The immigration court system has shed roughly a quarter of its judges in the past year, leaving millions of cases waiting as the administration reshapes who sits on the bench and shifts staffing priorities.
The number of immigration judges plunged from about 700 to just over 550 over the last year, according to an NPR investigation, a drop driven by firings, resignations, and retirements. This movement comes as the Trump administration pursues a clear effort to change the composition of the bench and accelerate case resolution under a stricter enforcement posture. Courts across the country are feeling the strain as experienced judges depart and new appointment strategies are rolled out.
One of the human stories behind the statistics involves supervisors and staff who woke up to abrupt dismissals. The details from the workplace level show how sudden the changes were and how they shook employees who had spent careers in immigration courts. Those experiences help explain why the departures have had an outsized operational effect beyond simple headcount loss.
Amiena Khan was supposed to have the day off that December. But, in a supervisory role at an immigration court, “you never really are on leave,” she said. So Khan was working — mostly on performance evaluations for the 36 immigration judges and dozens of staff members she oversaw at the court in Manhattan’s 26 Federal Plaza.
At 11:29 a.m., while in the middle of a meeting, Khan received the email she had been dreading for months: she had been fired. As her phone began blowing up, she learned that six of the judges she supervised had been terminated as well.
“As I tried to reassure them, I was trying to explain, ‘But I’ve been terminated too,'” said Khan, who had been an assistant chief immigration judge at the court. “It was chilling and — in how the terminations were effectuated — it was disrespectful. It was utter disregard of dedicated public servants.”
While Khan’s firing was upsetting, she said it wasn’t altogether shocking. The Trump administration fired nearly 100 judges in 2025. The dismissals were part of a larger push by the Trump administration to reshape America’s immigration courts.
The number of judges in the nation’s immigration courts shrunk by about a quarter in the last year due to firings and resignations — even when accounting for new hires. Twelve immigration courts have lost over half of their judges. Many courts are down to skeleton crews to handle thousands of cases; two courts have no judges at all.
San Francisco, one of the nation’s busiest immigration courts, lost 16 judges in 2025 and now has only four judges and one supervisor assigned to roughly 120,000 pending cases. The pace of removals has been rapid: the administration has fired over 100 judges since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, and many experienced staff positions have vanished as well. Those raw numbers underline how thin the system has become in certain districts.
The cuts have not stopped at judges. More than 400 support staff positions were eliminated, which compounds the practical difficulty of moving cases through the system. The current backlog sits near an estimated 3.2 million pending matters, making any staffing disruption multiply into major delays for ordinary people waiting for decisions.
Beyond firings, pressure and uncertainty pushed many judges to resign or retire, shrinking the bench faster than routine turnover would. An analysis found that judges with immigrant-defense or civil-rights backgrounds were disproportionately among those dismissed, a pattern that critics say signals an intentional shift toward more enforcement-oriented adjudicators. From the administration’s perspective, swapping in judges with different backgrounds is part of a strategy to enforce the law more consistently and prioritize national security concerns.
The Justice Department has moved to refill seats, announcing 33 new immigration judges, including 27 temporary appointments after loosening qualification rules and recruiting from the military, according to Reuters. The Pentagon also authorized up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges after DOJ removed prior immigration law experience as a requirement for those temporary roles. Those steps reflect an aggressive approach to staffing that values speed and scale over traditional immigration adjudication experience.
Advocates warn that replacing seasoned immigration judges with temporary appointees or personnel lacking immigration law backgrounds risks more legal errors, wrongful removals, and inconsistent decisions. The administration counters that a tougher, more efficient bench is necessary to regain control of an overwhelmed system and to secure the border. Either way, the practical effect for many is more time waiting for a hearing and greater unpredictability about how cases will be decided.
As the court system recalibrates, thousands of individual lives are affected by delays and staffing turbulence. With a backlog measured in the millions and critical courts operating with skeleton crews, the path to fair, timely adjudication faces major hurdles. The stakes are high for due process, for public confidence in immigration enforcement, and for how efficiently the system can deliver final decisions moving forward.
