Earlier this month, Kerry Doyle sat in a courtroom in the Boston region to observe a routine expulsion hearing – one of the thousands of similar procedures that take place in the immigration courts across the country every day.
It was the last step before Doyle, 59, would herself join the ranks of around 700 American immigration judges. It was seriously necessary – the immigration court system has a backlog of some 3.7 million cases, with more stacking every day.
As the hearing started, Doyle looked up at her email and spotted a message in her reception box with an attachment called “Termination”. A few days before it was used for one of the country’s most frequented immigration courses, Doyle was dismissed as part of the Trump’s first wave of mass layoffs to reduce government size.
“The reality is that you have a really broken system, and the licensed judges are not the means to repair it,” a long -standing immigration lawyer said in ABC News who previously run the Legal Bureau of the Ministry of Internal Security.
Doyle is one of the more than 100 immigration officials who have been dismissed or deceased voluntarily since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, according to Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a union which represents the immigration judges.
The latest layoffs and voluntary outings bring the total amount of departures to 43 immigration judges and 85 administrative staff – Legal assistants, clerks and translators – employees by the Immigration Executive Office (EOIR), the agency that oversees immigration courses.
Biggs said that more than half of them were part of the Administration’s delayed resignation program, which offered remuneration and benefits until September for any federal employee who agreed to resign by February 6.
Migrants / immigrants meet outside the immigration and customs offices (ICE) in the federal place of Lower Manhattan for their appointment and their legal dates for their legal status on November 20, 2024.
Andrea Renault / Star Max / IPX via AP, file
Several of those who were dismissed, such as Doyle, were part of a new class of judges hired in the Biden administration to help mitigate the overwhelming dear.
Critics warn that the mass exodus of judges could undermine one of Trump’s basic campaign promises – to clean up the legal immigration process and expel millions of immigrants who have had access to the country illegally.
“How do you expel people without immigration judges?” Biggs told ABC News. “It is very hypocritical. It goes against what it campaigned. It makes it more difficult to deport people in this country. It has no sense at all.”
The departure of immigration judges is only one way in which the Trump administration has potentially exercised efforts to invigorate the system of immigration courts.
In recent weeks, the Ministry of Justice has abolished several judges and civil servants in the Immigration Executive Office, the MJ office which oversees the immigration courts. And last week, the acting director of this office, Sirce Owen, wrote to colleagues that the Ministry of Justice had withdrawn “several layers of return restrictions protecting judges of administrative law”, which also applies to immigration judges.
Collectively, these measures “will simply reduce the ability of the courts to examine business quickly and fairly,” said Greg Chen of American Immigration Lawyers Association, an association of non -partisan bars.
As part of a broader effort to reduce the back of the immigration affairs in the process, the Biden administration hired more judges and civil servants in Eoir and has opened new audience rooms across the country.
Beyond its overhaul of the immigration court system, the Trump administration has also taken measures to make it more difficult for vulnerable immigrants to guarantee legal representation, a decision which could potentially inflict even more burden on the system of immigration courts.
Last month, the DOJ told providers of legal services who received federal funding to stop providing legal orientation and other works intended to support immigrants before the immigration courts. The Trump administration has also briefly interrupted the financing of organizations which provide professional legal representations to unaccompanied migrant children.
“What we see is a completely counterproductive plan that the new administration inaugurates which will make the immigration courts less effective and certainly less just,” said Chen.
Among the judges who remain, some fear that the administration will continue. Immigration judges were one of those who received an email from the personnel management office asking federal employees to provide five chips listing what they had accomplished during the previous week.
The Trump administration has not yet expressed its own plan to reduce the backlog of immigration cases.
