Dem
47
GOP
53
Immigration judges judge, well, immigration cases. They are not Article III judges, do not require Senate confirmation, and do not have lifetime tenure. They are DoJ (i.e., Executive Branch) employees and can be fired at will by the AG. There are 700 of them. Well, there WERE 700 of them. Now there are 600, as 100 of them have been fired since January.
Many of them are now sounding off about the reasons they suspect led to their firing. The firing of a single immigration judge is unusual, but the firing of 100 within a short period is unprecedented. They were fired by e-mail and some of them are not happy about it. Jennifer Peyton, a former supervising judge, said: "I cared about my job and was really good at it. That letter that I received, the three sentences, explained no reason why I was fired." She was appointed in 2016 and later helped to train, mentor, and oversee other judges. She had top-notch performance reviews and was never accused of any behavior inappropriate for a judge. The only thing she did that might be considered inappropriate by the administration is that she gave a tour of her Chicago courthouse to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in June. Durbin blasted the administration for firing Peyton, saying it was an "abuse of power."
Peyton thinks she knows why she and the others were fired. She thinks they were all on a watchlist of people not cooperating with the Trump agenda maintained by a right-wing organization. She plans to take action before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, although with Donald Trump's appointments to it, she is not likely to get very far.
Another immigration judge, Carla Espinoza, was fired while she was delivering a verdict. She noted that the firings were disproportionately women and ethnic minorities. She believes she was fired because she released a man who was accused of threatening Trump but was later shown to have been framed. Espinoza also said that the judges who remained feel very threatened and uncertain about their future. (V)