Fired SF Immigration Judge Visits Border to Grasp What Cases Couldn't Show

Jeremiah Johnson was at his desk at the immigration court on Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco when an email from Attorney General Pam Bondi arrived on a Friday in November. It was a termination notice. Thirty seconds later, administrators locked him out of the system entirely.

Johnson, 52, had spent eight years on the immigration bench in San Francisco and more than 20 years practicing immigration law in the city. He became one of 104 judges fired by the Trump administration, which stripped the downtown court from 21 judges to a fraction of that, leaving more than 120,000 pending cases with no clear resolution timeline. No reason accompanied the termination. Immigration attorneys and advocates have hypothesized the administration targeted judges because of "perceived bias."

"It was surreal and also made me feel disappointed in the immigration system," Johnson said.

Rather than contest or retreat, Johnson traveled south. In January, he walked into the Kino Border Initiative's migrant outreach center in Nogales, Sonora, not as "Your Honor" but as a volunteer. The shelter, which had once run at capacity with mothers and children, now primarily housed single men recently deported from the United States. He then hiked near Sasabe, Arizona, where the desert floor carried the physical record of migration: empty water bottles, discarded backpacks, abandoned clothing. Walls now line roughly 650 miles of the 1,954-mile border.

The trip offered what years of case files had not. Johnson's San Francisco caseload had been drawn heavily from India, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico. He had weighed those asylum claims from a bench elevated above the courtroom floor without ever standing on the terrain his petitioners described.

"What gives me hope is that the doors at Kino are still open, and that the people I met still have hope," Johnson said after his visit. "Their hope inspires me."

The personal reckoning arrived as the institutional consequences of the firings continued to accumulate. The court at 100 Montgomery Street is set to close in January 2027 when its lease expires. For legal aid organizations and immigrant service providers operating across San Francisco, from the Mission to the Tenderloin, the closure is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It means clients already waiting years for hearings will wait longer still, with some cases now pushed years further on an overloaded docket.

Johnson now serves as executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges and has been a consistent public voice on what the mass firings signal for due process. His border visit was an attempt to ensure that advocacy is grounded in something no courtroom file could ever supply.