“We have a president that campaigned on strictly enforcing immigration law on the one hand, and on the other hand . . . his administration is firing immigration judges for no reason at all,” he said. “It’s inexplicable, and it’s hypocritical.”
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Unlike the judges who preside over federal district courts, the nation’s immigration judges are executive branch employees who work for the Department of Justice in the Executive Office for Immigration Review. As such, they are potentially subject to the layoffs, voluntary severance offers, and other maneuvers the Trump administration has used to slash the federal payroll, though some are challenging the legality of their terminations.
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“Much of what this administration has done is illegal,” Biggs said.
When asked this week whether additional immigration judges had recently been let go, review office spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said the office declines to comment on personnel matters.
The names of three immigration judges who had been appointed to serve in the Chelmsford court just shy of two years ago, during former president Joseph R. Biden’s administration, were recently removed from the DOJ’s website. They did not grant the Globe’s requests for comment.
In February, the DOJ announced it would no longer defend the constitutionality of certain employment protections for administrative law judges, in a move that DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle said would restore “constitutional accountability so that Executive Branch officials answer to the President and to the people.”
In so doing, Biggs said, the DOJ is trying to treat immigration judges as at-will employees who can be fired for any reason, which would mean the administration could dismiss anyone whose decisions are seen as running contrary to its priorities.
“It’s pretty clear that these immigration judges’ rulings are being scrutinized,” he said, “and they’re being scrutinized by an administration that wishes to deport as many people as possible.”
While it’s unclear how many of the nation’s roughly 700 immigration judge positions are now vacant, the DOJ says in an active job listing that it is looking this month to hire immigration judges at dozens of sites, including both of its immigration courts in Massachusetts.
Federal officials established the immigration court in Chelmsford last year to help alleviate a backlog at the existing immigration court in Boston. Transferring about 40 percent of Boston’s pending caseload to the newly established court made it possible for hearings to be scheduled sooner, Mattingly said.
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The combined total number of immigration cases pending in Boston and Chelmsford climbed to a record high of about 159,000 in fiscal year 2024, according to federal data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That mirrored a nationwide record high.
Mattingly said reducing the backlog remains a high priority. She cited summary data that show the total number of pending immigration cases fell from 4.0 million when Trump took office in January to 3.9 million at the end of March. The reduction of about 116,000 cases, or 2.9 percent, is largely attributable to fewer new cases being added to the queue in February and March, while the number of cases completed each month held relatively steady.
Biggs said firing immigration judges could constrain the government’s capacity to hear cases and lead to an even bigger backlog, unless the Trump administration intends to deport people without regard for the law. Recent comments from high-ranking officials suggest they take pride in depriving immigrants of their rights, he said.
Trump wrote on social media this week that it would be impossible to facilitate due process for everyone who allegedly lacks legal permission to remain in the United States.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he wrote. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do.”
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Meanwhile, Trump has invoked war-time powers to imprison Venezuelan citizens with alleged gang ties in El Salvador without a hearing, and he has said he wants to imprison “violent” US citizens there as well, which would likely be illegal.
Vice President JD Vance said on social media last week the government needs to be able to deport “at least a few million people per year.” If resource limits and “administrative judge constraints” prevent that, then anyone who prioritizes due process in these cases is effectively just trying to prevent deportations, he said.
“They don’t want border security. They don’t want us to deport the people who’ve come into our country illegally,” Vance wrote. “They want to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically: The ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.”
Biggs said it doesn’t make sense for the administration to fire immigration judges while simultaneously citing limits on their capacity as a basis to deprioritize the rights of individuals.
“It appears that they have no interest in providing immigrants their due process rights,” he said, “and instead they’d rather just deport immigrants without even seeing an immigration judge.”
Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him @reporterporter.
