Donald Trump has put a retired Marine who was relieved of his command for shooting his office floor in charge of the U.S. immigration court system.
Marine Corps Colonel Daren K. Margolin, a military attorney, will now serve as chief of the Office for Immigration Review, the part of the Justice Department, which oversees reviews of asylum requests and the issuances of deportation orders, the New York Times reports.
Margolin’s resumé includes a stint as security chief at Marine Base Quantico in Virginia.
In 2013, Major General Juan Ayala removed Margolin from his post after the colonel shot his personal gun into the floor while inside his own office. The discharge was found to be accidental.
But Margolin was forbidden from having a personal weapon while on the base—and was responsible for enforcing the ban on personal weapons for all Marines.
“Gen. Ayala is not taking this lightly,” a Marine Corps spokesperson told UPI at the time. “He’s taking some serious measures to look at this.”
Margolin was appointed after Trump fired four senior officials Office for Immigration Review on the day he assumed the presidency for the second time earlier this year.
Tom Jawetz, a former lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden, told the NYT then that the firings were a likely sign Trump would look to populate the office with loyalists.
“[Political appointees] during the first Trump administration ran roughshod over the career civil servants who have dedicated their lives to public service,” he said. “A Day 1 blood bath like this indicates that they don’t intend to change course now.”
Margolin had been in the Trump administration since retiring from the Marine Corps. His new job puts him in charge of the judges who rule on whether immigrants can stay in the country but who have a backlog of 3.8 million cases on their plate. Immigration judges are part of the executive, not the judicial, branch of government, which gives the Trump administration much greater power over their general conduct.
In recent months ICE has been using the courts as a hunting ground for finding immigrants to take into custody before or even after they have appeared for scheduled hearings.
Trump’s second stint in the White House has been marked by the launch of undoubtedly the largest mass deportation drive in U.S. history. That nationwide immigration crackdown has in turn created a significant backlog of cases for Margolin’s office to address, with the NYT estimating almost four million cases may be currently pending review.
The president has previously batted off widespread criticism of violations to the right of detained migrants to due process under the U.S. constitution, claiming that to “we cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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