The Department of Justice has fired more than 100 immigration judges since President Donald Trump took office and replaced them with more than 140 new hires, two-thirds of whom have no prior immigration law experience listed in their biographies, The Daily Beast reported, citing a Washington Post analysis.
The mass turnover amounts to the most aggressive reshaping of the nation's immigration bench in recent memory. The DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, is now recruiting candidates who are invited to apply as "deportation judges" helping to "write the next chapter of America," with pay reaching up to $207,500 a year, a 25 percent signing bonus for first-time federal employees, remote work options, and flexible hours.
Just 24 percent of the new judges had previously worked for the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or immigration courts. In past years, most recruits had backgrounds in immigration law and received more extensive training than what is currently provided to the new hires.
Three of the newly hired judges have drawn particular scrutiny for their backgrounds and public statements. The Washington Post profiled each of them, and none responded to the Post's requests for comment.
Melissa Isaak, a defense attorney, represented three individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach. She later withdrew from two of those cases. Isaak also represented Alabama Republican Roy Moore in a defamation case tied to allegations that Moore sexually assaulted underage women, allegations Moore denies.
In 2021, Isaak gave a speech at what the report described as an anti-feminist convention. During that speech she claimed women and children falsely accuse men of domestic abuse at high rates in family court, a claim that runs counter to FBI data showing most domestic violence victims are women.
The administration has faced a string of legal challenges on immigration enforcement, including a federal appeals court ruling that blocked Trump's asylum proclamation. The judicial overhaul at the immigration bench adds another front to that broader fight.
Carey Holliday, a former Republican state party official, previously served as an immigration judge from 2006 to 2009. He stepped down after it emerged that the Bush administration had been hiring immigration judges based on political leanings, a practice the report noted is against federal law.
In 2010, a federal appeals court criticized Holliday for "relying impermissibly on stereotypes" after he denied asylum to a gay Serbian man. Holliday had written that the man displayed "no effeminate traits." He declined to comment when the Post reached him.
A third newly hired judge, Nathan M. Hansen, shared social media posts referencing the "Haitian invasion of Ohio" and promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which alleged a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was operating a child sex ring. Hansen also voiced support for ICE raids in Minnesota. He did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
The administration has consistently defended robust immigration enforcement across the country, including in Minnesota, where President Trump affirmed there would be no reduction in enforcement operations.
Immigration judges are federal attorneys supervised by the attorney general. Unlike Article III judges, they can be fired under certain circumstances. Many of the more than 100 judges dismissed in the past year have challenged their terminations in court, though the specific cases and their outcomes were not detailed.
The hiring push is tied directly to the administration's stated goal of deporting a million immigrants. The DOJ is offering 25 percent signing bonuses in some Democrat-led states, though which states qualify was not specified, as it works to fill benches across the country. The recruitment language frames the openings not as routine government postings but as a mission-driven call to action.
Critics have raised concerns that the Executive Office for Immigration Review now appears to be selecting judges based on their willingness to deny asylum, rush through cases, and help the administration meet its deportation targets. The report did not include an official DOJ response to those characterizations.
The legal landscape around Trump's deportation agenda has been contested on multiple fronts. A D.C. Circuit panel blocked Trump's asylum executive order, citing limits on presidential power under immigration law. Separately, the same circuit overruled a lower court judge and ended a contempt probe over the administration's deportation flights.
For years, the immigration court system has been drowning in a backlog that stretches into the millions of cases. Judges who retired or were removed under previous administrations were rarely replaced quickly enough to keep pace. The result was a system where illegal immigrants could wait years, sometimes a decade, for a hearing, effectively converting a court date into an indefinite stay in the United States.
The Trump administration's answer is volume: hire fast, hire aggressively, and get cases moving. Whether the new judges have the immigration law expertise to handle complex asylum claims fairly is a legitimate question. But the prior status quo, endless delays that functioned as de facto amnesty, was not working for anyone who believes the law should mean what it says.
Meanwhile, Tom Homan has laid out the administration's broader deportation stance, making clear that enforcement priorities extend well beyond the courtroom.
Several questions hang over the hiring wave. What training, exactly, are the new judges receiving? Where are they being assigned? Which specific Democrat-led states are offering the signing bonuses, and why? And what happened to the court challenges filed by the dismissed judges, are any of them winning?
The DOJ has not publicly addressed the criticism that its hiring criteria have shifted from legal competence to ideological alignment. That silence does the administration no favors. If the goal is a faster, tougher immigration bench, the strongest defense would be transparency about qualifications and training standards, not a recruitment pitch that reads like a campaign ad.
The backgrounds of Isaak, Holliday, and Hansen raise fair questions about judgment and temperament. A judge who was previously rebuked by a federal appeals court for relying on stereotypes, or one who promoted debunked conspiracy theories online, invites the kind of legal challenges that slow the very process the administration wants to accelerate. Every overturned ruling is a delay. Every procedural error is a gift to the immigration lawyers the administration is trying to outpace.
None of that changes the underlying reality: the immigration court system was broken long before this administration arrived. A backlog measured in millions of cases is not a sign of a functioning legal system. It is a sign of institutional failure, one that previous administrations, including Biden's, did little to fix.
Hiring more judges is the right instinct. Hiring the right judges is the harder part, and the part that will determine whether this overhaul holds up in court or collapses under its own weight.