No, "Deportation Judges" Don't Exist—But That Won't Stop Trump's DOJ from Staffing the Immigration Courts with an Army of Minions

After firing dozens of immigration judges, Trump's DOJ is now recruiting "deportation judges" to rubber stamp removal orders. It will undermine the integrity of the courts for years to come.

After months of maliciously firing immigration judges whose adjudication records do not explicitly embrace the White House’s official position of hostility toward the American legal system, Trump’s Department of Justice is now actively recruiting lawyers who are willing to trade professional integrity for a chance at rubber-stamping deportation orders.

In the past few days, the DOJ began a hiring campaign for immigration judges featuring a new webpage, a not-so-subtle nod to the larger project of racial nationalism, and the egregious misrepresentation of immigration judges as “deportation judges.”

The subversion of whatever was left of our immigration system is punctuated by moments of symbolic clarity which are worth more than a passing offense. This is one of those moments.

The casual but informative falsehood that “immigration judges” are “deportation judges” is consistent with the debasement of our most serious democratic institutions and the politicization of our courts—but it’s more than that: it’s a constitutive misrepresentation, a lie that is not available for correction because it is not accidental and its intent is not simply to mislead or to reframe, but to accelerate and legitimize the reconstitution of the immigration courts as deportation factories and judges as mindless functionaries. This is not necessarily true of many immigration judges currently on the bench who remain and do their work with a deep sense of integrity and a commitment to rule of law, but this recruitment page says a lot about the next wave of hirings.

To call an immigration judge a “deportation judge” is to declare, at the outset, that the position requires not adjudication but preordination, and in doing so, entirely negates the term “judge” as a person who attempts to address heavy case-specific questions of facts and law in the form of an authentic decision. Only a lawyer who despises the law and resents the intellectual responsibilities that the legal profession appropriately imposes on them would be moved to apply now for such a shamelessly subordinate position. EOIR Director Margolin isn’t hiring judges—he’s hiring henchmen.

If the slippage in terms were accidental rather than intention, we might call it parapraxis, since it transparently discloses a more authentic version of how the Trump administration views immigration judges. The reconstitution of the courts is already visible in the data. Since January, the rate of asylum denials in court has risen to 80 percent—the highest national rate for which we have data. Many courts have higher local denial rates (e.g., Atlanta, Omaha, Houston), but usually these are balanced out at the national level by more liberal courts (e.g., San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles). They won’t be satisfied until everyone except white Afrikaners are denied asylum.

And it’s not just denial rates that matter, it’s also the volume of cases closed. Due to a deluge of new policies, immigration judges are shoveling asylum cases and other removal cases out the door with little attention to detail or due process, often so that those same immigrants can be arrested on the spot in court or shortly after while going about their everyday lives. This has resulted in the first major decline in the immigration court backlog since anyone has started tracking it, but it’s all at the expense of basic fairness and justice. As I wrote recently, it’s an asylum denial machine on steroids.

This is all by terrible design. For a small and willfully misinformed subset of society, immigration law has always been, and will always be, a mere technical operation with deportation as its only legitimate outcome. In the MAGA version of the immigration courts, there is no deliberation, there is only the inking and thumping of rubber stamps that say REMOVAL ORDER. To them, every deportation order is rightly decided and every asylum application granted is evidence of “fraud”—and no amount of empirical or logical evidence can complicate this doctrine for all the same reasons that cult members are unaffected by rational debate.

Like most things, Trump alone is not to blame for this predicament. Notwithstanding the institutional normalization of immigration judges since the 1970s, the independence, and therefore legitimacy, of the position of immigration judge has never been fully settled by Congress and never fully respected by the Executive. As the National Association of Immigration Judges have proclaimed, with admirable integrity and consistency, both Democrats and Republicans have toyed with immigration judges’ independence through a whiplash-inducing series of policy changes that shuffle court dockets around based on the political winds of the moment. This isn’t even the first time that the DOJ has been found to use political litmus tests to hire immigration judges.

And it’s not as if there haven’t been real solutions. The prospect of creating an independent court system has been on the table for years, most recently with Zoe Lofgren’s introduction of the “Real Courts, Real Rule of Law Act of 2024,” which would have potentially mitigated the DOJ’s ability to engage in politically motivated firing and hiring. An independent immigration court would not have solved all of the problems, and it would not necessarily have solved the backlog (which is all anyone seems to foolishly focus on), but it would have solved some of the more fundamental questions about the independence of the courts and would have partially insulated the courts from the kind of politicization that we see now. The fact that the legislation was too much for some people and too little for others prevented everyone from seeing it as an important and practical step in good governance. If we manage to hold onto democracy, the independence of the immigration courts is the kind of obvious next step we need to make happen so we can move on with this part of our collective lives.

Am I taking this DOJ job announcement too literally? Maybe. I am aware that the recruitment language smells like trolling, by which I mean, using the phrase “deportation judge” is, in part, intended as a kind of rage baiting that Trump and the MAGA base regularly deploy as a substitute to substantive public debate and critical thinking. For example, during the recent shutdown, government websites added banners that blamed Democrats (Hatch Act be damned) for the shutdown. And if you’re still wading in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter, you’ll know that official agency accounts have become fountains of misinformation, petty feuds, and unnecessary vitriol that has nothing to do with their mission and which undermines the professionalism of the civil servants who work there.

This precise example is just part of the takeover of our government’s digital infrastructure by a pathologically online class of rejects who have grown up idolizing YouTube conspiracy theorists, whatabouters, and sealioners who are incapable of sustained serious thought. The mini-Trumpers-slash-DOGE-tweens who, until recently, spent their pitiable young lives complaining about being rejected by women on Reddit and trolling in the comments of actual respected leaders, now run the social media accounts and official .gov websites of our major federal agencies, and, like the digital disease vectors that they are, are now infecting civil society with the same sycophantic behavior that could only ever achieve a dribble of acceptance in the putrid trenches of the MAGA movement. “Deportation judge,” they joked. “This’ll be hilarious.”

But it’s not funny. It’s quite serious. There are over 3 million people with pending removal cases in the immigration court system, and very many—if not most—of them came to the United States seeking humanitarian protection from conditions in the world that we, ourselves, helped to create in the first place. They did not all enter the country illegally even if they may well be ordered deported (the first is not a precondition for the second, as people often seem to forget). Their lives are worth deliberation, not premeditated dismissal.

Immigration judges play a fundamental role in making these determinations, typically involving complex cases and sympathetic (but not always qualifying) stories on overwhelming deadlines. I know many people who believe that to accept the robes and responsibilities of an immigration judge is to join the ranks of an institution that is fundamentally oppressive. That might be true. But after more than a decade of research on the immigration courts, I can also tell you that the immigration judges that I have come to know have helped me to understand their deep professional and personal commitment to delivering the best version of justice they know how within the constrained context of the courts. Some judges have spent their career on the bench acting as deportation judges already. But many judges view their position as one that requires that decisions of great gravity be met with great integrity.

The DOJ recruitment page for immigration judges undermines the integrity of the position both discursively, by belittling the position as a “deportation judge” (even if that is, in fact, what the administration is trying to do), and it sends a clear message that the performance standard for current and future judges is how many deportation orders they issue. This will be bad for the immigration courts and it will require drastic Congressional action at the next possible moment to undo the damage unfolding in front of us. In the short term, Congress should investigate these hiring practices.

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