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On a Thursday morning last month, Patrick O’Brien, a federal immigration judge, walked into his courtroom in downtown San Francisco. He was scheduled for a master-calendar hearing, a roll call, essentially, to get cases ready for trial. O’Brien was wearing a matte-black robe that seemed to absorb the artificial light overhead. He took his seat, scanned the room, and angled himself toward a computer monitor. The court was leanly staffed. There was a judicial clerk but no bailiff or stenographer. Opposite the judge were tables for the prosecution—the Department of Homeland Security—and for the respondent, a succession of immigrants who were applying for asylum. A Spanish interpreter appeared as a faceless box on a big screen. About ten people, all Latino, sat in wooden pews, gripping folders full of esoteric documents. Hardly anyone had come with legal representation. A pro-bono “attorney of the day” from a local nonprofit introduced herself in Spanish and took down names on a clipboard. The room was emptier than it should have been, given the number of immigrants slated to appear. O’Brien scrunched his face and smirked. “This is a first,” he said. “We have more guests than respondents.” I counted three journalists, myself included, plus a legal observer, and a local politician and her aide. O’Brien let the few immigrants who had representation go first, since lawyers had places to be. He called the first case. “My client is right here,” the lawyer said. “She’s a four-year-old child here with her father.” The girl swung her feet beneath her chair. Each case took a predictable shape. O’Brien ran through the government’s allegations: that the respondents had entered the United States on a certain date, at a certain location, without permission; that they were citizens of another country, and would be deported there, if need be. He then scheduled them for individual “merits” hearings—a trial. There, they would have to prove that, if deported, they would face “harm or mistreatment” based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, or that they might be tortured by their government. The earliest available trial date was in 2029—there is a national backlog of nearly four million cases. But, O’Brien warned, “My calendar is in flux.” Since January, the Trump Administration had fired around a hundred immigration judges, including eleven in greater San Francisco. The thousands of cases left behind by every terminated judge were either frozen or reassigned. After three hours, only two respondents were left: a married couple from Colombia. The husband, who was lanky and wore a baby-blue hoodie, was thirty years old, and the wife, who parted her long brown hair down the middle, was twenty-three. They had arrived in the U.S. last year. Neither had a criminal record. They sat next to the attorney of the day and greeted the judge. “The Department moves to dismiss,” the government attorney said. “Circumstances have changed.” Under previous Administrations, a motion to dismiss had generally been a good thing for respondents. It meant that Homeland Security was choosing to stop fighting asylum claims that were likely to succeed. But, since May, D.H.S. was making motions to dismiss for another reason. “Where Homeland Security moves to dismiss,” O’Brien told the couple, “they’ve been putting people into expedited removal proceedings”—a shortcut to deportation. The attorney of the day spoke against the motion. Another lawyer, from the public defender’s office, entered the courtroom. O’Brien gave the couple thirty days to respond, and set a follow-up hearing for late October. “There is a good chance that the hearing is not going to happen,” he told them. “Some people have come back to court, but most haven’t.” When the hearing concluded, the attorneys huddled around the couple in the back of the courtroom. The lawyer from the public defender’s office wrote her cellphone number in pen on the back of their hands, in case they were moved and couldn’t get in touch with her. As the couple left the courtroom, four plainclothes officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who were waiting in an empty hallway, put them in handcuffs. The young woman began to cry. An hour later, two more Colombians were arrested outside O’Brien’s courtroom. All four were brought to the sixth floor, where ICE has holding cells and an office. Homeland Security noted that they were being “taken back into custody for redetermination.” That evening, the public defender’s office filed for a temporary restraining order and a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. The motion read: Petitioners’ arrests did not have anything to do with their individual cases. Instead, they are part of a new, nationwide DHS strategy of sweeping up people who attend their immigration court hearings, detaining them, and seeking to re-route them to fast-track deportations. . . . DHS is aggressively pursuing this arrest and detention campaign at courthouses throughout the country. . . . The U.S. has seventy or so immigration courts, which are required by statute. The roster of judges, clerks, and interpreters who staff them is tiny compared with the ninety thousand officers and other personnel who work for ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Most cases heard in these courts pertain to asylum applications filed by immigrants who’ve been vetted at the border. (Countless others are turned away without the chance to apply.) Judges decide who can stay and who should go. They also hold bond hearings for noncitizens in detention, and consider special relief for minors and for noncitizens with family members who are U.S. citizens. Through experience, they learn to spot fraud. Some “see the same claims over and over, down to small details,” Kyra Lilien, a recently fired judge, told me. “This could be caused by smugglers who are feeding recycled false claims to applicants, or because a group of people are suffering and fleeing the same patterns of abuse. Or maybe one story is true and the rest are the copycats. That determination can have life or death consequences.” Since 1983, immigration courts have operated under the Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR (pronounced “ee-or”), which is part of the Department of Justice. Unlike judges in the federal courts, who have their own branch of government, immigration judges report to the U.S. Attorney General. Yet they have managed to act more or less independently, without interference. That changed this year. In January, Trump fired the acting director and other top officials at EOIR. Then came the terminations of a third of the appellate judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals and dozens of supervisory and trial judges. They were fired by e-mail, without notice or reasoning. Anam Petit was in her courtroom in Annandale, Virginia, between merits hearings, when she was fired. She took a moment outside, then returned to deliver an oral decision in her next case. As judges, she told me, “We’re so stoic. We don’t get emotional. But I was very emotional.” Shira Levine, a judge in San Francisco, was fired in the middle of a hearing. “I read the entire termination letter—four sentences—into the record,” she told me, “because it was unprecedented that an individual waiting over five years for a decision would have their hearing interrupted by a judge being fired.” Initially, the Trump Administration seemed to be targeting judges who’d been employed for less than two years, or who granted asylum at high rates, or who as lawyers had represented immigrants. Many of the fired judges were women and people of color. Some appeared on a website, funded by the Heritage Foundation, called D.H.S. Watch List, which called for rooting out “woke” bureaucrats. “The idea that my background would somehow prevent me from doing my job is offensive,” Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a fired judge who previously worked as an advocate for immigrant women and children, told me. “No one would tell a family-court judge, ‘You’re not doing your job properly unless fully half of fathers before you get custody.’ ” By late summer, the terminations had become too numerous and diffuse to be explained on purely ideological grounds. Judges were fired not only in California and New York but in Louisiana, Texas, and Ohio. White men were being fired, as were Marine veterans and former ICE lawyers. So were judges with low asylum-grant rates, and those who managed cases for immigrants already in detention—a docket that tends to yield more deportations. Carla Espinoza, for instance, who joined EOIR in 2023, had handled a detained docket for one of the busiest immigration courts in the country. “When I was removed from my position, it was very shocking,” she told me. “Using logic, I could not understand it. O.K., you’re detaining people. Well, I was tapped to lead the detained docket for Chicago on top of my original docket, which had over fourteen thousand cases. There’s nowhere else to put those cases.” (A Justice Department official told me that judges have been fired for many reasons and that, despite these firings, the case backlog has fallen.) Between firings and resignations, the number of immigration judges has dropped from seven hundred and thirty-five in 2024 to fewer than six hundred. (I based my count on data assembled by a former EOIR employee and by the immigration-judges’ union, which lost its legal status during the first Trump Administration but continues to operate.) The judges who remain have seen their workloads double. I spent a week observing the immigration courts in the Bay Area, where some judges now have six individual hearings per day, instead of three, on top of master-calendar hearings. They have also been required to “recalendar” cases that had been “administratively closed” years ago—for instance, because the immigrant was married to a U.S. citizen who’d applied for an adjustment of status—further bloating their dockets. “My mandate seemed to be changing day to day,” Ila Deiss, a former San Francisco judge and a career federal employee, told me. “And my courtroom was becoming a trap for ICE to be arresting people.” In the past few months, I’ve spoken with more than twenty current and recently fired judges and EOIR officials. They describe a system that is being remade, ricocheting out of their control. It’s a system whose guarantee of due process has relied on trust and good will—and a commitment by the executive branch to let court employees do their jobs. The Justice Department under President George W. Bush was sued, in 2005, for hiring immigration judges on the basis of their politics. “Otherwise, Administrations have stuck to the rules of neutral hiring,” Kerry Doyle, a former ICE official and immigration judge who was fired in February, before she could hear her first case, told me. Today, “I don’t think the immigration-court system is a court system,” a former senior EOIR official and military judge said. “What this Administration wants is a rubber stamp.” One humid evening, I went to the home of an immigration judge whom I’ll call K. We sipped iced tea in K.’s dining room, in the company of inch and spider plants and a wandering cat. K. is still employed, but more than a third of K.’s colleagues, across the three immigration courts in San Francisco and nearby Concord, have been fired. The loss was “palpable,” K. told me. “It’s just so demoralizing.” The courthouse had always been a stressful place—asylum cases involve testimony on extortion, starvation, war, rape, and child abuse. Now the scaffolding was collapsing. “A lot of attorneys, in addition to respondents, have been in tears,” K. told me. They were seeing their clients arrested; parents were handcuffed and yanked away from their children. In one waiting room, Homeland Security had posted bilingual flyers warning people “to self-deport.” The flyers were illustrated with a photo of Latino men, in gray prison sweats, being dragged toward an ICE van. Not long ago, an interpreter in K.’s courtroom became too distraught to finish a hearing. The interpreter couldn’t reach a family member in Los Angeles, and was worried that he’d been apprehended by ICE. “After the courthouse arrests started, the temperature at the court ratcheted up,” K. told me. Masked ICE officers stalked the hallways. Courtrooms emptied out: respondents were too afraid to show up for their appointments. Judges continued to be fired. K. started to carry a taser with a loud alarm. “I’m afraid of being arrested,” K. said. “I’m scared someone will come with an I.E.D. and detonate it.” (A D.H.S. spokesperson told me that ICE is placing certain “illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been. The average illegal alien gets far more due process than most Americans.”) K. told me about an incident, from early July, that seemed to encapsulate the sense of havoc. A man from El Salvador had appeared for a master-calendar hearing at one of the courthouses in San Francisco, on Montgomery Street, to press his claim for asylum. Homeland Security moved to dismiss his case; the judge denied the motion, but ICE arrested the man anyway. Officers led him, in handcuffs, out of the building. A group of protesters tried to wrest the man away, but ICE agents shoved him into a waiting van and shut the door. Protesters clung to the front of the van as it accelerated and fishtailed through a crowded downtown street. One slid off the hood and looked close to being run over. Another hung on a bit longer before being pulled down by ICE. K.’s colleagues watched it all unfold from their office windows. This year, a string of sharply worded policy memos arrived from the desk of Sirce Owen, the new acting head of EOIR. “EOIR’s values at the core of its mission are rooted in three ‘I’s’: integrity, impartiality, and the decisional independence of its adjudicators,” she wrote in January. “However, all three of these values have been severely eroded in recent years.” Many judges found such language menacing—and reminiscent of memos issued under the first Trump Administration by James McHenry, then the director of EOIR, and a close friend of Owen’s. During the Biden Presidency, McHenry was relegated to a minor section within the office, where he publicly complained of being the target of “a larger campaign of harassment.” He remained loyal to Trump, who, this year, made him acting Attorney General before Pam Bondi’s confirmation. In February, Owen sent a memo telling judges to complete asylum cases within six months—a statutory deadline, but one that was impossible to meet except by denying applications en masse. In April, she urged judges to toss out asylum applications that were “legally deficient” on paper, “without a hearing.” (The first Trump Administration attempted a version of this, but still required judges to bring in respondents for a master-calendar hearing.) In May, EOIR encouraged judges to grant the motions to dismiss filed by Homeland Security. Levine, the former San Francisco judge, saw this as an unprecedented overreach: “a directive on how to rule in a specific motion,” she said. (EOIR later retracted the instruction, citing a lawsuit.) Subsequent memos warned judges not to demonstrate “bias directed against DHS” or to be “adjudicatory outliers,” at risk of “close examination and potential action.” David Kim, a judge in New York, who was fired in September, told me, “When I read that, I thought, I know where this is going.” Owen also circulated what read to many judges as nakedly partisan commentary. In August, she wrote, “EOIR took great strides between 2017 and 2021 in improving the integrity of its proceedings and in restoring its reputation as a fully-functioning, administrative adjudicatory agency whose adjudicators are professional, competent, and neutral. Unfortunately, those efforts were largely eroded between 2021 and 2025.” Emmett Soper, a judge based in Virginia who was fired after two decades at EOIR and the Justice Department, told me, “The tone of the memos was extremely combative and derogatory.” (A Justice Department official said that the memos have rescinded “policies that were unfounded in law or discouraged the timely completion of cases.”) In addition to Owen’s pressure campaign, rulings by the Board of Immigration Appeals and Attorney General Bondi revoked Biden-era precedent, narrowing the options for relief. Asylum became harder to claim for survivors of domestic and gender-based violence. Immigrants who were detained after entering the U.S. “without inspection” were deemed ineligible for bond, if put in detention. “It’s likely increasing the number of people who will just say, ‘Give me an order of removal,’ ” Jennifer Durkin, a former judge in New York, told me. The norms of the court were changing so fast that it was difficult for lawyers to advise their clients. “I’ve been practicing immigration for seventeen years, and I’ve had to say so many times, in the past two or three months, ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ ” Marty Rosenbluth, an attorney who represents detained respondents in Georgia, told me. “We don’t know if a rule this week will be the same next week.” The American Immigration Lawyers Association accused the Administration of trying to “make immigration courts an arm of the enforcement system.” Owen’s term as acting director ended in September. On the first of October, the federal government shut down for lack of funding. During the previous shutdown, in 2019, only the detained dockets in immigration court continued operating; now, everything related to immigration was deemed essential. Judges and staff members at EOIR are all working without pay. On October 7th, EOIR announced a new director: Daren Margolin, who was most recently a supervisory immigration judge in Santa Ana, California, and a guest commentator on the right-wing network Newsmax. Years ago, when Margolin was a commanding officer in the Marine Corps, he’d made headlines for accidentally firing his personal handgun into the floor of his office at the Quantico base in Virginia. He was relieved of his command. After he retired from the military, he worked as a lawyer for Homeland Security before becoming a judge. K. and other Bay Area judges I interviewed were familiar with Margolin. He had served as an interim supervisory judge in San Francisco, in 2021. When Biden’s acting EOIR director issued a policy memo encouraging judges and staff to use terms such as “respondent” and “noncitizen” instead of “alien”—to reflect “our character as a Nation of opportunity and of welcome”—Margolin noted, in an e-mail to the judges and law clerks on his watch, that “one of the treats of serving in immigration courts is that we are subject to the winds of politics.” It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Margolin has a military background. This summer, as the firings of judges went on, EOIR announced that it would hire six hundred active-duty military lawyers and judges, as well as reservists and members of the National Guard, to serve as temporary immigration judges, on six-month terms. The Army Reserve told members of its legal command, “This assignment provides the opportunity to gain judicial experience in a high tempo, nationally significant setting.” Some of these recruits were scheduled to begin their training in October. (Neither the Justice Department nor the Pentagon could confirm a training timeline or any other specifics.) Former military judges, and immigration judges with military backgrounds, have condemned this plan. Last month, on a press call, several retired judge advocate generals compared the use of uniformed officers in immigration courts to Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in American cities. Frank Rosenblatt, a former Army judge advocate, warned that immigration hearings could turn into “military trials.” He added, “The use of martial law when civilian courts are functioning violates longstanding principles of international human rights law and the United States Constitution.” There are also concerns that these short-term judges, with little training, won’t be equipped to sort through thousands of cases in one of the most complex areas of U.S. law—and that they’ll be under pressure to do as they’re told, in keeping with the military chain of command. Earlier this year, Homeland Security designated certain Latin American gangs as foreign terrorist organizations; if a prosecutor were to argue that an asylum applicant extorted by such a group had in fact provided material support to terrorists, would a temporary judge feel empowered to disagree? “At the end of the day, they’re soldiers,” Ryan Wood, a former Army judge advocate who recently resigned from his position as a chief immigration judge in Minnesota, told me. “This puts them in a very difficult position.” The former senior EOIR official and military judge I spoke with expressed similar alarm: “If you won’t be there more than six months, you’ve got no incentive other than professionalism to try to do the right thing.” As I went between the courts in San Francisco and Concord, I looked north over San Francisco Bay, toward Angel Island, where, between 1910 and 1940, half a million immigrants were inspected, processed, and detained. Their fates were determined by a “board of special inquiry” composed of adjudicators who mostly rubber-stamped refusals. This was true for Asian migrants, in particular, under the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 2025, a federal mandate to detain and deport again threatens to efface other legal commitments. “The pressure is unrelenting,” K. told me. “I find myself struggling to preserve due process and to protect the process from this tinkering, this meddling, this pressure.” ♦ The New Yorker is committed to coverage of the federal workforce. Are you a current or former federal employee with information to share? Please use your personal device to contact us via e-mail (tammy_kim@newyorker.com) or Signal (ID: etammykim.54).
