The Trump administration has fired a number of immigration court judges, even as the country deals with a significant backlog of immigration cases.
Kerry Doyle, a judge who was appointed by the Biden administration to work in the new Chelmsford immigration court, was observing court for one of the other judges on Feb. 14 when she opened her email to a message from Sirce Owen, acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the agency that oversees the courts. It read: “EOIR has determined that retaining you is not in the best interest of the Agency.”
The termination was effective immediately, and without explanation, according to the message reviewed by GBH News on Wednesday.
Doyle is one of more than 20 judges fired nationwide. She and many others were readying to start their positions, according to the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers which represents the nation’s 700 immigration judges. A number of management positions were also terminated.
“It was political,” Doyle wrote on LinkedIn, noting the time and resources spent on hiring judges during the last administration.
“If you start making it political, it really does blow the system up and blow up people’s faith in the system,” said Doyle in an interview. “None of us were there to drive a political agenda. We were there to do our jobs.”
She pointed out that a number of judges in Boston’s immigration court have been in service through multiple administrations.
“It would be problematic for it to be political because what civil servants do is they serve the public — we swear an oath to the Constitution,” she said.
The firings come as more immigrants are being detained in the nation’s interior — meaning they will either have a day in court or be forced into expedited removal, a process that bypasses the court system.
“Look up the definition of ‘hypocrisy.’ It’s ‘when someone says one thing but does another.’ The firing of immigration judges when we need more judges to enforce our immigration laws by this administration is a perfect example of hypocrisy,” said Matthew Biggs, president of the federation, in a message.
He said the firing of judges, who hear 500 to 700 cases per year, will only make the backlog worse. He estimated the eliminated positions will mean 10,000 fewer cases can be heard this year.
In 2024, the backlog in Massachusetts was about 160,000 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group that tracks immigration data. Nationally, it’s more than 3.7 million. At that time, the average amount of time immigrants waited for their day in court was more than 18 months.
Doyle spent decades working in immigration law, including challenging Trump’s 2017 travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. During the Biden administration, she worked as the principal legal advisor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She was already scheduled to take over the cases of a colleague who had just left the Chelmsford court, which opened last year and hears more detention cases than Boston’s court. Doyle anticipates extended timelines for people to have their cases heard and rescheduled cases as a result of the firing.
“Those cases will have to be handed out to all the other judges. So it’s going to be even more work for them,” she said. “They need every judge, every person available. And so it will just make the court more congested. Folks are working very hard already.”
This is not the first time a new administration has come in and fired judges. In 2021, judge Marna Rusher was fired soon after Biden became president. She had been hired under Trump and served as Department of Homeland Security counsel before that.
“Maybe it’s just that each president wants to have his imprimatur and people who will follow his agenda. I don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t think that I would call that politically motivated in as much as they think they have a better idea for America and fairly treating people that come across the border.”
