Now, however, Trump’s angry zeal for mass removals appears to be helping to produce a particularly unnerving outcome.
The judges and their representatives fear that this is designed to pave the way for the removal of judges who don’t consistently rule against migrants in deportation and asylum cases—and thus frustrate Trump and his hardline immigration advisers. Replacing them with judges who will more reliably rule against migrants could theoretically speed up the pace of deportations.
This represents a serious escalation of Trump’s assault on the immigration system. Last month, DOJ fired 20 immigration judges with no public rationale; those were largely probationary officials. Then, last week, DOJ let it be known that it will no longer observe restrictions that constrain the removal of Administrative Law Judges, a category that decides federal government agency cases and doesn’t include most immigration judges.
Translated into plain English, this means that if restrictions on removing immigration judges are “determined” by the DOJ to be unconstitutional, they will no longer apply, immigration lawyers say. It’s only a matter of time until this “determination” is made.
There are good reasons for immigration judges to enjoy protections from at-will firing. Right now, they cannot be fired unless the administration can cite a strong rationale. The restrictions on removals are rooted in statute, procedure, and precedent, and if the DOJ goes forward with the idea that they’re unconstitutional—in keeping with an expansive reading of Trump’s authority to fire subordinates—it will trigger a major legal battle.
The IFPTE union fears that this is exactly what the new administration does not want—that disregarding protections for judges will mean more pressure on them to rule against migrants, because if they don’t, Trump officials will start removing them. “They’ll look at who deports more people and who doesn’t deport enough,” IFPTE president Biggs told me. “And they’ll start there.”
All of this points to a deep incoherence in MAGA ideology. Trump and fanatical, deportation-happy advisers like Stephen Miller want as many people removed as possible. But Trump ordered Republicans to kill the 2024 bipartisan Senate border security bill, which would have provided nearly half a billion dollars to increase the courts’ capacity to process migrants—including for deportation.
That’s because the last thing Trump and Miller want is an immigration court system that functions fairly toward migrants. After all, that risks facilitating more migration. All their initiatives are shaped around opposition to that goal, whether it’s closing off channels to asylum or refugee status, ending parole programs for migrants to apply for sponsorship in this country from abroad, or rolling back temporary protections for migrants facing horrific conditions in home countries.
Which leads back to immigration judges. As American Immigration Counsel senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick notes, Trump and his advisers actively want ICE to be able to issue removal orders without ever letting that person get a hearing in court. “They don’t want anyone to be able to tell them that an immigrant has rights, that an immigrant can apply for some form of relief,” he says. “That is a terrifying thought.”
The next best thing is judges more prone to rubberstamp deportations. As all this demonstrates, Trump and Miller don’t want a system that doles out impartial legal rulings for migrants. What they want is a system that does not do this. Their holy grail is the removals of as many migrants as possible, even if that means entirely eviscerating due process for them—or especially if it does.
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