After Trump Fires 5 More SF Immigration Judges, Legal Scholars Fear a More Partisan System

After five federal judges were fired last week in San Francisco, legal scholars and advocates are warning that the Trump administration is taking unprecedented steps to remake the immigration court system.

Friday’s firings bring the total number of immigration court judges removed by the Trump Administration to 90 across the country, including 12 on the Bay Area’s bench, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges. This overhaul comes amid a nationwide backlog of immigration cases — with about 120,000 currently pending in the Bay Area alone.

UC Davis Law Professor Kevin Johnson said that it’s not uncommon for presidents to appoint judges whose philosophy matches their own, but that the current administration appears to be not only at hiring, but firing, the federal judges based on their immigration ideology.

“It’s very aggressive, and it’s like nothing we’ve seen in any of the previous five or six administrations. I don’t remember it ever happening in U.S. history,” he told KQED. “But it’s happening now.”

On Friday, Judges Amber George, Jeremiah Johnson, Louis Gordon, Shuting Chen and Patrick Savage were fired from San Francisco’s immigration court, which at the start of the year had more than 20 judges, according to Milli Atkinson, the director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program with the Bar Association of San Francisco.

Now, she said, the bench is down to just nine judges.

Earlier this year, at least seven other Bay Area judges were fired, including the city’s top judge, Loi McCleskey, who was terminated after just over a year on the job in September.

The firings of longstanding adjudicators have been without explanation from the DOJ, according to Atkinson.

“The general belief among the immigration legal community is that they are trying to remove judges who’ve been longstanding civil servants who’ve been very experienced in adjudicating these cases here in San Francisco and filling the bench with judges who are more aligned with the political beliefs of this administration and are going to follow policy memos and directives from the administration,” she said.

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

San Francisco’s immigration court has historically granted asylum at higher rates than the national average, and 11 of the 12 judges who have lost their jobs have higher-than-average asylum-granting rates. The three San Francisco judges with the highest rates of asylum were all terminated earlier this year.

Attorneys told KQED in September that the discrepancy between rates across jurisdictions is likely due to a multitude of factors, including that asylum seekers in San Francisco are more likely to have representation and required to meet different standards than in some other states.

Former immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks told KQED at the time that the firings also appear to be targeting those who have previously worked in immigrant advocacy rights, private practice or public interest law, while others who rose through the ranks as prosecutors for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division of the Department of Homeland Security have kept their appointments.

“This is an effort to change things by removing people as well as selecting new people who are going to be with their party line,” Professor Kevin Johnson said.

Atkinson said that the firings will require a major reshuffling of scheduled proceedings, which will make attorneys’ jobs more difficult, since they usually know how the presiding judge runs proceedings and tailor preparation and testimony and preparation to fit their style.

It is also jarring for asylum seekers.

“People are being arrested when they go to their hearings. They’re being arrested when they show up for appointments. So, they’re already terrified,” Atkinson said. “Now, everything that they’d been working towards and kind of building themselves up for mentally to prepare for — to suddenly have that taken out from under them is really challenging.”

The shake-up will also add more strain to an overloaded immigration system, especially as temporary judges filling in remotely are no longer required to have a background in immigration law.

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

Experts who spoke with KQED worried more, though, that in the long term, the firings could be making way for a more partisan immigration court system.

“This has just been so extreme that it really is a radical departure from past experiences in terms of people being fired despite good performance,” Marks said.

While the court’s enforcement priorities typically shift with each administration, since it is housed within the Department of Justice, Atkinson said sitting judges are now under unprecedented pressure to make decisions that the DOJ agrees with, or face possible termination.

New immigration judge job postings in San Francisco and other cities, advertised on social media by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem the day before the firings, seek candidates to apply for roles as “deportation judges,” who would “restore integrity and honor to our Nation’s Immigration Court system” and ensure that “only aliens with legally meritorious claims are allowed to remain.”

“I think immigration judges are the canaries in the coal mine of the judicial system in America, they are the early warning system,” Marks said. “I fear that this kind of erratic, irrational and probably illegal behavior by the administration is just starting at the immigration courts. And I worry as to how it’s going to affect the legal system writ large.”

KQED’s Billy Cruz contributed to this report.