When the White House starts bragging that the president has “replaced activist judges” and that there will be “no more activist judges shielding criminal illegals”, you do not need to squint to see what is happening. They are telling you plainly. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Pam Bondi want an immigration court system that delivers deportations on demand.
Most people hear the phrase court packing and think about the Supreme Court. That is too narrow. Authoritarian systems start where the people inside the system have the least political protection. Here, that means migrants in asylum cases before a tribunal the public barely understands. Fill that bench with people who already think like prosecutors, and the rest follows.
A New York Times investigation found that the administration has dismissed more than 100 immigration judges since Trump returned to power, while announcing 143 permanent and temporary replacements and driving asylum approvals this year below 10 percent. Reuters separately reported that the Justice Department swore in 42 new immigration judges in March, many with prosecution or immigration enforcement backgrounds, on top of earlier hires and temporary judges, after firing more than 100 judges since January 2025. Reuters also reported that the courts were already carrying a backlog of about 3.2 million cases. Instead of treating that backlog as a reason to protect fairness, the administration is using it as an excuse to gut fairness.
That matters because immigration judges are not supposed to be mere political functionaries. Yes, they sit inside the Justice Department. Yes, the attorney general appoints them. But the regulation governing their job still says that in individual cases they “shall exercise their independent judgment and discretion”. If the executive branch can fire judges until everyone still standing understands the approved outcome, that promise of independent judgment becomes a joke.
And the threat is not abstract. Reuters reported on April 13 that the National Association of Immigration Judges says 113 immigration judges have been fired since January 2025, including Massachusetts judges Roopal Patel and Nina Froes after they blocked deportation efforts against Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi. GBH reported that Patel got the email ending her job during a break in an asylum hearing, while Froes had to halt a cross examination, clock out the interpreter, and then got escorted from the building. Patel told GBH the pattern looked “informed by a kind of political agenda” to reshape the bench for mass deportations.
That is what court packing looks like in real life. A judge pauses a hearing, checks an email, and learns the case no longer has a judge because the administration did not like the kind of judging she was doing.
The administration’s defenders do have an argument, and it is not a trivial one. Immigration judges are executive branch employees, not Article III judges with life tenure. In March, Reuters reported that the Merit Systems Protection Board ruled immigration judges are “inferior officers” who can be removed at will by the attorney general because they exercise significant policymaking and administrative authority. The Justice Department says that is simply Article II working as designed. It also says EOIR has an obligation to act if a judge shows systematic bias for or against one side.
If all of this were really about neutrality, the White House would not talk the way it talks. A neutral institution would not celebrate the collapse of asylum grants, boast that it replaced “activist judges” until it got “results,” and stock the bench with former DHS and ICE lawyers. The administration did all three. Reuters found that more than a third of the newest class previously worked on immigration matters at DHS, with several coming directly from ICE. One new judge, Kieran Lalor, had already argued in public life that New York should not fund lawyers to help immigrants fight deportation. These are not random hires. They are ideological sorting.
And once you view it that way, the whole project snaps into focus. Trump and Miller found a court system most Americans ignore, one that handles life altering cases for people with little power, and realized they could pack it without paying the political price that would come from trying the same stunt somewhere more visible. They can fire judges, force buyouts, hire prosecutors, hire ICE lawyers, and rotate in temporary judges with military backgrounds, all while claiming the backlog made it necessary. Then they dare anyone to prove the outcomes were predetermined.
What makes this especially ugly is that immigration court is where due process matters most. These cases decide whether people get asylum, whether families get separated, whether a student or green card holder gets exiled over speech, whether someone gets sent back to persecution, prison, or death. The law does not mean much if the referee knows the boss wants deportations and has already shown he is willing to purge the bench.
This is also bigger than immigration. In the appeal brought by fired judges Brandon Jaroch and Megan Jackler, their lawyer warned that if the administration’s theory wins, the federal government could “quickly regress into a corrupt patronage system” without legal protections for civil servants. He is right to worry. Immigration court is the testing ground because the people inside it are easiest for the right to demonize. But a White House that learns it can treat adjudicators as disposable political instruments will not keep that lesson neatly confined to one corner of government.
Trump keeps selling mass deportation as law and order. What he is actually building is a system where the verdict comes first and the hearing is just paperwork. Once a government learns it can purge judges until deportation becomes the default, due process is already gone. That is the real project here, and migrants are just the first people forced to live inside it.