For three immigration judges, the day took a similar turn.
Kyra Lilien, who was hired in 2023, was presiding in a courtroom in Concord, Calif., in July when she paused the hearing of an immigrant seeking asylum to read an email.
“I told them that we were not going to have a hearing because I had just been fired,” Lilien said. Present in the court was a court interpreter and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. “They asked me if I was joking.”
Anam Petit, who was hired as an immigration judge in 2023 after a career in immigrant defense, was sitting on the bench in her courtroom in Virginia’s Annandale Immigration Court in September. It was her two-year anniversary in the position and she was between hearings when she got the email.
“My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. My mind was racing. And I gave the decision and I dismissed everyone without mentioning anything,” Petit said. One decision that day was to deny asylum, and the other was a partial denial, each for a different member of one immigrant family, she recalled.
Tania Nemer was hired as a judge at the Cleveland immigration court in 2023. She had about 30 or 40 immigrants, a DHS attorney and staff in her court one morning in February. She had just finished explaining rights and responsibilities to the group when her door opened and her manager asked her to come with him. She was later escorted out of the building.
“I didn’t know at all why I was being fired at the time. And I kept asking; no one had a reason,” Nemer said.
Nemer was one of the first immigration judges fired by the Trump administration after a slew of dismissals of leaders at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the branch of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. Later that month, the administration fired 12 judges — an entire incoming class that had just been trained and was about to take the bench.
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The pattern has been consistent. Every few months this year, a new class of judges gets termination notices in the middle of the day, often while they are in the middle of immigration court proceedings. The notices often target those who have reached the end of their two-year probationary period, a trial period for federal workers before they are “converted” to permanent employees. It was previously common for these civil servants to be converted to permanent employees of the DOJ.
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An analysis of each of the 70 immigration judges’ professional backgrounds found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants, and no prior work history at DHS, made up about 44% of the firings — more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.
NPR also analyzed the classes of judges onboarded between February 2023 and November 2024, who would have neared the ends of their probationary periods this year or are still in the probationary period. Of those judges, those who had prior DHS experience, including working as asylum officers and as attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, made up the largest share still on the bench.
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There were 700 immigration judges at the start of the year. Over the past 10 months, EOIR has lost more than 125 judges to firings and voluntary resignations. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress approved a spending bill that allocated over $3 billion to the Justice Department for immigration-related activities, including the hiring of more immigration judges, to address the backlog of millions of cases at immigration court.
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The Trump administration has moved to bring back immigration judges it sees as unfairly fired by the Biden administration. The Justice Department, in a February memo, said that it cannot be confident the Biden administration was ethical and lawful in how it dismissed immigration judges and other adjudicators.
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The post The DOJ Has Been Firing Judges With Immigrant Defense Backgrounds appeared first on American Renaissance.
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