For three immigration judges, the day took a similar turn.
Kyra Lilien, who was hired in 2023, was presiding in a courtroom in Concord, Calif., in July when she paused the hearing of an immigrant seeking asylum to read an email.
"I told them that we were not going to have a hearing because I had just been fired," Lilien said. Present in the court was a court interpreter and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. "They asked me if I was joking."
Anam Petit, who was hired as an immigration judge in 2023 after a career in immigrant defense, was sitting on the bench in her courtroom in Virginia's Annandale Immigration Court in September. It was her two-year anniversary in the position and she was between hearings when she got the email.
"My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. My mind was racing. And I gave the decision and I dismissed everyone without mentioning anything," Petit said. One decision that day was to deny asylum, and the other was a partial denial, each for a different member of one immigrant family, she recalled.
Tania Nemer was hired as a judge at the Cleveland immigration court in 2023. She had about 30 or 40 immigrants, a DHS attorney and staff in her court one morning in February. She had just finished explaining rights and responsibilities to the group when her door opened and her manager asked her to come with him. She was later escorted out of the building.
"I didn't know at all why I was being fired at the time. And I kept asking; no one had a reason," Nemer said.
Nemer was one of the first immigration judges fired by the Trump administration after a slew of dismissals of leaders at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the branch of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. Later that month, the administration fired 12 judges — an entire incoming class that had just been trained and was about to take the bench.
Those dismissals come as the administration has ramped up mass deportations of those without legal status, and sometimes pointed to judges as obstacles in that effort.
The pattern has been consistent. Every few months this year, a new class of judges gets termination notices in the middle of the day, often while they are in the middle of immigration court proceedings. The notices often target those who have reached the end of their two-year probationary period, a trial period for federal workers before they are "converted" to permanent employees. It was previously common for these civil servants to be converted to permanent employees of the DOJ.
"None of us have been given an explanation, we are in the dark, but we've been trying to ascertain patterns," Lilien said, the former judge in northern California. She wonders if her past experience representing immigrants got her fired, even though she also worked at DHS as an asylum officer.
Her hunch has some correlation with the data. NPR has independently identified 70 immigration judges who received termination notices from the Trump administration between February and October. The number matches the tally kept by the union that represents immigration judges of judges who received termination letters, as well as NPR's past coverage of the terminations.
The count does not include assistant chief immigration judges (ACIJ), who are courthouse supervisors and also have their own dockets. The union has counted 11 ACIJs terminated.
An analysis of each of the 70 immigration judges' professional backgrounds found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants, and no prior work history at DHS, made up about 44% of the firings — more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.
NPR also analyzed the classes of judges onboarded between February 2023 and November 2024, who would have neared the ends of their probationary periods this year or are still in the probationary period. Of those judges, those who had prior DHS experience, including working as asylum officers and as attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, made up the largest share still on the bench.
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NPR reached out to the DOJ, EOIR and the White House for a comment on the firings and NPR's findings. The press staff at EOIR is furloughed due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, according to automatic email replies, though immigration courts are still operational. The White House referred questions to the DOJ.
"DOJ doesn't 'target' or 'prioritize' immigration judges for any personnel decision one way or the other based on prior experience," a DOJ spokesperson told NPR in a statement. "DOJ continually evaluates all immigration judges, regardless of background, on factors such as conduct, impartiality/bias, adherence to the law, productivity/performance, and professionalism."
The spokesperson added that, "pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, IJs (Immigration Judges) are inferior officers who are appointed and removed by the Attorney General."
The spokesperson disputed the 70 count, saying the agency has terminated fewer than 55 judges, but was unable to provide more details. The agency's number is inconsistent with other news reports, NPR's prior reporting and the union. NPR reached out to reconcile the numbers. The DOJ spokesperson said staff have been furloughed and the Justice Department is not able to confirm their data.
Employees search for reasons
Fired judges have been grasping at straws to understand why they were fired — some have filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Others have turned to wrongful termination complaints and lawsuits. Some worry they were targeted on the basis of protected classes, such as gender or race.
"I fit the bill," said Nemer, who had represented immigrants prior to becoming an immigration judge. Nemer listed off characteristics cited in a lawsuit she has filed, arguing she was fired based on various protected classes.
"It's hard to know without having the explanations of why judges were fired," said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on immigration policy. "But the way the Trump administration is approaching immigration courts reflects a really high prioritization of immigration enforcement and [the administration] has really made deportations this whole-of-government effort."
Immigration judges approve or deny a final order of deportation. Court officials have placed pressure on judges to move through their dockets faster, including by reviewing asylum cases without hearings.
Each fired judge can leave behind thousands of cases, according to several interviews with fired judges throughout the year. Each case is an immigrant who has likely already waited years for their day in court, to make the case for why they should be allowed to stay in the U.S.
Many of these cases have now been reassigned to other judges, at the bottom of their already years-long dockets. Immigrants whose cases were already in progress, or set to be reviewed soon, now have new dates as far out as 2029.
There were 700 immigration judges at the start of the year. Over the past 10 months, EOIR has lost more than 125 judges to firings and voluntary resignations. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress approved a spending bill that allocated over $3 billion to the Justice Department for immigration-related activities, including the hiring of more immigration judges, to address the backlog of millions of cases at immigration court.
Fear of retribution
Probationary judges aren't the only ones who have been fired under the Trump administration. NPR tracked 12 fired judges who started prior to 2023. This means they were fired after their two-year probationary period.
Some have been left wondering if their firings were retribution for the decisions they made on the bench.
Shira Levine had worked for EOIR since 2021 before being fired in September. She was presiding over a hearing for an immigrant who had already waited more than five years for a day in court when she got the email.
"People looked surprised, but no one looked shocked," Levine said. "That's because, unfortunately, this by that point had become a pattern." She said she didn't expect to be removed since she had passed her two-year mark. She was never given a reason.
Levine, like several others, received a standard email that they were being terminated pursuant to Article 2 of the Constitution, which gives the executive the power to dismiss federal employees.
Levine thought she might have been dismissed because of her response to some recent Trump administration policies.
During the summer months, immigration judges had already had to contend with an outsized enforcement presence in normally empty courtroom hallways. ICE attorneys — who argue on behalf of a government that an immigrant should be deported — started more regularly filing "motions to dismiss" cases. When a judge granted such a motion, migrants would be detained before leaving the building.
Levine said such motions should be granted if there is a change in the individual migrant's case, not a change in immigration policy.
"I was not told it was because of my decision to deny the motion to dismiss that I was fired," Levine said. "But I handed down a decision that contravened what they apparently wanted the judges to do."
Others, like Ila Deiss or Emmett Soper, who had been immigration judges since 2017 and 2016, served as career officials at the DOJ for nearly two decades.
Soper had been with EOIR since graduating law school in a variety of other roles. He doesn't know if his firing had anything to do with past policy work under the Biden administration's EOIR director or his handling of cases as a judge.
As the Trump administration brings in new people to the bench, he has concerns over the loss of experienced judges.
"You have to be able to manage your courtroom and you have to make very difficult, sometimes life-or-death decisions, with the person whose life is going to be affected and the family members sometimes right in front of you," Soper said.
"It's not something that you pick up right away. And with all of these judges — many of whom are very experienced — being fired, the agency is losing something that will take a long time to get back, if they ever can."
Prior political interference
The agency is prioritizing other judges to hire.
The Trump administration has moved to bring back immigration judges it sees as unfairly fired by the Biden administration. The Justice Department, in a February memo, said that it cannot be confident the Biden administration was ethical and lawful in how it dismissed immigration judges and other adjudicators.
A handful of judges in 2022 had not been converted to permanent employment, sparking GOP outrage over what lawmakers saw as political interference.
Earlier this year, Matthew O'Brien and David White, two of those judges let go under President Joe Biden, were reinstated at immigration courts in Virginia. O'Brien was brought back to a managerial position, as NPR previously reported — though he is no longer with EOIR. White is a judge at the Falls Church court.
The Justice Department appointed a new director of EOIR, Daren Margolin, in October. Margolin has previous experience as the assistant chief immigration judge, or courthouse supervisor, throughout multiple courts in California, and a background as a military and DHS lawyer. He had been fired from a command position at a Marine base for negligently firing a gun and had left EOIR in 2024 before returning to lead the agency.
Then the DOJ last month announced its first class of 2025, which included 25 temporary judges who are military lawyers.
"EOIR is restoring its integrity as a preeminent administrative adjudicatory agency," the announcement states. "These new immigration judges are joining an immigration judge corps that is committed to upholding the rule of law."
The incoming class of permanent judges comprises mostly those with a background in federal government work, including EOIR itself and the Department of Homeland Security. Their previous jobs included training Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents, serving as asylum officers and working for ICE's legal arm.
One judge was originally going to take the bench at the start of the year, but was among the initial class of judges fired before they could start. None of the incoming judges appear to have previously worked in the field of immigrant defense based on EOIR's announcement.
Immigration judges' backgrounds vary over time
In recent years, immigration judges' backgrounds have varied. Many came to the position after several years working for ICE's legal branch. Others became judges after working for immigrant defense nonprofits or in private practice. Some have no immigration law experience, which was previously a requirement for temporary judges but not for permanent ones.
When immigration courts were first established, it was more common for immigration judges to have an enforcement background, said Dana Leigh Marks, a former immigration judge and immigration attorney who litigated landmark immigration cases before the Supreme Court.
Marks joined the court in 1987, when courts were still under the former Immigration and Naturalization Service branch of the DOJ.
"Frankly, I was one of the individuals who was hired to show that it wasn't just a career path of prosecution that led you to be eligible to be an immigration judge," Marks said.
That push for professional diversification carried through the Biden administration. That administration selected as immigration judges not just immigration attorneys, but also criminal defense attorneys, other administrative judges across the federal government, and those with military experience, as it sought to diversify the perspectives of those interpreting the complicated set of immigration laws.
Marks said that the president and his cabinet will continue to affect personnel decisions as long as these courts stay in the executive branch.
"It's common sense that the boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge," Marks said, recalling the fight to keep immigration courts separate from immigration enforcement when DHS was created in 2002. Enforcement, which is primarily ICE, was separated from the DOJ.
—NPR's Rahul Mukherjee contributed to data analysis for this story.
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