, gave Pappas eight days to dissolve his law firm and report to Falls Church, Virginia, for training. After being sworn in on a Friday, he only had the weekend to pack his things, move from North Carolina to Boston, Massachusetts, at his own expense, and show up to work the following Monday. He came back to visit his wife every two weeks.

Pappas wasn't alone in taking a leap into uncertainty. Many colleagues relocated from across the country and abroad, signing mortgages and moving children to new cities. Despite the disruptions, the judges felt they'd made the right choice and found the work as public servants rewarding.

But those personal sacrifices and drive meant little when, in the days since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Pappas and scores of other judges were fired from the bench without cause and without warning.

"We were treated worse than dogs," Pappas said.

At least 141 judges have left the immigration bench since Jan. 20, including 82 who have been fired outright. Some were forced to take early retirement, others simply resigned.

Eight former immigration judges who spoke to Law360 say the administration's rough treatment of the immigration courts poses an unprecedented threat to judicial independence and is eroding immigrants' due process rights.

While arrests and expedited removals have grabbed headlines, quieter internal steps like the firing of hundreds of immigration judges and curbs on the discretion of those who remain have drawn far less scrutiny.

But the judges view these as sides of the same coin: a hollowing out of protections for noncitizens and adjudicators alike, aimed at shrinking immigration courts into a bare administrative process with little recourse. The endgame, some of them say, is to eviscerate the immigration court or eliminate it altogether.

"Nothing is happening in a vacuum," said A. Ashley Tabaddor, a former immigration judge in Los Angeles who served as chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Biden administration. "They are doing everything to essentially bypass the law and maximize the enforcement arm."

Matt Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, the broader union the National Association of Immigration Judges falls under, called the number of judges who have been fired was probably an undercount and said it doesn't include judges who resigned for jobs in private practice or just retired. Some of them, like Pappas, were terminated at the end of a two-year probationary period, while others had been on the bench for decades.

Judges who were fired said that they were never told the reason they were let go. The judges who spoke to Law360 encompass the full political spectrum, ranging from liberal to conservative.

Overall, the judges said the administration seems to have targeted people whose background could be perceived as pro-immigrant. That includes judges who previously worked representing immigrants or doing pro bono immigration work, or judges who worked as counsel in the Biden administration. Tenured judges say they were fired for granting asylum at rates that the administration deemed too high to reconcile with Trump's mass deportation plans.

Pappas, a dual Greek-American citizen born and raised in New York's outer boroughs, once ran for local office as a Republican during the 1990s. Pappas had an asylum denial rate of 76% — higher than the 58% national average and the 50% average for Boston, where he presided. But that rate didn't seem to matter in light of the work done on behalf of noncitizens by his former firm.

A letter dated July 11 and signed by then-acting EOIR Director Sirce E. Owen informed Pappas that the attorney general had decided not to extend his term and asked him to return all government-issued property by the end of the same day. The letter followed the same template used to fire the other judges.


"All of the judges fired were fired without cause. It's unclear what the reasoning was," Biggs said.

Some judges have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to fight their termination, arguing that congressional statutes protect civil servants. Some said they are willing to escalate their claims to the Merit System Protection Board, a quasi-judicial agency tasked with protecting the federal workforce against partisan political personnel actions.

The agency has challenges of its own: In February, Trump fired MSPB Commissioner Cathy Harris. A federal court held that her termination was illegal, but the U.S. Supreme Court let the firing stand.

Pappas, who is in his later 60s, has recently reestablished his law firm and is in the midst of rebuilding his client base. He said he's willing to file a lawsuit in federal court to seek reinstatement, back pay and damages.

Last week, the EOIR announced that it had hired 36 new immigration judges, including 25 temporary ones, to replenish its ranks.

The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

Decimating the Ranks

Pappas said that even before Trump reassumed office in January, being an immigration judge meant operating day-in, day-out in a "degrading, hostile, unprofessional judicial environment" where jurists were under extreme pressure from their leadership to handle a massive and ever-growing backlog of cases.

A judge works hours preparing for asylum cases that have been languishing for years, always struggling to find time to delve into paper files and to become familiar with the facts and the issues presented by the people requesting relief. At some point, Pappas was expected to hold three asylum hearings per day. Each one of them could decide the destiny of a noncitizen and family members. Despite that heavy burden, immigration judges and their staffers stuck together, helping one another to get the job done.

"We really believed that we were doing something positive. We believed in due process. We wanted to give dignity and respect to the hearings," he said.

After Trump's second inauguration, most judges expected a return to many of the policies of his first administration: quotas and limits on their discretion in deciding which cases to remove from the docket to, for instance, allow a noncitizen to pursue other immigration benefits like a green card or a work visa.

What they did not expect was mass-scale firings.

Within hours from the president's swearing in, the entire EOIR leadership, including its acting director, chief immigration judge and general counsel, was sacked. Since then, immigration judges have been fired in waves, most recently earlier this month, when more than a dozen were let go.

"It's an atmosphere of paranoia and fear, which is exactly what they want," said David C. Koelsch, who resigned in September after seven years presiding in Baltimore Immigration Court and has since kept in touch with his colleagues.

"Many judges are wondering if their PIV cards — their identification cards — are even going to work when they show up to work that day," he said.

Carmen Maria Rey Caldas has been on the immigration bench since 2022, first in Stewart, Georgia, hearing cases involving detained immigrants, then in Batavia, New York, and in Manhattan. On Aug. 21, around 4 p.m., she received a termination email. Her supervisor wasn't copied on it.

"I was on the bench. I was in the middle of work," she said. She told the parties in the case before her that she had just been fired, and that she would work through the afternoon to write up a decision.

Caldas, who declined to label herself conservative or liberal, felt her days as a judge were numbered because of her 20-year background working for a nonprofit advocating for refugees and victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. She just didn't know when the email would come. But she said that for many of her fellow judges, the uncertainty is unnerving.

"The chaos is the point," she said.

"Due Process Is Dead": Exerting Control Over Judges

The EOIR has issued at least 50 memorandums announcing the undoing of policies put in place by the Biden administration and dictating the president's immigration agenda. Some of those memos had harsh words for immigration judges.

In a memo issued on April 11, Owen, then acting director, said that it was "clear" from the massive backlog of asylum cases pending nationwide that judges were not fulfilling their duty to manage their dockets efficiently. The memo encouraged judges to dismiss asylum applications that "do not have viable legal paths" and issue deportation orders without holding hearings in those cases.

In a later memo on June 27, Owen insinuated that some judges were biased in favor of noncitizens and that they were acting unethically. Owen threatened "corrective or disciplinary action" for judges exhibiting bias against either party in an immigration proceeding, though judges said it was clear that the memo was meant to punish perceived bias against prosecutors.


Overall, the memos came down so often that judges had to ask their support staff to produce digests at the end of each week.

In the spring, attorneys with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began the practice of filing memos asking immigration judges to dismiss cases against noncitizens with the specific intent of stripping them of implicit, if temporary, protections against deportation, and facilitating their immediate arrest.

Pappas said the chief judge he was serving under directed him to grant the DHS motions outright, even though doing so would violate the established practice of giving noncitizens 10 days to consider whether to oppose them.

"You mean, like 'rubber stamp' grant them?" Pappas said he asked his supervisor, who replied that unless the memos were defective in some way, they should be granted.

That practice was followed by a campaign of courthouse arrests. Images and videos of noncitizens handcuffed and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in courthouse hallways while attending required hearings have continued to dominate the national attention.

Taken together, judges have said, these policies have turned immigration courts across the U.S. into fast tracks to removal.

"We were told to facilitate deportation," Pappas said. "Due process is dead in immigration courts."

Koelsch, the former Baltimore immigration judge, said the constant firing of judges sends a message to those who remain that they have to "toe the line" — meaning limiting the number of cases in which they grant asylum and strictly enforce procedural requirements — because their job is at risk.

"It's a classic totalitarian playbook strategy," he said. "You keep the bureaucracy guessing about what they're supposed to do, and you just issue vague, sort of ominous warnings, and you fire people routinely, so that people get nervous."

Koelsch said that during his tenure, which began under the first Trump administration, he never allowed pressure from superiors to influence his decisions on the bench. But the control the EOIR exerts on judges, particularly those who were hired recently, is having an adverse effect on the noncitizens who come before them.

"People are feeling very constrained and it's having spillover effects in their decisions," he said.

Judges say the fear of being fired leads to self-censorship, which translates into fewer grants of asylum or challenges to DHS attorneys. The uncertainty and the hostile work environment they navigate every day affects their decision-making and discretion. Where once they would have opposed a motion made by government attorneys, or looked at the claims of a noncitizen more carefully, they now feel constrained and incentivized to hear cases quicker and to deny relief more often. In the longer run, they say, rulings become more mechanical, and the whole process loses what makes it humane: discretion.

That discretion is crucial to a fair process because each case involving a noncitizen is unique and requires a deep understanding of their circumstances, the judges said

Emmett D. Soper, a former judge in immigration court in Arlington, Virginia, said asylum cases are complex, particularly when a noncitizen is represented by an attorney and can produce a large amount of evidence, including affidavits, medical and police records, and reports from sources like the U.S. State Department, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The analysis is complex, time-consuming and requires being done "with a really high degree of care," he said.

"You listen to the testimony and you make a determination: Is a person credible? Does it seem like they're telling the truth, or on the other hand, does it seem like there are holes in the story?" Soper said. "If they're not credible, that's a problem you typically would think very seriously about denying the application."

But by hastening or pressuring judges, that aspect of due process evaporates, judges say.

"Any reasonable person would always think twice before they make a ruling on any case," said Tabaddor, who is also a past president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

"The linchpin of any court system is that the decision-maker has to be an independent, impartial decision-maker," she said. "You cannot go into that court knowing that your judge is afraid of losing his or her job if they rule against the government."

Elizabeth Young, another former judge who presided in immigration court in San Francisco, said the administration is using fear to push judges to make certain decisions. Judges who are still serving tell her they feel the pressure.

"I've talked to many of them, and they're like, 'When I go into court, I am concerned about applying the law, but I'm also concerned that I should deny more, because if I don't, then I'll get fired'," she said.

Koelsch said that the adjudication of asylum cases strikes at the core of America's legal and moral identity, and that due process rests on the true independence of the immigration judges.

"The laws are what the laws are, and they provide for a system of protecting people who will be harmed if they go back to their home countries. That's not a liberal attitude to me. That's part of what our country is all about, that, you know, we provide people an opportunity," he said. "My job as a judge is to enforce those laws and apply those laws as best as I can to each person's unique situation."

Koelsch said it is up to Congress to shape the asylum system by enacting legislation.

Dana Leigh Marks, who retired in 2021 after serving for decades as a judge in immigration court in San Francisco, said the judges are unfairly put in a position when they need to confront a backlog that began to spin out of control during the Obama administration and has worsened because of congressional inaction.

"It's a snowball effect that's been ongoing for a really long period of time, but it basically comes from a lack of 'cojones' by Congress to take on immigration," she said. "Sorry, but that's really what it is."

Immigration Courts Are Pulled Into Partisan Warfare

Each of the judges Law360 spoke to landed on the immigration bench following a different path, but they share a common identity as public servants in a profession marked by crushing caseloads and daily, high-stakes decisions.

Young, who said she saw civil service as a "calling," worked as an attorney adviser at the EOIR in the early 2000s, then left for academia and private practice before returning to the bench.

"I could have made a lot more money in the private sector, but chose to stay with the government because of that sort of underlying desire to serve," she said.

In June, Young was reassigned from her deputy chief immigration judge position into a "sanctuary cities enforcement working group" where she was effectively sidelined and given no work, she said. She quickly resigned.

Tabaddor said judges are being fired not for performance but for their past roles or perceived sympathies.

"You don't have the background that we think we want to have, you're perceived to have worked in the past as an advocate. Therefore, we don't want you as a judge," she said, summing up what she thinks is the administration's rationale.

Soper entered the immigration courts straight out of law school in 2005 as a judicial law clerk, then moved to the EOIR headquarters in 2006, cycling through roles at the agency and the U.S. Department of Justice.

He was appointed an immigration judge at the end of the Obama administration and began hearing cases in early 2017, serving on the bench until March 2021. He returned to the court in 2024 after serving as counsel to the EOIR director under the Biden administration. On July 17, 2025, he was fired by the Trump administration.

Soper said it's "hard to know" why he was dismissed because he was given no reasons. But it was possible that current EOIR leadership viewed his asylum denial rate — around 30% — as too low.

DHS Bureaucrat Watchlist, a partisan website funded by the right-wing group Heritage Foundation, listed Soper as one of the judges on its "target list."

"Judge Soper has consistently granted asylum in over 67 percent of his cases, effectively allowing a significant number of migrants into the country. This level of leniency is problematic and flouts the purpose of [a] legitimate asylum system," the entry on the website said.

Soper said the watch list is evidence that the immigration courts are being politicized and that the administration is treating judges' asylum rulings as a political loyalty test.

"It's a real politicization of what's supposed to be a nonpolitical adjudication system," said Soper, who now practices immigration law at Benach Pitney Reilly, a private firm in the Washington, D.C., area.

Koelsch described himself as a "fairly conservative" on immigration issues. He taught immigration law in Detroit and supervised students representing asylum applicants before working as an asylum office supervisor in Arlington, Virginia. He ultimately became a judge in 2018, which he said was the pinnacle of his legal career.

"It was my highest form of service to the American people," he said. "I'm a very patriotic guy."

But political ideology matters less to the administration than willingness to fulfill Trump's agenda, said Sarah Cade, a judge at the immigration court in Boston who resigned in May and now works at an immigration law firm.

"Even for the most conservative of judges, this is not a good work environment," she said.

Cade, who describes herself as a "middle-of-the-road" judge who began working for the government under the George W. Bush administration and had a 50% average asylum denial rate, said she expected to serve her entire career as an immigration judge.

But starting in January, as the Trump EOIR's memos began to come down, Cade grew concerned about the ethical ramifications of what the administration was asking her and her colleagues to do.

The new directives prevented judges from pausing cases while respondents pursued other relief, a process known as administrative closure. Meanwhile, DHS attorneys began aggressively seeking dismissals to allow courthouse arrests, and mandatory detention was extended to long-term residents who previously could request bond.

Cade was told that if a noncitizen detainee, under the pressure of ICE officers, without an interpreter and the help of a lawyer, signed a stipulated deportation order, judges must issue the order immediately, without confirming that the person understood or signed voluntarily

Cade said she saw in the directives, many of which were conveyed verbally by supervisors and not through official memorandums, a clear sign that a profound cultural shift was occurring.

"I felt I might have to compromise my ethics and might be put in a place where I felt like I was going to be asked to violate due process. So I left and I went to private practice."

Cade is now an attorney at Bremer Law LLC, a firm based in Providence, Rhode Island. She said she respected the judges who remained, but emphasized that the system had become nearly untenable for anyone committed to due process and judicial integrity.

Pappas said the gutting of the immigration courts should be viewed in the context of a broader "assault" of independent institutions — universities, media, civil society and the administrative state — and urged the public to "connect the dots."

The effect, he said, is to transform society into one in which a ruling class decides who can enter the country, and ultimately, who gets to be considered American.

"It creates a hierarchy of 'real' Americans at the top and everybody else. So if you're part of that real American core, you need to be protected, and we need to limit people that threaten your culture and your history and your heritage, and those that are in the American core are the ones that are entitled to lead and rule this country," he said. "This is a complete fascist blueprint."

--Editing by Robert Rudinger.

If you work in the immigration courts or have been affected by these developments you can contact the reporter via email at Marco.Poggio@Law360.com or via Signal username rabo.14