Federal agents in immigration court in New York City.Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx/AP
The Trump administration has axed another group of judges from immigration courts. On Monday, the New York Times reported, eight judges serving on the bench at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza—ground zero for courthouse arrests—were terminated. Among them was Amiena A. Khan, the court’s supervising assistant chief immigration judge.
Trump is trying to reshape immigration courts to fit his mass deportation agenda.
The latest firings, which were confirmed by the National Association of Immigration Judges and a Department of Justice official, add to an estimated 90 judges who have been terminated so far this year without stated cause. (Immigration judges are employed by the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR.) Federal Plaza, one of the city’s three immigration courts, now lists the names of just 25 sitting immigration judges and one temporary judge.
As I’ve previously reported (here and here), the sweeping purge of dozens of immigration judges across the country is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to hollow out the already overburdened courts—charged with making decisions on deportation and life-or-death asylum cases—and reshape them as a tool for the mass deportation agenda. Since President Donald Trump took back the White House, more than 130 adjudicators have been terminated or transferred, or have voluntarily left the workforce.
A recent NPR analysis of the professional backgrounds of 70 immigration judges fired between February and October found that judges with deportation defense experience and who hadn’t previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security accounted for 44 percent of the dismissals. That rate was “more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.” (In a statement to NPR, a DOJ spokesperson said it didn’t target or prioritize immigration judges based on past experience.)
David S. Kim was in the middle of a hearing in September when a termination email landed in his inbox. Kim had been an immigration judge for almost three years and had the highest asylum grant rate among the judges at 26 Federal Plaza.
“I know they will try their best to comport with due process and at the same time try to be efficient,” Kim told me in October of the judges who remained on the bench, “but it’s going to make their job that more difficult, especially knowing that their colleagues have been terminated for an unknown reason.”
As it removes seasoned judges with diverse backgrounds, the Trump White House is also working to replace them with adjudicators it expects will be more aligned with its anti-immigration push. Earlier this year, the administration eased the requirements to hire temporary judges with limited immigration law experience and started recruiting military lawyers for temporary assignments, a move legal experts have warned could undermine due process.
More recently, the official DHS account on X started calling on candidates to apply to join the bench to work under a new title: “Deportation Judge.”
