Trump Fires Immigration Judges as Border Security Becomes a Top Priority

Matt Vespa | January 20, 2025 10:45 PM

There’s a new sheriff in town on immigration. President Donald J. Trump will make and is expected to sign new executive orders that will declare a national emergency at our southern border and allow for the deployment of National Guard units to repel the illegal alien invasion we’ve been subjected to for the past four years.

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FIRES IMMIGRATION JUDGES: NYT
— NewsWire (@NewsWire_US) January 21, 2025

One way to do that is to shore up the legal backbone by having quality immigration judges, which the president wasted no time in reshaping. He fired a slew of them today. Immigration judges are the gatekeepers to asylum requests. The president would like new ones, jurists who aren’t open borders (via NYT):

The acting head of the U.S. immigration court system and three other top officials were fired on Monday soon after President Trump took office, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a purge of the top echelon of a critical part of the government’s immigration system.
The abrupt removals signaled that the Trump administration wants to remake the immigration court system, which is housed under the Justice Department, as part of a broader immigration crackdown that Mr. Trump began within minutes of being sworn in for his second term.
Immigration judges oversee an essential part of the system: granting asylum to migrants whose claims pass muster and ordering the deportation of those whose cases do not.
Tom Jawetz, a senior lawyer in the Homeland Security Department in the Biden administration, said the move suggested that Mr. Trump would try to insert loyalists who could undermine veteran career officials into key roles, as he did during his first term.
[…]
The four officials included Mary Cheng, the acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review. The three others fired were Sheila McNulty, the chief immigration judge; Lauren Alder Reid, the head of policy for the agency; and Jill Anderson, the general counsel in the Executive Office of Immigration Review.