More Than 200 Immigration Judges Fired Under Trump, Replaced by 'Deportation Judges' Vetted for Enforcement Loyalty

More than 200 United States immigration judges have been fired, forced to retire, or pushed out of the Department of Justice under the Trump administration, a CBS News investigation published Sunday found, and they are being systematically replaced by judges explicitly recruited and marketed as "deportation judges" — candidates whose prior career records demonstrate a strong predisposition toward ordering removal. The overhaul has left tens of thousands of immigration cases in legal limbo and is drawing sustained fire from civil liberties advocates and former jurists who say the changes are gutting the independence of the nation's immigration courts.

CBS News senior correspondent Ted Koppel reported the investigation Sunday morning on CBS News Sunday Morning, interviewing multiple former immigration judges who agreed to speak on the record about what they described as an unprecedented restructuring of judicial appointment within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which operates under the Department of Justice. The judges said they were given no specific cause for their removal and that many were replaced within days of their dismissals. "These were career immigration judges, people who had served for 10, 20 years," one former judge told CBS. "They were replaced not because they ruled incorrectly, but because they ruled independently."

The administration's legal position, articulated in internal DOJ communications reviewed by CBS, is that immigration courts are not Article III courts and that immigration judges are therefore executive branch employees who serve at the president's pleasure. Under that theory, the administration has been free to remove judges whose statistical record of granting relief — asylum approvals, cancellations of removal — was deemed inconsistent with enforcement priorities. The replacement judges have gone through a vetting process that one DOJ document described as focused on "alignment with the administration's immigration enforcement mission."

The practical impact is being felt across the country. Tens of thousands of people — including, according to legal advocates, a significant number of US citizens caught up in ICE's mass detention operations — remain detained without clear case resolution dates. A Minneapolis resident named Aliya Rahman filed a federal legal claim against the government this month after she was dragged from her car by federal agents during a January immigration enforcement sweep despite presenting documentation of her US citizenship. ICE has declined to comment on her case, citing ongoing litigation. Federal courts in three circuits have issued injunctions blocking portions of the mass detention operations, but the administration has appealed those rulings, and enforcement is continuing in jurisdictions where injunctions are not in effect.

Immigration legal aid organizations say they are overwhelmed. The American Immigration Lawyers Association reported last week that the average wait time for an individual hearing before one of the newly appointed judges is nine months shorter than under the outgoing judges — a figure the administration cites as evidence of efficiency, and that critics cite as evidence that due process protections are being compressed beyond constitutionally acceptable limits. Several former judges told CBS that the new "deportation judge" vetting criteria amounted to a political loyalty test, noting that independent immigration adjudication — even one that frequently results in removal orders — is fundamentally different from a system designed to maximize removal rates regardless of individual case merits. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued a formal statement of concern this month, calling for the United States to ensure that asylum seekers receive individualized hearings before trained and independent adjudicators.