Despite a Growing Case Backlog, Trump Fires Sixth San Francisco Immigration Judge

The Department of Justice this week fired a sixth San Francisco immigration judge since President Donald Trump took office. The firing appears to follow a pattern of targeting adjudicators likely to grant asylum or have spent their careers defending immigrants.

Judge Shira Levine, who was appointed to the city’s immigration court in October 2021, was terminated without cause by the Department of Justice this week, NBC Bay Area first reported.

According to Milli Atkinson, the director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program with the Bar Association of San Francisco, Levine wasn’t given an explanation for her removal. But it wasn’t entirely out of the blue.

Since April, five other judges in the city’s immigration court have received similar termination messages, including Judges Chloe Dillon and Elisa Brasil, the two other judges in the city’s court who have the highest asylum grant rates, according to data collected by Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Dillon told KQED she learned she was fired through a three-sentence email on Aug. 22. She opened her inbox late that Friday, returning to her office after hearing oral arguments for a yearslong asylum hearing. She had already indicated how she would rule in the courtroom, and hoped to issue her decision by the end of the day.

Instead, she spent the next 90 minutes scrambling to collect all of her personal items, return all of her federal property and hand over her 6,000-docket case load without any idea who would pick it up.

Dillon said it didn’t come entirely as a shock that she was fired — despite the job safety she and other government workers might have had in the past, the Trump administration has treated federal workers as at-will employees. And, she said, there had been mass firings at immigration courts, especially among people who fit certain demographics.

She said many of the judges who have been fired were appointed during the Biden administration. People with experience representing immigrants, or with high asylum grant rates also appear to be targets.

“They are specifically targeting one end of the spectrum because they don’t like those results; they don’t think that people should be granted asylum essentially,” she said.

Five of the six dismissed judges have higher asylum-granting rates than the national average and have spent at least part of their careers aiding immigrants in court.

“It appears to be completely ideologically based,” former San Francisco immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks said of the firings. “It’s making assumptions about people from their background, and it appears to be very results-oriented, targeted towards individuals who think more independently and are willing to listen to both sides when a case is presented to them rather than just accepting the government assertions.”

Levine granted asylum to more than 97% of the immigrants in her courtroom between fiscal years 2019 and 2024. Dillon granted 96.5% of people asylum. During that period, the national average hovered around 50%, falling to its lowest last October at just below 36%, according to TRAC data.

While the numbers don’t reflect that San Francisco asylum seekers are more likely to have representation and have to meet different standards than those in other states, experts said the Department of Justice is targeting judges who they believe are more likely to stray from U.S. prosecutors’ requests.

Marks said it appears that the DOJ is going after judges with backgrounds in immigrant advocacy rights, private practice or public interest law, while those who rose through the ranks as prosecutors for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division of the Department of Homeland Security have kept their appointments. She called the pattern “distressing.”

Before being appointed to the court in May 2023, Brasil worked as a private practice immigration attorney, litigating pro bono cases throughout her career. Levine spent more than five years as an immigration attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza and the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area in the East Bay. Dillon served as an attorney advisor at Los Angeles’ immigration court and another fired judge, Jami Vigil, previously worked as a court-appointed counsel for immigrant families for eight years.

When Marks was appointed in 1987, the federal court system was undergoing a transformation, she said.

Before the 1980s, many immigration judges were career Department of Homeland Security prosecutors who were “rewarded for their productivity” with a court appointment. But, “when I was recruited, and when others followed me, there was an effort to balance the court so that there were both immigration prosecutors and immigration defenders,” she told KQED.

Marks was the 68th person to be appointed as an immigration judge in the country. Now, there are more than 600, many of whom previously defended immigrants in the courts they now oversee.

“That’s much more appropriate with regard to reflecting public attitudes towards immigration and towards the knowledge base and sophistication and professionalism that the court was trying to achieve,” Marks said.

The recent changes, she fears, reflect backsliding within the system.

In August, the DOJ lowered the prerequisites to qualify for temporary judge positions, removing the requirement that candidates have prior immigration experience. The following week, the federal government authorized 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges, NPR reported.

“Immigration law is routinely considered to be second in complexity to tax law,” Marks said. “To hire someone with no immigration law experience seems very, very unfair, counterproductive [and] undermining the integrity and respect that the immigration judge core deserves.

“I fear it will have lasting consequences. And none of them good.”

Even before the firings, U.S. immigration courts had growing case backlogs as ICE enforcement efforts ramped up under the Trump administration. New temporary judges who don’t understand the nuances of the immigration field, and don’t have time for training or mentorship, will likely work more slowly and could make more errors, Atkinson said.

Both she and Marks said this could extend already long wait times for court dates and increase the number of erroneous rulings that end up in appeals court.

Atkinson believes the changes could further deter asylum seekers from pursuing their cases if they cannot afford representation on appeal or understand the filing timeline to do so. Advocates have already been raising alarms that ICE agents are making previously unprecedented arrests in the halls of immigration courts and outside ICE field offices when people reported to mandatory hearings or check-in appointments, a move they say is meant to scare asylum seekers into missing these appointments and losing their case.

“Every barrier at every stage is going to mean more and more asylum seekers are going to be put at risk of being removed and deported because they didn’t have the opportunity to present their case in front of a fair and unbiased judge,” she told KQED.