Trump Takes Massive Step To Ramp Up Deportations

The Trump administration is revamping the immigration court system to speed up deportations.

In its latest move, the Department of Justice hired 82 immigration judges, the most in any single year, the agency announced Thursday. Now, the United States has nearly 700 immigration judges.

“The Trump administration is committed to reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule [of] law in our nation’s immigration system,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Today, we are onboarding the largest immigration judge class in agency history.”

“This could only happen thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership and commitment to securing our borders. I also applaud EOIR’s [Executive Office of Immigration Review] leadership team for helping facilitate these hiring efforts and recruiting highly qualified and talented personnel in record time.”

The new class includes 77 permanent judges and 5 temporary ones.

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House and commenced his mass deportation effort, administration officials began a mass firing of immigration judges who had largely granted asylum at higher rates.

Since then, administration officials have dismissed more than 100 immigration judges who granted asylum in 46% of cases, according to The New York Times.

Immigration judges have completed more than one million cases since Trump’s second inauguration, reducing the pending caseload by more than 447,000 cases, according to the Justice Department. There are currently roughly 3.53 million pending cases sitting in the immigration courts, down from roughly four million.

The Justice Department said it’s the sharpest decrease in the court’s history.

The latest hiring blitz is part of a broader effort to undo the damage the Biden administration’s border surge inflicted on the immigration court system in creating years-long backlogs.

Sirce Owen, then the acting director of EOIR, the Justice Department branch that oversees the immigration courts, issued a memo in April 2025 encouraging immigration judges to toss out asylum claims more rapidly and without a hearing.

In June 2025, Owen issued a separate memo threatening “disciplinary action” for immigration judges who exhibit “bias” towards illegal immigrants.

“Judges who would prefer to be policy advocates favoring either aliens or DHS should consider transitioning to alternate career paths,” Owen wrote in the memo.

In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, White House border czar Tom Homan touted the Trump administration’s record of 800,000 deportations.

“Total of 800,000 [have been removed] out of the country,” Homan said. “If you take 60% of that, criminals, hundreds of thousands of public safety threats, have been removed from this country. Name another president who’s done that.”

Homan admitted that the effort has slowed down recently, but indicated that the delay is only temporary.

“There’s a lot of argument within the world that, ‘Are we keeping our promise?’” Homan said. “Numbers are slightly down, but there’s a plan. Get them back up and even higher.”