Earlier this month, Kerry Doyle sat in a Boston-area courtroom to observe a routine deportation hearing — one of thousands of similar proceedings that take place in immigration courts across the country each day.
It was the final step before Doyle, 59, would herself join the ranks of America’s roughly 700 immigration judges. She was badly needed — the immigration court system has a backlog of some 3.7 million cases, with more piling up each day.
As the hearing got underway, Doyle glanced down at her email and spotted a message in her inbox with an attachment called “Termination.” Days before she was to be sworn in at one of the busiest immigration courts in the country, Doyle was fired as part of the Trump’s administration’s first wave of mass layoffs to reduce the size of government.
“The reality is that you’ve got a really broken system, and firing judges is not the way to fix it,” Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney who previously led the Department of Homeland Security’s legal office, told ABC News in an interview.
Doyle is one of more than 100 immigration officials who have either been dismissed or voluntarily departed since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to Matt Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a union that represents immigration judges.
The latest dismissals and voluntary exits bring the total sum of departures to 43 immigration judges and 85 administrative staff — legal assistants, clerks and translators — employed by the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency that oversees immigration courts.
Biggs said that more than half of those are leaving as part of the administration’s deferred resignation program, which offered full pay and benefits until September for any federal employee who agreed to resign by Feb. 6.
Several of those who were dismissed outright, like Doyle, were part of a new class of judges hired during the Biden administration to help mitigate the overwhelming backlog of cases.
Critics are warning that the mass exodus of judges could undermine one of Trump’s core campaign pledges — to clean up the legal immigration process and deport millions of immigrants who gained access to the country unlawfully.
“How do you deport people without immigration judges?” Biggs told ABC News. “It’s highly hypocritical. It runs contrary to what he campaigned on. He’s making it more difficult to deport people from this country. It makes no sense at all.”
The departure of immigration judges is just one way the Trump administration has potentially set back efforts to reinvigorate the immigration court system.
The Justice Department has in recent weeks removed multiple judges and officials within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the office within DOJ that oversees the immigration courts. And last week, the acting director of that office, Sirce Owen, wrote to colleagues that the Justice Department had withdrawn “multiple layers of removal restrictions shielding administrative law judges,” which also applies to immigration judges.
Collectively, these moves are “simply going to reduce the capability of the courts to review cases in an expeditious and fair manner,” said Greg Chen of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a nonpartisan bar association.
As part of a broader effort to reduce the backlog of pending immigration cases, the Biden administration hired more judges and officials in EOIR and opened new courtrooms across the country.
Beyond its overhaul of the immigration court system, the Trump administration has also taken steps to make it more difficult for vulnerable immigrants to secure legal representation, a move that could potentially inflict even more of a burden on the immigration court system.
Last month, the DOJ told legal service providers who receive federal funding to stop providing legal orientation and other work intended to support immigrants at immigration courts. The Trump administration also briefly halted the funding to organizations that provide pro-bono legal representations to unaccompanied migrant children.
“What we are seeing is a wholly counterproductive plan that the new administration is ushering in that will make the immigration courts less effective and certainly less fair,” Chen said.
Among the judges who remain, some fear that the administration’s squeeze will continue. Immigration judges were among those who received an email from the Office of Personnel Management asking federal employees to provide five bullet points listing what they had accomplished during the previous week.
The Trump administration has not yet articulated a plan of its own to reduce the backlog of immigration cases.
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