Trump Purges Immigration Judges With Biden Ties
At least eight newly appointed judges—including veterans and former DHS officials—were dismissed without explanation, raising alarm over politicized justice and stalled deportations.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has dismissed at least eight newly appointed immigration judges across the country — including several from Massachusetts — a move Democratic lawmakers and immigration advocates say appears to be part of a politically motivated purge aimed at shaping the bench to align with the White House’s hardline immigration agenda.
In a letter sent Thursday to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the firings appear to target judges with non-enforcement backgrounds and warned the pattern undermines judicial independence.
“We are concerned that EOIR may be deciding whether to convert judges... using their prior employment as an indicator of whether they will be supportive of the Administration’s immigration agenda,” the senators wrote. They called the decision “unprecedented.”
The firings occurred at the end of the judges’ two-year probationary period — a phase after which nearly all judges are typically converted to permanent appointments. According to the senators, eight out of sixteen judges were dismissed in April without explanation, despite receiving recommendations for conversion from supervising judges. Historically, the conversion rate for immigration judges has hovered around 94 percent.
The cuts come amid a broader shift in immigration court policy under President Donald Trump’s second term. While immigration judges are technically civil servants and not political appointees, the Trump administration has reasserted political oversight over conversion decisions. A previous Trump-era policy change clarified that the Attorney General retains discretion over whether to make judges permanent.
Critics say that discretion is now being used to install ideological loyalists and remove jurists perceived as too lenient or neutral. “It certainly seems like they are trying to cull any judges who might be at all pro-immigrant, or, I would argue, pro rule-of-law,” said Boston immigration attorney Robin Nice in an interview with WBUR.
Nice had represented Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a high-profile teenage immigrant arrested en route to volleyball practice and later released from ICE detention. Nice discovered the judge in Gomes' case, Jenny Beverly, was no longer listed on the Chelmsford Immigration Court’s website.
The staffing crisis is particularly acute in Massachusetts. The Chelmsford court, opened in 2023 to ease the state’s case backlog, listed 20 judges in February. As of this month, only 10 remain, with advocates saying two of those have already left or been transferred.
The dismissals also included Judge Kerry Doyle, a former top ICE attorney who later served as Deputy General Counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. Doyle, appointed as a judge under President Biden, was terminated just weeks after Trump’s return to office.
“In our group of 12, there were three veterans and at least one of them was a former 25-year JAG attorney,” Doyle told WBUR. “And this administration has fired them.”
Doyle previously authored a 2022 ICE memo directing prosecutors to prioritize cases involving threats to national security and public safety — a policy singled out in a Republican congressional report accusing the Biden administration of enabling “nearly 1 million illegal aliens to remain in the U.S. indefinitely.”
Now back in private practice, Doyle said she believes immigrants still deserve their day in court and that Congress must act to fix ballooning backlogs. “Despite the bottleneck in the courts,” she said, “immigrants have a right to due process.”
The firings come as the Trump administration doubles down on its promise to deport 1 million people annually. A sweeping immigration enforcement budget passed by the GOP-controlled Congress adds tens of billions of dollars to ICE and Border Patrol operations. Yet immigration courts are already overwhelmed, with nearly 4 million cases pending nationwide. Advocates warn that removing judges will only deepen delays.
“Allowing IJs to reach the end of this process and then simply dismissing them with no apparent rationale wastes taxpayers’ investment in each judge,” Warren and Markey wrote. They warned that each unfilled judgeship could mean 50 cases going unresolved per month.
The Department of Justice has not responded to the senators’ letter or publicly explained the rationale for the firings.
As the backlog grows and removals stall, Nice suggested the effort to reshape the bench may end up undercutting Trump’s own immigration goals: “People trying to fight deportation could end up staying in the country much longer,” she said, “while parents trying to reunite with children could see agonizing delays.”