Kerry Doyle, an immigration lawyer with over 20 years of experience who held senior positions in the Biden administration, said she was not surprised when she was terminated as an immigration court judge in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, within two months of her tenure in February 2025.
Doyle was notified of her termination through an email with no explanation.
“I was a little shocked to hear it that way,” Doyle said. “Of course [it’s] very disrespectful to just get an email like that out of the blue and no explanation whatsoever.”
Doyle is among more than 100 immigration judges the Trump administration ousted, decreasing the national number of judges from 735 to 600 since January, according to the American Immigration Council. The remaining judges and military lawyers, who are serving as temporary immigration judges, are left to handle 3.8 million backlogged cases, which have steadily grown in the last decade. Experts and former immigration judges are concerned about the future of due process and the rise of dysfunction across the immigration court system.
“Immigration courts are a place that should permit people to have a fair day in court,” Doyle said. “But the way the system is set up, it makes that very difficult. With the pressures that the Trump administration is putting on the people that are judges — that are in these positions — they’re making it very difficult for people to have a fair day in court.”
Politicization of Immigration Courts
Trump’s second administration has enacted an immigration crackdown with an emphasis on mass deportation. There have been over 500,000 deportations as of October 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
There was a “weaponization of expedited removal” and infrastructure to quickly deport people, which the Trump administration inherited from the Biden administration, according to Sophia Genovese, a supervising attorney and Clinical Teaching Fellow of the Center for Applied Legal Studies.
Click here to learn more about Genovese and her work.
During Trump’s first term, there were several efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and restrict asylum access.
In the Biden administration, there was also a focus on restricting asylum access, slowing border arrivals and prioritizing the removal of noncitizens who were a threat to the nation. The administration also allowed judges to prioritize and pause certain cases as well.
Doyle said she sees a pattern in this administration: firing judges who had previously defended or represented immigrants as attorneys.
Emmett Soper is one of them, receiving a termination email in July 2025 after working nearly 20 years for the DOJ.
Soper said while his termination was upsetting, he was not surprised to be fired and that the administration may find judges with more experience “pliable” compared to those with less.
“It’s hard to know what they’re thinking exactly with some of these moves that they’re doing,” Soper said. “Ultimately, we don’t know to what extent judges’ experience, or lack thereof, is playing a role in a lot of these firings.”
Soper added that immigration courts have been “politicized” since the start of Trump’s second term and that he felt a little bit of relief when he was fired because leaders of immigration courts were “allowing people” to get arrested in their lobbies.
At a National Press Club panel discussion on Nov. 13, Soper said that noncitizens who did not have criminal backgrounds would “regularly” be detained outside the courtroom.
“All they were doing was showing up to court like they had been told they had to do,” Soper said during the panel discussion.
Doyle, who is now a partner at an immigration law firm Green and Spiegel, said it is an anxious time for her clients and people are nervous due to the arrests and detainments.
In addition to ICE presence, as of September, the administration authorized 600 military lawyers or Judge Advocate General Corps to serve as temporary immigration judges.
However, under the Posse Comitatus Act, the use of federal troops in civilian enforcement is prohibited.
“I think it’s a very thinly veiled way in which due process rights of non-citizens in the immigration courts is even being further constrained,” said Cori Alonso-Yoder, an assistant professor of law and director of the immigration clinic at the University of Maryland. “Our immigration court system is called a court system, but it really doesn’t look a lot like a court system in many of the other ways in which Americans have come to understand what having one day in court should look like.”
Doyle also worked with three former JAG attorneys as judges and said while they were good to work with, she thinks it’s “problematic” to have military members make decisions over civilians and emphasized the lack of training they have.
“I think they’re going to do their best to be proper judges, but I think it slows things down quite a bit when you fired people that have had experience and had more training,” Doyle said.
A “situation of crisis”
Currently, there are more than 70 immigration courts run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the Department of Justice, which houses and controls them.
In a statement to the Medill News Service, EOIR Press Secretary Kathryn Mattingly said reducing its 3.8 million case backlog is one of the “highest priorities” and that they have implemented measures such as rescinding 20 policies that are “unfounded in law or discouraged the timely completion of cases.”
“EOIR is committed to making further advancements to its operational efficiency, thereby helping to ensure timely justice for both parties involved and the public it serves,” the statement read.
Since immigration courts are under the DOJ, they are “more susceptible” to policy influence from the Trump administration, Alonso-Yoder said.
In July 2025, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” authorized 10,000 ICE officers but only increased the cap of immigration judges to 800.
Soper, along with former immigration Judges Anam Petit, from the Annandale Immigration Court, and Ted Doolittle, from Hartford Immigration court, stressed that there has always been a critical need for more immigration judges during the panel. They added that after they were fired, their caseload would be handed off to other judges, creating an abundant amount of work for the court staff.
“It’s not fair to the judges who inherit these cases, and most importantly, it’s not fair to the people who have cases pending in front of the immigration courts, who depend on the immigration courts being a functioning system,” Soper said.
Migration Policy Institute Analyst and immigration attorney Kathleen Bush-Joseph outlined in her policy brief how the consequences of prosecutorial discretion and docket policies created a “dysfunctional cycle” between the EOIR and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
If a noncitizen’s case were closed with the EOIR, many would seek to reapply for asylum, creating a backlog at the USCIS, which would be sent back to the immigration courts.
Bush-Joseph said the arrests by ICE and Customs and Border Protection Agents are contributing to the EOIR backlog and the USCIS backlog.
“Without major changes, the immigration courts will continue to be in this situation of crisis,” Bush-Joseph said. “The judges will not be able to keep up with all of the cases that are in the system, but I do think that the Trump administration is going to continue to try to close out cases, so I’m not sure where the backlog numbers will end up.”
Matthew J. O’Brien, Deputy Executive Director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in an email to the Medill News Service that the United States has gone from no legal immigration enforcement to “effective” enforcement.
“The backlog at the Immigration Court has long been exploited by the Immigration Bar as a feature, not a bug,” O’Brien said. “The way to eliminate the backlog is to stop pretending that aliens in front of the Executive Office for Immigration Review are litigating civil rights issues.”
Trump’s immigration crackdown deepens
Bush-Joseph said the Trump administration is using the National Guard shooting on Nov. 26, which led them to pause all asylum decisions and pause green card applications from 19 countries, to justify and accelerate plans they might have previously had.
USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow wrote on X that “USCIS has halted all the asylum decisions until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible. The safety of the American people always comes first.”
The suspect is an Afghan national, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who came to the U.S. in September 2021 as a result of the Biden administration’s “Operation Allies Welcome,” which evacuated and resettled Afghans, as the Taliban took over. He applied for asylum in 2024 and was granted it under the Trump administration.
Genovese said she is still trying to decode what the asylum halt means for their clients, but expects there to be a continuation of expedited deportations and unfair adjudications.
“I think we are in for a really, really bumpy ride for the next few years,” Genovese said. “What’s different now is that we’re seeing a lot of people give up and consent to deportation – not everyone – there’s still a tremendous amount of need for representation in the immigration courts, but we’re also seeing a lot of people give up at rates I’ve never seen before.”
