Trump replaces fired immigration judges with deportation judges, JAGs

Immigration courts are losing experienced judges just as their dockets have exploded, raising the risk that asylum seekers and other noncitizens will face slower hearings and thinner due-process protections across the country. The system sits inside the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, not the federal judicial branch, so the administration has direct control over who hears these cases and how fast they move.

That control is now being exercised in the middle of an unprecedented workload. Congressional Research Service data says the immigration-court backlog reached 3.6 million cases at the end of fiscal 2024, after EOIR received nearly 1.8 million new cases that year. The Government Accountability Office said EOIR already had nearly 2.2 million pending cases in July 2023, more than four times the number at the start of fiscal 2023. Against that backdrop, every departure removes a judge who already knows the law, the procedures and the pressure points in a system that has long struggled to keep pace.

The Trump administration has recruited more than 70 new deportation judges, many of them from enforcement backgrounds with little or no immigration-judge experience. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also authorized sending military lawyers, or JAGs, to serve temporarily on immigration courts. The shift is more than a staffing change. Former judges say it changes the character of the bench, replacing people steeped in immigration law with lawyers who may know removal work better than the standards for asylum, detention and other defenses against deportation.

The latest firings intensified that concern. On April 13, 2026, the National Association of Immigration Judges said six judges were fired that weekend and three more on Good Friday, bringing the total to 113 immigration judges removed since January 2025. Two of the judges dismissed in April had previously ruled against deporting pro-Palestinian student activists, including Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi, giving the purge a sharper political edge and fueling fears that judges still on the bench will think twice before issuing controversial rulings.

That is the chilling effect former judges have warned about. In April 2025, Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper warned EOIR that firing judges while the courts faced a staggering backlog and a likely surge of new cases tied to Trump’s mass-deportation agenda could worsen delays and deepen due-process problems. A Justice Department official defended the removals by saying judges have a legal, ethical and professional duty to remain impartial and neutral. Former judges counter that the scale of the purge is unlike anything they have seen, and that stripping out experienced judges while expanding deportation capacity will slow the courts and weaken public confidence in their fairness.