More than a dozen immigration judges were fired on Friday, coinciding with President Donald Trump‘s promise to trim the federal workforce.
A union official told the Associated Press that 13 judges who were set to be sworn in, and five assistant chief immigration judges, were fired on Friday without warning.
The move comes after two other judges were dismissed this week, the AP reported. No replacements have been announced.
Fox News Digital previously reported the U.S. immigration court backlog surpassed three million pending cases.
Immigration judges currently average 4,500 pending cases each, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The AP reported five top court officials were replaced by the Trump administration, including Mary Cheng, the agency’s acting director.
In a memo released on Jan. 27, Sirce Owen, acting director of the Department of Justice, noted the Biden administration “severely undermined” core values of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
“An effort to restore those values and to re-establish EOIR as a model administrative adjudicatory body is well underway,” Owen wrote. “If all employees are willing to join that effort, then there will be no limit to what EOIR can achieve.”
The Trump administration on Thursday instructed agencies to lay off most probationary workers without civil service protection, the AP reported.
The International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, which represents federal employees, and the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on Saturday.
Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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