Donald Trump’s gun-toting immigration courts chief is a “total moron” and “f—ing dope” who doesn’t actually understand his job, according to multiple sources who’ve worked alongside him.
Daren Margolin serves as the MAGA administration’s director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, a Justice Department division overseeing asylum claims and deportations in immigration cases across the country.
A retired Marine Corps colonel, his appointment in October made headlines after it emerged that while still in active service, he’d been relieved of command position in 2013 for firing a gun in his office at a Virginia Marine base. As the site’s chief of security, it was his responsibility at the time to enforce a ban on bringing personal weapons onto the grounds.
The Daily Beast has now spoken with four people who worked with Margolin for several years at the immigration agency. They slammed him as “lazy” and “extremely dysfunctional,” with a “fundamental lack of understanding” of both his administrative duties and the laws he oversees.
“Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” said one person, granted anonymity for fear of retribution from the DOJ. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”
“He’s a total moron,” another person said. “Such a f—ing dope,” a third added.
Ironically, those with first-hand experience of working with Margolin believe it’s precisely because of his checkered record that he’s now found himself in charge of a DOJ division adjudicating almost four million backlogged immigration cases.
Sources, who have now left the office, told the Daily Beast they’d come forward because they regard Margolin as a MAGA “puppet,” appointed to oversee the “rubberstamping” of deportation targets set by the White House.
Since Trump assumed office for the second time in January 2025, critics have decried what’s been taken as a wholesale gutting of the immigration courts.
Amid its nationwide deportation drive, the MAGA administration is accused of reshaping the system to prioritize rapid removals over fair hearings, undermining its independence by replacing seasoned immigration judges with pliant and inexperienced loyalists.
“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” one person said.
“I’m so worried about the agency,” another added. “It really breaks my heart to see.”
“The guy literally once shot a gun in his office,” said another.
According to George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge who was fired amid MAGA’s purges last year, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he told the Daily Beast. He said the Trump administration’s gutting of the system represents “generational damage” that could “easily” take 20 years to repair.
For detainees facing removal to violent countries like El Salvador, Pappas further warns that a policy of prioritizing deportations has now witnessed the roughly 600 judges who make up Margolin’s division handing down rulings that place migrants at risk of extreme harm.
He even goes so far as to describe some of those judgments as “death sentences.”
“The killing fields are coming as much from the immigration courts as gunships in the Caribbean,” Pappas said. “There’s a disdain and disrespect for the rule of law, and in its place a policy of using the legal system as a weapon of performative cruelty.”
Margolin left the Marines in 2016, three years after the Virginia gun incident. After a stint as an attorney at Homeland Security, he joined the Executive Office of Immigration Review in 2020, toward the tail end of the first Trump presidency, before retiring in 2024 in highly acrimonious circumstances.
Others who worked at the office during that time described his prior tenure as marred by total ineptitude, along with petty grievances, unprofessional behaviour, and squabbles with management.
During the pandemic, they claim he would turn up to online meetings in shorts while lounging in his back garden. “Everybody’s messaging him, because he doesn’t even realize his camera’s on,” one person recalled.
At the end of lockdown, Margolin apparently resisted a return to in-office work because of a bad back. When his superiors insisted, an insider said he responded by turning a conference room into “his own luxurious office,” bringing in a large couch so he could “lie down during the day.”
The retired Marine also brought an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against his own agency, claiming he was entitled to a higher salary because of his military service.
While colleagues from that period couldn’t say whether upper management actively pushed Margolin to leave, they said by the time his lawsuit failed in March 2024, his position had become untenable, and he quit.
“That was when he went on NewsMax and trashed us,” one person said. “He became this spokesperson for Trump, and it was all about how we supposedly weren’t following the rule of law.”
Asked who may have vouched for Margolin to return and head up the office under the second MAGA administration, those sources pointed toward his alleged personal relationship with James McHenry, who was the immigration review agency’s director before being ousted by the Biden administration in 2021.
A Trump loyalist, McHenry briefly stood in as acting Attorney General before Pam Bondi’s confirmation last year, and is currently listed on the DOJ’s website as serving on an “unspecified” detail within the department.
Former colleagues explained Margolin would ordinarily need to have undergone a series of rigorous, essay-based tests to qualify.
“I cannot, for the life of me, see how he could have managed that,” one person said. “He’s not bright enough. I’m pretty sure McHenry just got him hired anyway.”
The Daily Beast reached out to the Executive Office for Immigration Review for comment on this story. A spokesperson said Margolin got his job on merit and that he passed the same tests as other senior executive service employees.
They added that he and McHenry had never met until a few months ago, and that the office “otherwise declines to comment on baseless ad hominem attacks from disgruntled former EOIR employees.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal attorney, said Margolin has “the enthusiastic support of EOIR’s over 2,000 employees.”
He added the retired colonel’s appointment reflects the Justice Department’s “commitment to restoring EOIR’s integrity as an unbiased tribunal after four years of rubberstamping amnesty for nearly 1 million aliens in support of an open borders agenda.”
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