Posted on 12/02/25
| News Source: Newsweek
The Trump administration has fired eight immigration judges in New York City, sharply cutting staff at one of the country’s busiest immigration courts as President Donald Trump vows to speed up deportations, The New York Times reported late Monday.
The judges, including an assistant chief immigration judge who supervised colleagues at the court inside 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, were told their jobs were over as part of a nationwide shake-up of the immigration bench, the paper said, citing union and Justice Department officials.
The New York firings are part of a broader wave: Roughly 90 immigration judges have been dismissed across the United States this year, with only 36 replaced, according to the Times. That represents a sizable churn in a system that handles hundreds of thousands of deportation and asylum cases per year and already faces a record case backlog of more than 3.7 million matters nationwide.
Immigration judges decide whether people can stay in the U.S. or must be removed. Cutting dozens of experienced adjudicators while the Trump administration is rolling out a mass deportation agenda risks deepening an already severe backlog and raises fresh questions about due process in immigration courts.
Trump’s plan for large-scale removals is running headlong into a bottleneck of nearly 4 million pending cases, prompting Stephen Yale-Loehr, immigration attorney who teaches at Cornell Law School, to previously tell Newsweek, “you just cannot deport people without a hearing.”
Union officials and former judges previously told Newsweek that earlier rounds of firings and forced departures inside the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)—the Justice Department agency that runs the courts—have added years to wait times in asylum cases, with some hearings now pushed into 2028.