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A core strategy of President Donald Trump’s second term has been manipulation by brute force, particularly over the judiciary. In what feels like a never-ending list of legal challenges, Justice Department lawyers have brazenly asserted that executive branch authority is unreviewable by courts all over the country in order to push through the president’s agenda. Though they’ve lost many of these battles, the DOJ has often responded by simply ignoring judicial orders. But there is one court system that Trump has been wildly successful in dismantling, bit by bit, from the day he was inaugurated in January 2025, and it is perfectly legal: Welcome to U.S. immigration court.

The executive branch has a uniquely unilateral level of control over the entire immigration court system because it was not constitutionally established like the Article 3 judiciary. Immigration court is an administrative court that falls squarely within the executive branch, overseen by the Department of Justice. Its exclusive role is to consider deportation cases. The attorney general, who oversees it, is tasked with selecting immigration judges and members of the Board of Immigration Appeals. This system is not perfect, but past presidents have largely respected the preexisting makeup of immigration courts when they enter office, appointing more immigration judges of their own choosing throughout their term. Trump 2.0 has not followed this precedent.

When Trump returned to office, there were about 750 immigration judges stationed across the country. The Trump administration fired more than 100 of them over the course of one year, largely those appointed by Democratic presidents, but especially ones who issued decisions that favored immigrants. When Trump first kicked off his second term, the BIA consisted of 28 members; now it only has 15. To be clear, these staffing changes aren’t a result of shrinking caseloads, in fact it’s quite the contrary. There are approximately 3.3 million active cases pending before immigration court as of February 2026.

Nina Froes was an immigration judge appointed in 2024 by the Biden administration, and she recently ruled against the federal government in its deportation case against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. Roopa Patel was also an immigration judge, based in Boston, and she ruled in favor of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University student detained over an op-ed she wrote against the war in Gaza, in that deportation case. Both judges were fired just last week. Meanwhile, when Judge Jamee Comans was assigned to the deportation case for Mahmoud Khalil, the poster child for the Trump administration’s crackdown on college students’ pro-Palestinian protests, and issued a decision ordering Khalil’s deportation last year, she was promoted. Khalil appealed, and a three-judge panel of the BIA reaffirmed her decision just this month.

“No matter what an immigrant suffered, no matter what Congress intended, no matter what the hearing-level judge found, the answer is removal,” Jason Cade, a law professor at the University of Georgia, concluded in a forthcoming research paper titled “Welcome to the Trump Administration’s Board of Immigration Appeals. The Immigrant Always Loses.”

Homero López is an immigration attorney based in Louisiana who provides pro bono removal........

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