Kerry Doyle sat in an immigration courtroom observing a fellow judge finish a hearing in an asylum case late on a recent Friday afternoon when she received an email with an attachment titled “terminated.”
Doyle had been a judge for only about two months and was in training to begin hearing cases soon at a recently opened Massachusetts court. Her colleagues helped her pack up her office before the afternoon was over, she said.
“This doesn’t make sense for an administration that is prioritizing removals,” Doyle said, using the legal word for deportation. “You need the judges to hear the cases to order the person removed so that you can then carry out the removal order. It’s a vital part of the system.”
So far, the administration of President Donald Trump has fired 22 immigration judges, including a group that worked as managers of their respective courts, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union that represents immigration judges. The administration has also fired five senior managers of the immigration court system, the union said.
As part of its efforts to reduce the size of the government workforce, the Trump administration has been firing federal employees on probationary status, meaning that they had recently been hired for their positions. Immigration judges are on probationary status for their first two years, according to the union, except for military veterans who have probationary status for only a year.
When the administration sent federal employees its “Fork in the Road” email calling for voluntary resignations, it was supposed to exclude people who worked in immigration enforcement and national defense and for the Postal Service, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. But the letters went to immigration judges anyway.
“Look up the definition of ‘hypocrisy,’ it’s ‘when someone says one thing but does another.’ The firing of immigration judges when we need more judges to enforce our immigration laws by this administration is a perfect example of hypocrisy,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, in an emailed statement to Beyond the Border.
“This outrageous move to fire immigration judges will only make the backlog of cases worse. This is the opposite of the administration’s stated goals,” Biggs said.
The Trump administration and the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which operates the courts, did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Biggs estimated that the fired judges would have held 10,000 hearings this year. The courts currently have a backlog of more than 3.7 million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which monitors government data on immigration through public records requests.
Days after the firings, immigration Judge Samuel B. Cole, who has been hearing cases in Chicago since 2016 and has served as executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said that he would be stepping down. He declined to say more on the subject at this time.
The firings affected courts across the United States, with California and Texas losing the most, according to the union. Five of the judges were based in Texas with three in Houston, one in Laredo, and one in El Paso. Four of the judges were based in California with one in San Diego and three in Concord.
Rhana Ishimoto, the assistant chief immigration judge who managed the downtown San Diego court, disappeared from the immigration court website at the end of last week and was replaced with Anne Kristina Perry, who already served as assistant chief at the Imperial and Otay Mesa courts in Southern California. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Ishimoto was appointed to her position in May 2023 and previously worked as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney representing the government in immigration court cases.
Ishimoto did not respond to a message on social media.
On Wednesday morning, the downtown San Diego court, which operates on the fourth floor of the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building, seemed largely business as usual. People with stacks of documents and plastic folders lined up in the court’s lobby to file paperwork and check in for court hearings.
In one courtroom, Judge Rico Bartolomei, who once served as assistant chief immigration judge in San Diego before stepping down from the managerial role to hear cases full time again, worked his way through a full docket of people from Venezuela, El Salvador, Haiti, Russia and Brazil. Almost all had recently crossed the border, mostly through the now defunct CBP One phone application that allowed people to schedule appointments to request asylum.
Bartolomei greeted each person brightly, almost cooing, “Hi Kaleb!” at a toddler who approached the judge a few strides in front of his parents and older brother.
He carefully explained their rights in court and offered them time to find attorneys. In the case of Kaleb’s parents, whom the government alleged were from Venezuela, he learned that they had moved to Arkansas.
He asked how they had arrived in court that day.
By bus, the family responded.
How long did that take? he asked empathetically.
About 36 hours, the family said.
He moved their case to a court closer to them.
He transferred three of the cases that he heard that morning to the court in Concord, California, which is now short three judges.
— Kate Morrissey, Capital & Main
This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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