Earlier this month, Kerry Doyle sat in a Boston area court to observe a routine deportation hearing, one of the thousands of similar procedures that take place in the immigration courts throughout the country every day.
It was the last step before Doyle, 59, joined the ranks of the approximately 700 immigration judges of the United States. It was very necessary: the immigration court system has an accumulation of about 3.7 million cases, with more accumulation every day.
When the audience was launched, Doyle looked at his email and saw a message on his entry tray with an attached file called “Termination.” Days before she was a swear in one of the most busy immigration courts in the country, Doyle was fired as part of the first wave of mass layoffs of the Trump administration to reduce the size of the government.
“The reality is that you have a really broken system, and the dismissal judges is not the way to fix it,” Doyle told ABC News, an immigration lawyer who previously directed the legal office of the National Security Department in an interview.
Doyle is one of the more than 100 immigration officials who have been dismissed or voluntarily parties since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, according to Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a union that represents immigration judges.
The last layoffs and voluntary outputs carry the total sum of the outputs to 43 immigration judges and 85 Administrative Personnel (legal assistants, employees and translators) used by the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that supervises the immigration courts.
Biggs said that more than half of them are going as part of the Deferred Resignation Program of the Administration, which offered full wages and benefits until September for any federal employee who agreed to resign before February 6.
Migrants/immigrants meet outside the Immigration and Customs Control (ICE) offices in the Federal Square of Bajo Manhattan for their ongoing appointment and the court dates for their legal status on November 20, 2024.
Andrea Renault/Star Max/IPX through AP, file
Several of those who were fired, such as Doyle, were part of a new class of judges hired during the Biden administration to help mitigate the overwhelming accumulation of cases.
Critics warn that the mass exodus of the judges could undermine one of the main promises of the Trump campaign: clean the legal immigration process and deport millions of immigrants who obtained access to the country illegally.
“How sports for people without immigration judges?” Biggs told ABC News. “It is highly hypocritical. He postulates against what he campaigned. It is making it more difficult to deport people from this country. It makes no sense at all.”
The Immigration Judges item is just a way in which the Trump administration has delayed efforts to revitalize the immigration court system.
In recent weeks, the Department of Justice eliminated multiple judges and officials within the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the office within the DOJ that supervises the immigration courts. And last week, the interim director of that office, Sirce Owen, wrote to his colleagues that the Department of Justice had retired “multiple layers of removal restrictions that protect the judges from administrative law”, which also applies to immigration judges.
Collectively, these movements “will simply reduce the ability of the courts to review the cases in an expedited and fair manner,” said Greg Chen, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a non -partisan lawyers association.
As part of a broader effort to reduce the accumulation of pending immigration cases, the Biden administration hired more judges and officials in Eoir and opened new courts of courts throughout the country.
Beyond its review of the Immigration Court system, the Trump administration has also taken measures to make vulnerable immigrants ensure legal representation, a movement that could further inflict a burden on the immigration court system.
Last month, the DOJ told the providers of legal services that they receive federal funds to stop providing legal guidance and other works aimed at supporting immigrants in immigration courts. The Trump administration also briefly arrested funds to organizations that provide legal representations for unaccompanied migrant children.
“What we are seeing is a totally counterproductive plan in which the new administration begins to make immigration courts less effective and certainly less fair,” Chen said.
Among the judges that remain, some fear that the tightness of the administration will continue. Immigration judges were among those who received an email from the personnel management office asking federal employees to provide five bullet points to list what they had achieved during the previous week.
The Trump administration has not yet articulated an own plan to reduce the accumulation of immigration cases.
