Inside Donald Trump’s Attack on Immigration Court

Today, “I don’t think the immigration-court system is a court system,” a former senior EOIR official and military judge said. “What this Administration wants is a rubber stamp.”

One humid evening, I went to the home of an immigration judge whom I’ll call K. We sipped iced tea in K.’s dining room, in the company of inch and spider plants and a wandering cat. K. is still employed, but more than a third of K.’s colleagues, across the three immigration courts in San Francisco and nearby Concord, have been fired. The loss was “palpable,” K. told me. “It’s just so demoralizing.”

The courthouse had always been a stressful place—asylum cases involve testimony on extortion, starvation, war, rape, and child abuse. Now the scaffolding was collapsing. “A lot of attorneys, in addition to respondents, have been in tears,” K. told me. They were seeing their clients arrested; parents were handcuffed and yanked away from their children. In one waiting room, Homeland Security had posted bilingual flyers warning people “to self-deport.” The flyers were illustrated with a photo of Latino men, in gray prison sweats, being dragged toward an ICE van. Not long ago, an interpreter in K.’s courtroom became too distraught to finish a hearing. The interpreter couldn’t reach a family member in Los Angeles, and was worried that he’d been apprehended by ICE.

“After the courthouse arrests started, the temperature at the court ratcheted up,” K. told me. Masked ICE officers stalked the hallways. Courtrooms emptied out: respondents were too afraid to show up for their appointments. Judges continued to be fired. K. started to carry a taser with a loud alarm. “I’m afraid of being arrested,” K. said. “I’m scared someone will come with an I.E.D. and detonate it.” (A D.H.S. spokesperson told me that ICE is placing certain “illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been. The average illegal alien gets far more due process than most Americans.”)

K. told me about an incident, from early July, that seemed to encapsulate the sense of havoc. A man from El Salvador had appeared for a master-calendar hearing at one of the courthouses in San Francisco, on Montgomery Street, to press his claim for asylum. Homeland Security moved to dismiss his case; the judge denied the motion, but ICE arrested the man anyway. Officers led him, in handcuffs, out of the building. A group of protesters tried to wrest the man away, but ICE agents shoved him into a waiting van and shut the door. Protesters clung to the front of the van as it accelerated and fishtailed through a crowded downtown street. One slid off the hood and looked close to being run over. Another hung on a bit longer before being pulled down by ICE. K.’s colleagues watched it all unfold from their office windows.

This year, a string of sharply worded policy memos arrived from the desk of Sirce Owen, the new acting head of EOIR. “EOIR’s values at the core of its mission are rooted in three ‘I’s’: integrity, impartiality, and the decisional independence of its adjudicators,” she wrote in January. “However, all three of these values have been severely eroded in recent years.” Many judges found such language menacing—and reminiscent of memos issued under the first Trump Administration by James McHenry, then the director of EOIR, and a close friend of Owen’s. During the Biden Presidency, McHenry was relegated to a minor section within the office, where he publicly complained of being the target of “a larger campaign of harassment.” He remained loyal to Trump, who, this year, made him acting Attorney General before Pam Bondi’s confirmation.

In February, Owen sent a memo telling judges to complete asylum cases within six months—a statutory deadline, but one that was impossible to meet except by denying applications en masse. In April, she urged judges to toss out asylum applications that were “legally deficient” on paper, “without a hearing.” (The first Trump Administration attempted a version of this, but still required judges to bring in respondents for a master-calendar hearing.) In May, EOIR encouraged judges to grant the motions to dismiss filed by Homeland Security. Levine, the former San Francisco judge, saw this as an unprecedented overreach: “a directive on how to rule in a specific motion,” she said. (EOIR later retracted the instruction, citing a lawsuit.) Subsequent memos warned judges not to demonstrate “bias directed against DHS” or to be “adjudicatory outliers,” at risk of “close examination and potential action.” David Kim, a judge in New York, who was fired in September, told me, “When I read that, I thought, I know where this is going.”