According to reports, the Trump administration has fired a number of Executive Office for Immigration Review staff and immigration judges (IJs). On February 14, 2025, 13 IJs who had been hired recently were summarily fired, along with seven assistant chief IJs. One IJ, Kerry Doyle, was fired via an email with the subject line “Termination” that stated, “EOIR has determined that retaining you is not in the best interest of the agency,” with no other details. Her hiring process had taken 14 months with multiple interviews, and she was appointed in December 2024.
Since February 14, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, a parent union of the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ), at least two more IJs have been fired, along with eight supervisory assistant chief immigration judges and five senior managers. Some were recent hires, but others had been on the job for a long time. Collectively, they would have been responsible for hearing an estimated 10,000 cases this year. More IJs and staff are leaving or retiring early. In addition, more than a dozen of the 28 members of the Board of Immigration Appeals were purged.
It is unclear if or when the fired staff will be replaced. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, posted on Bluesky that the actions were an “ideological purge” and that the results show “how much ‘fire everyone’ conflicts badly with ‘deport everyone.’ ” Meanwhile, backlogs continue to grow, reaching nearly 3.6 million cases, as evidenced by the graph below:
