One month into his return to the White House, President Donald Trump has made his immigration policies a top priority, with a sharp focus on border enforcement and government downsizing.
As part of broader federal budget cuts, the Senate has advanced legislation to increase funding for border security and immigration enforcement while reducing spending across most other federal agencies. Among the cuts, the Department of Justice has dismissed 28 immigration judges from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), a move aligned with the president’s goal of shrinking the federal workforce.
Scripps News confirmed that 28 judges were fired, including 13 who had just completed their training and were set to begin hearing cases. One of those judges, Kerry Doyle, along with the others, was notified of the termination during their probationary period — just one day before taking the bench.
“The priority of this administration is to move forward on removals and to put people in removal proceedings, get removal orders and have that move forward. So it really doesn't make any real logical sense of why you would fire immigration judges, particularly ones, where, if the training had occurred as scheduled, we would start hearing cases this week or next week at the latest,” Doyle told Scripps News.
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Doyle was part of the newest class hired by the Justice Department's office responsible for decisions on removing individuals charged with crimes or immigration violations, as well as granting asylum and permanent residency.
By the end of the fiscal year 2024, there were only 735 immigration judges, according to a congressional report—three times the number in 2015. However, the backlog has still exploded, increasing more than 1,100% since 2012 and now exceeding 3.7 million pending cases, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC project.
Many of those cases take years to be resolved simply due to the time it takes to get before a judge.
"You see the piles of work, and then you're told it's not in the agency's interests to continue to employ you,” Doyle said. "I can't think of a rational explanation for why a decision like this would be taken.”
Doyle has served as a lawyer for decades in both public and private practice
In 2017, she was one of the lawyers that challenged then-President Trump’s Muslim travel ban. More recently, she served as principal legal advisor or general counsel for ICE and as deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration.
However, many new judges, including Doyle, had yet to hear a case as a judge on the bench – and were hired as part of a bipartisan push to have more judges to address the backlog.
Republican Senator James Lankford’s 2024 bipartisan immigration bill would have included $440 million to hire immigration judges and support staff at the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
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And every year, there has been an increase in funding to help address the case backlog.
“Each judge handles 500 to 700 cases a year. You can quickly see the cases that will not be heard as the backlog increases. Hiring more immigration judges is essential to achieving the enforcement this president campaigned on,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union that represents immigration judges.
Scripps News reached out to the immigration office at the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
The Department of Homeland Security responded, saying, "Positions are being reevaluated," and confirmed the termination of 50 employees at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the office responsible for legal immigration.
DHS added, “We are actively identifying non-mission critical personnel in probationary status.”
Despite inquiries, DHS did not disclose how many personnel involved in immigration enforcement agencies such as Customs and Border Protection and ICE had been affected and their respective unions did not respond to a request for comment.
The White House asserted that it is up to each agency to disclose reductions but emphasized that no mission-critical positions, such as border agents, were terminated; they also indicated that the positions cut were either duplicative or misaligned with the administration's objectives.
“President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse. This isn’t easy to do in a broken system entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it’s a task long overdue,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy spokesperson for the White House, told Scripps News in a written statement.
Judges have long been seen as outside the scope of political interference.
During Trump’s first term, he sought to decertify the union that represents immigration judges.
More recently, he moved to fire administrative law judges — like those that oversee social security cases and disability, at will," calling the law that protected them from arbitrary removal unconstitutional. The statute had sought to protect judges from political interference
The administration will likely see more border cases stack up, even as southern border crossings have hit historic lows. This is because the judges responsible for deportations also handle cases from the interior, including appeals related to Temporary Protected Status. The president has also sought to undo this status for numerous countries, further adding to the already bloated system.
