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It’s clear by now that the Trump administration remains furious that it is required to give immigrant detainees even the meager due process they are currently owed. So it’s setting out to change that.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced an interim final rule that effectively dismantles the immigration appeals process, making it nearly impossible to appeal adverse decisions by immigration law judges. It goes into effect automatically within 30 days, bypassing the normal notice and comment period to make sure the government doesn’t have to take into account any input from bleeding heart libs who don’t want immigrants abducted and deported.
But of course that’s not how the DOJ is framing it. No, you see, they’re just helping to speed things up!
The DOJ says the rule will “streamline administrative appellate review by the Board of Immigration Appeals (“Board” or “BIA”) of decisions by Immigration Judges by making review of such decisions on the merits discretionary, by setting appropriate times for briefing in cases that are reviewed on the merits, and by streamlining other aspects of the appellate process to ensure timely adjudications and avoid adding to the already sizeable backlog at the Board.”
Okay, to be fair, it definitely does streamline an appellate process if you just refuse to hear the appeals outright.
What this means in practice: by default, an appeal to the BIA will now get summarily dismissed—as in the Board will not hear it at all—unless a majority of the Board votes to hear it. Dismissals have to be issued within 15 days, which the administration smugly lies is Good, Actually, because it will allow people to “seek federal court review expeditiously, rather than potentially waiting for years for a Board decision that in the vast majority of cases would affirm the underlying Immigration Judge.”
They’re kinda saying the quiet part out loud there at the end by admitting that the BIA generally just rubber-stamps the decisions of the immigration law judges.
Immigrants will now have only 10 days, rather than 30, to file a notice of appeal from an ILJ decision. And thanks to a provision in the Big Beautiful Bill, that now costs $1,000. And after the BIA inevitably denies that appeal? Then the person gets deported, unless they file a petition with a federal circuit appellate court, which costs $600. But they can still get deported during that time unless the court grants them an emergency stay.
What’s appalling here is that the structure of the appeals process is, just like the first-rung immigration law judge process, already wildly tilted in favor of the government. First, it isn’t a neutral appeals board or a court. It’s just a part of the executive branch, and the attorney general names people to it.
President Donald Trump didn’t just purge the board of people who aren’t ideologically in agreement with his anti-immigrant crackdown, but also shrank it. In April 2025, the administration issued a rule limiting the board to 15 members, down from 26 at the end of the Biden administration.
Related | Apparently anyone can be an immigration judge in Trump’s America
Most of these faux-judges are now Attorney General Pam Bondi-approved specials, but chief appellate “judge” Garry Malphrus is a holdover from the George W. Bush era.
If you’d like a sense of why Malphrus has been allowed to stick around for so long, know that for all published decisions in 2025 (most BIA appeals are not published), all but one was negative for the immigrant.
The board faces a backlog of its own making, exacerbated by now having fewer judges to hear appeals.
But wait—there’s more. The Trump administration has also utterly compromised the immigration law judge process. First, Trump fired hundreds of experienced immigration law judges, making sure there are no pesky people who are foolish enough to believe that being a judge means fairly considering both sides.
Those folks are being replaced with ones who are happy to answer an ad looking for “deportation judges,” and they get a whopping two weeks of classroom training and one week observing hearings. During that woefully inadequate training, they are now told not to grant asylum in most cases.
So now an immigrant faces inexperienced ILJs specifically chosen for their eagerness to deport people, and their recourse is to appeal to a board comprised of people chosen for their eagerness to deport people, and that board doesn’t even have to glance at their appeal. If they just let it sit on a desk for 15 days, on day 16, the appeal is dismissed.
Add to this that the administration has also broken the habeas process by which detained immigrants can challenge the legality of their detention. First, it often immediately transfers people well outside the jurisdiction where they were arrested, isolating them from resources and their community.
Next, the administration cannot and will not promptly address the massive backlog of habeas petitions resulting from its spree of wrongfully detaining immigrants. In Minnesota, ICE has wrongfully detained so many people that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of petitions languishing.
Indeed, the first few weeks of January 2026 saw as many habeas filings in the Minnesota federal court as the entirety of the previous year. And even when petitioners prevail and the court orders them to be released, the administration often just … doesn’t release them.
So, to recap: Immigration law judges are now selected for their willingness to rule against immigrants. Administrative appeals are now basically gone. If you’re wrongfully detained and have to file a habeas petition to get out of whatever prison ICE stashed you in, good fucking luck, because the administration is functionally ignoring those cases and orders to release.
It’s a perfectly closed circle of viciousness.
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Lisa Needham
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