Is the US Justice System at Risk? Judges Speak Out on Political Purge

A former US immigration judge has warned that the US justice system is being bent to political will after the Donald Trump administration removed more than 100 immigration judges across the country since January 2025 and replaced many of them with military lawyers and political appointees. Speaking from Maryland, ex-judge David Koelsch and several other current and former judges say the shake-up amounts to a 'purge' that threatens the independence of the courts and the basic idea of neutral justice in America.

The alarm from inside the immigration courts follows a two-year drive by Trump's second administration to accelerate deportations and tighten control over legal decision-making. The policy, backed by Elon Musk's 'Department of Government Efficiency' (DOGE), has targeted judges viewed as too sympathetic to asylum-seekers, offered buyouts to others and shut down one of the largest immigration courts in the country. Those who remain describe a climate of fear in which granting bond or asylum can put a judge's job at risk.

Former Judge's Street Shock Raises US Justice Fears

Koelsch, 59, had already resigned when he travelled to Minneapolis on the day federal agents shot dead Alex Pretti. He says he simply walked to Nicollet Avenue 'to stand and bear witness.' What he found instead felt like a different country. Dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection officers in masks and tactical gear, rifles slung at the ready, had sealed off the street as civilians shouted from the pavements.

When tear gas drifted through the crowd, his chest tightened and he dropped to his knees before stumbling away to catch his breath. The physical reaction unnerved him; the symbolism troubled him more. Koelsch had once taken the same oath as those officers, first as a supervisory asylum officer at the Department of Homeland Security, then for nearly eight years as an immigration judge in Baltimore.

'I was proud to do my part in protecting the country,' he said. 'But then to see these officers out in the streets, basically harassing civilians, I just felt kind of sad... I didn't think they were living up to [the oath].'

Four months earlier, Koelsch had walked away from the bench, years earlier than planned, as colleagues were dismissed 'left and right.' Since January 2025, more than 113 immigration judges have been fired, pushed out through buyouts or moved aside, and their posts filled with military lawyers and political picks, according to figures cited by the judges.

Koelsch insists the corrosion of independence did not start with Trump, criticising the Biden administration's use of prosecutorial discretion to clear court backlogs as 'a numbers game' for 'good headlines.' But he says the current administration has turned pressure into outright control.

Inside the Immigration Courts

The shift has been stark in San Francisco. On 21 November 2025, Jeremiah Johnson, 52, thought he was finishing an ordinary day on the bench. Appointed in 2017 by Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, Johnson had granted asylum at rates well above the national average, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

That afternoon he approved asylum for a family of four, then returned to his office. Minutes later he discovered by email that he, and two colleagues named Chen and Savage, had been fired. His access to the court system was cut almost instantly.

The dismissals coincided with the closure of the San Francisco immigration court, which shrank from 21 judges at the start of 2025 to just four early this year, leaving 120,000 cases in limbo and pushing hearings to a smaller court 35 miles away. Johnson was one of five judges removed that day.

Months earlier, a memo from Sirce E. Owen, acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, had warned staff of judges who supposedly believed 'bias is justifiable' if it favoured an 'alien' over the Department of Homeland Security. It threatened disciplinary action and suggested those who disagreed 'consider transitioning to alternate career paths.'

Johnson, now an executive vice-president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, rejects the charge. He argues the firings are being justified under the president's executive authority to drive what he calls 'mass deportation,' frequently without adequate due process.

A group of dismissed judges has sued the Department of Justice over the administration's power to remove them without cause. The Merit Systems Protection Board, which normally protects federal employees from politically motivated discipline, ruled it had no jurisdiction in their case. The judges are now appealing to the US court of appeals for the federal circuit, calling the move a break with more than a century of civil service practice.

Another former judge, Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, points to the severance she received as evidence that the government cannot claim misconduct. 'The government doesn't state a reason,' she said. 'So arguably, that means they are admitting that there's no cause because otherwise I wouldn't be due severance.'

Rey Caldas, a first-generation immigrant born in Spain after the Franco dictatorship, was appointed in 2022 by then attorney general Merrick Garland and made permanent after strong evaluations from her supervisor, ICE officials and defence counsel. She was later terminated without explanation, shortly before the administration moved to install hundreds of military lawyers as temporary judges and drop the usual requirement for lengthy immigration law experience.

The Pentagon says JAG officers are there to 'deliver justice, restore order and protect the American people.' Legal groups call the move 'a dangerously flawed solution to a manufactured crisis.' One army reserve lawyer, Christopher Day, was dismissed after just five weeks as a temporary judge in Virginia. Federal data, cited by the Associated Press, shows he granted asylum or other relief in six of 11 cases, far more often than other military appointees.

Judges still on the bench, who speak anonymously for fear of retaliation, describe meetings where they are warned that granting certain bonds could see them removed. Supervisors, they say, now demand explanations for routine adjournments. Rey Caldas calls it 'this devil on your shoulder' whispering about bills, children and job security whenever a difficult case lands on the desk.

Alongside that human pressure, the numbers are unrelenting. The immigration courts face a backlog of more than 3 million cases. Since January 2025, habeas corpus petitions from detained migrants have outstripped those filed across the previous three administrations combined. ICE has deported more than 605,000 people in Trump's second term, with a public target of 1 million removals per year, and asylum approvals have fallen to historic lows as third-country deportation deals expand.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, defends the policy as a necessary response to what she calls Joe Biden's 'open border,' insisting Trump is simply enforcing federal immigration law. The Department of Justice and the Executive Office for Immigration Review decline to discuss specific personnel moves, repeatedly calling them 'personnel matters.'

For many of those who have lost their robes, the argument over technical jurisdiction misses the larger point. Immigration judges sit inside the Department of Justice, directly under the attorney general and, ultimately, the president. That structure, they now argue with some urgency, has allowed one White House to treat legal status as a policy lever rather than a matter of law.

'If such a thing exists in the United States as a tribunal where you're never going to be heard, where the outcome of your case is predisposed, then why would that be different in any other type of tribunal?' Rey Caldas asked. 'If the president can effectively say who gets immigration status and who doesn't, whether or not the law would give them the right to immigration status, then we're past a system of laws, and we are fully living at the whim of an individual.'

Nothing in these accounts has been independently confirmed by government agencies, which have either declined to comment or treated the firings as confidential employment issues, so all claims about internal intent and decision-making should be taken with a grain of salt.