President Donald Trump’s deputies have fired more than 20 immigration lawyers from the Department of Justice, prompting an uproar in pro-migration media outlets.
President Joe Biden’s deputies recently hired the lawyers to act as pro-migration judges in the nation’s immigration courts, whose roughly 700 judges are now under the control of Trump’s justice department, now headed by Pam Bondi.
In 2021, Biden fired some of the lawyers Trump had hired for his immigration courts, just as President Barack Obama fired some of the lawyers hired by his predecessor, President George W. Bush.
One of the fired Biden-picked lawyers, Kerry Doyle, had worked in Biden’s administration where she directed that officials stop deportation cases against up to 300,000 migrants. “I can’t say I was surprised this happened. I was expecting it,” Doyle wrote on LinkedIn.
“This firing was political,” said Doyle, who worked for Biden’s zealously pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, as he welcomed roughly nine million migrants across the southern border.
The media’s uproar tends to obscure deeper problems in the courts, noted Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge working for the Center for Immigration Studies.
The outcome of migrant requests for asylum and other benefits vary wildly from judge to judge, even with the regional courts, Arthur told Breitbart News. “Nothing explains the huge discrepancy between judges in the same court who have wildly different asylum grant rates,” he said, adding, “it is incumbent upon the Trump administration to examine to see why this exists,” he added.
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Moreover, a prior investigation under Bush showed much evidence of fraud with the courts’ asylum decisions, Arthur said. However, the investigation was quickly shut down by Obama’s deputies, he said. “We need to identify where the fraud is, and root it out … because, it is a slap in the face of the American people to allow people to fraudulently take advantage of our humanitarian instincts,” he told Breitbart News.
Immigration judges are not part of the constitution’s third branch, the federal judiciary.
Instead, they are selected and hired by the Department of Justice, which is part of the executive branch run by the president. The judges are expected to comply with each president’s regulatory adjustments to the Congress’s immigration laws.
The fired lawyers were hired to judge the merits of migrants’ pleas for asylum. The judges also decide if migrants should get “relief” from the nation’s immigration laws, which require the repatriation of migrants who enter the country illegally. They also decide on requests related to citizenship by illegal aliens or migrants with crminal records.
But media headlines portrayed the lawyers as equivalent to federal judges confirmed by Congress.
“Justice Department fires multiple immigration judges amid case backlog,” said the headline at NBC News.
“Justice Department fires 20 immigration judges from backlogged courts amid major government cuts,” said the Associated Press (AP), adding:
The Trump administration earlier replaced five top court officials, including Mary Cheng, the agency’s acting director. Sirce Owen, the current leader and previously an appellate immigration judge, has issued a slew of new instructions, many reversing policies of the Biden administration.
“Trump administration fires new immigration judges,” said Politico, which added:
The firings come as the immigration courts have a 3.7 million case backlog, and President Donald Trump looks to fulfill his promise of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.
Firing immigration lawyers “is a norm that the Democrats have created, and now it’s adversely affecting their judges,” Arthur said.
