Inside Donald Trump’s attack on immigration court
Today, “I don’t think the immigration court system is a judicial system,” says one former elder EOIR The official and military judge said. “What this administration wants is a rubber stamp.”
One humid evening, I went to the house of an immigration judge who I’ll call K. We sipped iced tea in K’s dining room, in the company of potted plants, spiders, and a wandering cat. K is still working, but more than a third of K’s colleagues at the three immigration courts in San Francisco and nearby Concord have been fired. K told me the loss was “tangible.” “It’s very frustrating.”
The court has always been a stressful place — asylum cases include testimony about extortion, famine, war, rape and child abuse. Now the scaffolding was collapsing. “A lot of lawyers cried, as well as the defendants,” K told me. They were seeing their clients arrested. Parents were handcuffed and snatched away from their children. In one waiting room, the Department of Homeland Security posted bilingual flyers warning people against “self-deportation.” The posts were illustrated with a photo of Latino men wearing gray prison clothing being dragged toward an inmate Ice a truck. Not long ago, the courtroom interpreter became so distraught that he was unable to finish the hearing. The translator was unable to reach a family member in Los Angeles, and was worried he would be arrested Ice.
“After the arrests started in court, the temperature in the court rose,” K told me. Masked Ice Officers stalked the hallways. Courtrooms became empty: respondents were too afraid to show up for their appointments. The expulsion of judges continued. K started. Carrying a stun gun with a loud alarm. “I’m afraid I’ll be arrested,” K said. “I’m afraid someone will come with an explosive device and detonate it.” (A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told me this Ice It is to place some “illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they should have always been. The average illegal alien gets much more due process than most Americans.”)
K told me about an incident in early July that seemed to sum up the feeling of devastation. A man from El Salvador showed up for a key hearing in a San Francisco court, on Montgomery Street, to press his claim for asylum. The Department of Homeland Security moved to dismiss his case. The judge denied the request, however Ice The man was arrested anyway. The officers took him out of the building in handcuffs. A group of protesters tried to snatch the man away, however Ice The agents pushed him into a waiting truck and closed the door. The demonstrators clung to the front of the truck as it accelerated and drove through a crowded street in the city center. One of them slid off the hood of the car and looked about to be run over. Another hung a little longer before being pulled down Ice. See K’s colleagues. All from their office windows.
This year, a series of strongly worded political memos arrived from the desk of Cyrus Owen, the agency’s new acting head. EOIR. “EOIR’s values at the core of its mission are rooted in three elements: integrity, impartiality, and the decision-making independence of its arbitrators,” she wrote in January. “However, these three values have been severely eroded in recent years.” Many judges found such language threatening, reminiscent of memos issued during the first Trump administration by James McHenry, then director of the International Court of Justice. EOIRAnd a close friend of Owen’s. During Biden’s presidency, McHenry was moved to a small department within the office, where he publicly complained about being the target of a “larger campaign of harassment.” He has remained loyal to Trump, who this year appointed him acting attorney general before confirming Pam Bondi.
In February, Owen sent a memo asking judges to complete asylum cases within six months — a legal deadline, but one that was impossible to meet except by rejecting applications en masse. In April, she urged judges to reject asylum claims that were “legally deficient” on paper, “without a hearing.” (The first Trump administration tried to implement a version of this, but still required judges to bring defendants in for a key hearing.) EOIR He encouraged judges to approve DHS’s motions to dismiss. Levin, a former San Francisco judge, saw this as an unprecedented overreach: “guidance on how to rule on a specific motion,” she said. (EOIR She later retracted the instructions, citing a lawsuit.) Subsequent memos warned judges against showing “bias directed against DHS” or being “outliers in judgment,” risking “scrutiny and potential action.” “When I read that, I thought,” David Kim, the New York judge who was fired in September, told me. I know where this is headed“.