More than 100 high-level immigration officers across the United States have been fired or taken the Trump administration‘s withdrawal presents, which was complicated its plans to execute “mass arrests” in an already overwhelmed program.
In total, 85 employees, including 18 judges, at the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review accepted the government’s deferred resignation or early retirement offer, and more than 29 judges were fired by the Trump administration. These judges are part of the administrative court system under the Justice Department, not the judicial branch, and they have the authority to make decisions about asylum claims and could order that someone be removed from the country.
Losing this high volume of immigration judges is likely to cut into President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants. Delays in adjudicating immigration claims are part of what contributes to the number of undocumented immigrants living in the U. S. while they wait for their cases to be resolved.
Each immigration judge handles, on average, 500 to 700 cases a year. According to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the court already has a massive backlog of more than 3.7 million cases.
” Donald Trump ran for office promising to boost deportations, but as president, his administration’s policies are actually decreasing the number of immigration judges and judge teams who hold deportation hearings”, Matthew Biggs, the president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said in a statement on Thursday.
” Immigration judges are hard to replace given their specialized knowledge and legal experience. It takes at least a year to recruit, hire, train, and conduct a background check on a new judge”, he continued.
Biggs noted that more than half of those leaving the immigration system are leaving as part of the administration’s deferred resignation program. This program offered full pay and benefits through September for any federal employee who agreed to resign by Feb. 6.
The Trump administration has additionally fired judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals. Adding more judges to the system has bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats.
” The reality is that you’ve got a really broken system, and firing judges is not the way to fix it”, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney who previously led the Department of Homeland Security’s legal office, told ABC News in an interview.
THE PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES WITH TRUMP’S MASS DEPORTATION PLAN
Several of those who were dismissed, including Doyle, were part of a new class of judges under former President Joe Biden’s administration to , help mitigate the overwhelming backlog of cases. The Trump administration has not yet put forth a plan to execute its mass deportation plan without these judges.
” How do you deport people without immigration judges”? Biggs said. ” It’s highly hypocritical. It runs contrary to what he campaigned on. He’s making it more difficult to deport people from this country. It makes no sense at all”.
