This article is an update to our earlier coverage, “Eight New York Immigration Judges Fired in Sudden EOIR Purge: A Dangerous New Phase in U.S. Immigration Adjudication” (Jan. 6, 2026), available at myattorneyusa.com. Readers are encouraged to review that article for background on the structural position of immigration judges within the Department of Justice, the scale of the 2025 dismissals, and the due-process concerns they raise.

Introduction

When we published our initial analysis in January 2026, the dismissal of immigration judges across the country was already unprecedented in scope. Since then, the transformation of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has accelerated, deepened, and — thanks to an extensive investigative report published by The New York Times on April 9, 2026 — become substantially better documented in quantitative terms.1

The data are arresting. They confirm, with hard numbers drawn from EOIR’s own records, what practicing asylum attorneys have observed in courtrooms: the immigration adjudication system is being systematically reoriented away from individualized merits review and toward institutional pressure for removal.

This update synthesizes the newly available data, describes the structural mechanisms the administration has employed, and draws out the implications for asylum practitioners and their clients — particularly those with pending individual hearings.

The Scale of the Personnel Change

As of the date of the Times report, the Trump administration had dismissed more than 100 immigration judges out of approximately 750 who were in place when the president returned to office in January 2025.2 That figure — over 13 percent of the entire corps dismissed within roughly fifteen months — has no historical precedent. By comparison, the Biden administration’s firing of approximately six Trump-appointed judges in 2022, itself criticized as politicized at the time, now reads as trivially modest.2

The dismissals were not random. The Times’s analysis of EOIR data found that the vast majority of fired judges shared three characteristics: they had been appointed under Democratic administrations; more than half had previously represented immigrants as attorneys; and they had granted asylum at significantly higher rates than their peers who were retained.2

Before their terminations, fired judges had granted asylum to approximately 46 percent of applicants during the current administration — a rate well above the 15 percent grant rate recorded for judges who kept their positions.2 The replacements appointed by the administration — 143 permanent and temporary judges announced to date — have granted asylum in approximately 6 percent of cases, the lowest rate of any identifiable cohort in the available data.2 Many new hires come from backgrounds as immigration prosecutors at the Department of Homeland Security or as military lawyers; several, the Times reported, have little or no prior experience in immigration law.2

Asylum Grant Rates: A Historic Collapse

The aggregate effect on asylum grant rates is severe. During the Biden administration, the average asylum grant rate across all immigration judges was approximately 42 percent.2 Under the second Trump administration, the average has fallen to approximately 20 percent — and, as of February 2026, the monthly grant rate dropped to 7 percent, the lowest in the available data going back to 2009.2

For asylum practitioners, this number requires careful interpretation. It does not mean that 93 percent of asylum applicants lack colorable claims. The Times analysis found that the decline in grant rates is not explained solely by the characteristics of the applicants — nationality, date of entry, or detention status — but persists after adjusting for those variables.2 The data reflect, in other words, adjudicative behavior, not applicant quality.

This matters enormously for appellate strategy. When asylum is denied at the individual hearing level, the denial must be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. The BIA — itself substantially reorganized in recent years — is the gateway to circuit court review. Practitioners should anticipate that individual hearing decisions issued under the current regime will, in many cases, be products of institutional pressure rather than genuine independent merits adjudication, and should preserve that argument carefully for BIA and circuit court briefing.

Mechanisms of Pressure: Memos, Monitoring, and Bond Denial

The Times investigation documented three primary mechanisms through which the administration has exerted pressure on immigration judges. Each has direct implications for pending cases.

A. Administrative Memos and Disciplinary Threats

In June 2025, Sirce Owen — serving as acting director of EOIR — issued a memorandum accusing some immigration judges of tolerating bias as long as it favored the noncitizen, and warned that judges who favored one side “may be subject to corrective or disciplinary action.”2 One fired judge, Carla Espinoza of Chicago, stated that she and her colleagues interpreted the memo as an instruction to be more favorable to the government.2 Ms. Espinoza was dismissed approximately two weeks after the memo was circulated.

In a previously unreported whistle-blower letter to Congress, a military lawyer who had been detailed to serve as a temporary immigration judge and was subsequently dismissed described an official articulating the standard for granting asylum as follows: the benefit should perhaps be reserved only for someone who was “Jewish and escaping Nazi Germany in 1943.”2 The Justice Department disputed the account and stated that the comment, even if made, did not represent official policy — but did not explain the basis for any of the individual dismissals.2

B. Statistical Monitoring of Individual Judges

White House and Justice Department officials have actively monitored individual judges’ asylum grant and denial statistics, according to federal employees with knowledge of the activity who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity.2 According to a separate whistle-blower letter submitted to Congress by Christopher Day — a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve JAG Corps who was appointed as a temporary immigration judge in October 2025 and dismissed within two months — EOIR’s incoming director told new judges during training that the administration had “fired almost 100 judges to date and were watching new judges very carefully.”2 Mr. Day had, before his dismissal, granted asylum at a rate substantially higher than any other temporary judge.2

The chief immigration judge, Teresa Riley, has received daily reports on bond rulings, and her office has at times directly contacted individual judges seeking explanations for decisions to grant bond.2 One sitting judge described the pressure to deny bond as “overt” and confirmed that judges were required to notify supervisors each time bond was granted.2

C. Mandatory Bond Denial

The administration has directed immigration judges to decline to hold bond hearings for virtually all persons who entered the country without authorization, reversing decades of individualized bond practice.2 This policy is independently significant and is the subject of an ongoing legal battle that may reach the Supreme Court. See our article on bond hearing rights under the second Trump administration, available at myattorneyusa.com.

The practical effect on asylum proceedings is profound: detained individuals who cannot obtain bond face the choice between prolonged immigration detention or abandoning their asylum claims through voluntary departure. The Times data show that the rate of detained immigrants abandoning their cases through voluntary departure has risen sharply under this policy.2 The Times also found that, since 2009, more than 75 percent of individuals who were released on bond appeared at all scheduled hearings — a statistic that directly contradicts any flight-risk rationale for the blanket denial policy.2

One of the human faces of this policy is Shahrokh Rahimi, who entered the United States without inspection in 2003, was ordered deported in 2010 but simultaneously protected against return to Iran on torture grounds, and has since lived under ICE-supervised release. Married to a U.S. citizen, the father of a twelve-year-old U.S.-born daughter, and possessing no criminal record beyond a traffic violation, Mr. Rahimi was arrested by ICE in the summer of 2025 as part of the administration’s enforcement surge, denied bond by an immigration judge, and as of the Times report’s publication date had spent nine months in immigration detention.2

Structural Transformation: A Summary Assessment

In our January 2026 article, we identified several structural concerns raised by the purge of immigration judges. The April 2026 data permit a more precise assessment of each.

Judicial independence. The picture is now substantially confirmed by the data. The pattern of dismissals — targeting judges appointed under Democratic administrations who granted asylum at above-average rates — combined with documented statistical monitoring and explicit threats of disciplinary action for insufficiently pro-government rulings, establishes a functional chain of command from immigration outcomes to employment security. Whatever the formal administrative law characterization of immigration judges as employees exercising “independent judgment,” the practical reality described in the Times investigation is one of outcome-directed adjudication.3

Due process. The combination of near-universal bond denial, accelerating abandonment rates among detained applicants, and an asylum grant rate that has collapsed to historic lows produces a system in which the procedural forms of adjudication are preserved while the substantive outcomes are largely predetermined. This is the concern that fair-hearing arguments at the BIA and in the circuit courts must engage directly.

Institutional knowledge. The replacement of experienced judges — many of whom had backgrounds as immigration defense attorneys and thus deep substantive knowledge of asylum law — with recent converts from enforcement backgrounds, including some with no immigration law experience, has immediate implications for the quality of adjudication. Errors of law, evidentiary shortcuts, and inadequate engagement with country condition evidence are likely to appear more frequently in decisions issued by the current bench, creating both appellate grounds and practical challenges.

Backlog. The administration has achieved a reduction in the three-million-plus case backlog that accumulated under the Biden administration, primarily through accelerated denials rather than through meritorious case resolution. A backlog reduced by mass denial is not a functioning asylum system.

Implications for Practitioners

For attorneys handling pending individual hearing cases in the New York and Philadelphia immigration courts — and in EOIR courts nationwide — the following practical considerations are presented by the foregoing.

Preserve the record. Where an immigration judge appears to be rushing through an individual hearing, refusing to hear testimony, or issuing a bare-bones denial that does not engage with the specific country conditions evidence presented, counsel should make a contemporaneous objection and ensure the record reflects the fair-hearing concern. The right to a full and fair hearing remains a constitutional requirement.

Cumulative persecution and nexus arguments. The collapse in grant rates suggests that judges are routinely rejecting claims that would have been granted under a neutral application of Matter of C-A-R-R-, Matter of H-A-A-V-, and the applicable circuit court standards. Counsel should build BIA and circuit court arguments into the individual hearing record from the outset.

Bond litigation. Clients arrested and denied bond should be advised of the parallel federal habeas track available to challenge unlawful detention. Federal district courts have repeatedly found unlawfully detained immigrants entitled to bond hearings. See our article on bond hearings and detention challenges, available at myattorneyusa.com.

Voluntary departure. Clients in detention who raise the possibility of voluntary departure should receive full advice about the consequences — including the bar on returning to the United States for specified periods, the impact on future immigration filings, and the alternative avenues available — before any agreement is made.

Conclusion

The data now confirm what the structural analysis of our January 2026 article anticipated. The immigration courts have undergone a transformation that is institutional and not merely atmospheric. Asylum grant rates have reached historic lows; detained applicants are abandoning cases at unprecedented rates; and the mechanisms driving these outcomes — statistical monitoring, disciplinary threats, bond denial directives, and targeted dismissals — are now thoroughly documented. For practitioners, the environment demands heightened attention to record preservation, appellate positioning, and the full range of parallel remedies available in federal court.

We will continue to monitor developments and update our coverage as circumstances evolve. Individuals and families facing removal proceedings are strongly encouraged to consult with an experienced immigration attorney.

  1. Nicholas Nehamas, Allison McCann, Steven Rich, Jazmine Ulloa & Hamed Aleaziz, How Trump Purged Immigration Judges to Speed Up Deportations, N.Y. Times (Apr. 9, 2026) [hereinafter Times Investigation].
  2. Id.
  3. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.10(b) (requiring immigration judges to exercise “independent judgment and discretion”).