Friends:
I strongly encourage you to watch Jacob Soboroff’s sobering interview with Professor Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers (see video below).
The segment, titled “‘Capturing the Courts’: Chilling New UN Report Shows U.S. ‘More Vulnerable’ to Authoritarianism,” examines the Trump administration’s mass removal of immigration judges and the transformation of immigration courts into what critics describe as deportation machines.
Professor Satterthwaite is a professor of law at New York University and an internationally recognized authority on judicial independence. Together with Gehad Madi, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, she issued an extraordinary warning on July 16, 2026, about the politicization of the American immigration-court system. These special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, rather than representatives speaking on behalf of the United Nations as an institution. That distinction is important, but it does not make their findings any less alarming.
According to the experts, at least 135 immigration adjudicators have been terminated since January 2025: 113 immigration judges, 13 assistant chief immigration judges, and nine appellate immigration judges. The removals reportedly occurred without cause or individualized explanation.
The pattern does not appear random.
Of the 78 removed immigration judges for whom public data were available, 65 had asylum-grant rates higher than either the national average or the average for their particular court. Judges with backgrounds in immigrant defense and humanitarian advocacy were disproportionately removed, as were judges appointed during the Biden administration. More than half of the probationary judges appointed in April and July 2023 were terminated. Only one judge appointed by a Democratic administration reportedly remains on the Board of Immigration Appeals.
This is not ordinary personnel turnover. It bears the hallmarks of court capture: removing adjudicators whose decisions displease the executive, intimidating those who remain, and replacing independent professional judgment with political obedience.
Immigration judges occupy a particularly vulnerable position because immigration courts are housed inside the Department of Justice. Unlike Article III federal judges, immigration judges do not enjoy life tenure or the same structural independence from the executive branch. They are civil servants working under the authority of the attorney general—the same executive branch responsible for pursuing deportation.
That arrangement has always presented concerns about impartiality. What is happening now appears to be the exploitation of that weakness on a mass scale.
At the same time that judges have been removed, the Department of Justice has reportedly issued more than 50 policy memoranda governing immigration adjudication. Some warn judges that they may face disciplinary consequences for being considered too slow or biased. The administration has also expanded “mega” calendar hearings in which a single judge may be expected to preside over the cases of hundreds of people during one half-day session.
No meaningful individualized hearing can take place under such conditions. A person fleeing political persecution, domestic violence, religious repression, torture, or death cannot adequately present a complicated life history as one face among hundreds moving through an administrative assembly line.
The Fifth Amendment does not say that no citizen shall be deprived of liberty without due process. It says that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Congressional legal analysis confirms that people physically present in the United States, including noncitizens facing removal, possess due-process protections and ordinarily must be provided a meaningful opportunity to be heard.
Those words mean little, however, when judges fear termination for carefully considering the cases before them.
The administration’s actions are particularly perverse given the immense unresolved docket. At the end of May 2026, a staggering more than 3.24 million cases remained pending in immigration court. More than 2.3 million of the people involved had already submitted formal asylum applications and were awaiting hearings or decisions (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 2026).
Yet courts are also being dismantled.
San Francisco’s main immigration court began the Trump administration’s second term with 21 judges. By the time the court closed on May 1, 2026, only two remained. Most of its approximately 117,000 cases were transferred to a court in Concord that already carried about 60,000 cases and had itself lost more than half of its judges. The San Francisco court had one of the country’s highest asylum caseloads and historically granted relief at rates significantly above the national average (Rodriguez, 2026).
A system genuinely concerned with resolving its backlog does not eliminate experienced judges, close a major court, transfer tens of thousands of cases into an already overwhelmed courthouse, and replace seasoned adjudicators with less experienced temporary personnel.
This is not primarily about efficiency. It is about controlling outcomes.
Authoritarianism does not always arrive with soldiers standing at the courthouse door. It can arrive through administrative memoranda, personnel decisions, shortened hearings, unexplained dismissals, impossible productivity requirements, courthouse closures, politically selected replacements, and the gradual normalization of fear among those entrusted with applying the law.
That is why Professor Satterthwaite’s larger warning is so important. Immigration courts may be the testing ground, but they need not be the endpoint. The federal government employs administrative law judges who decide cases involving Social Security disability benefits, labor protections, veterans’ claims, environmental regulations, workplace safety, and other matters affecting millions of Americans. Satterthwaite warns in the Soboroff interview that these administrative adjudicators—including judges deciding Social Security cases—could eventually become targets of similar executive control.
Once a government establishes that judges may be fired because their rulings are considered insufficiently aligned with executive policy, the precedent does not remain confined to immigrants. It becomes a model for disciplining administrative justice everywhere.
This is one of the defining dangers of authoritarian governance: an unpopular or politically marginalized population is targeted first, allowing new mechanisms of state power to be constructed with limited public resistance. Once those mechanisms are accepted, they can be turned toward others.
We therefore cannot regard the removal of immigration judges as merely an immigration-policy dispute. It is an attack on judicial independence, constitutional due process, separation of powers, and the basic democratic principle that courts must decide individual cases according to evidence and law—not according to the political objectives of the president.
As the UN experts declared, efficiency cannot justify the erosion of due process. When the government controls which judges remain, pressures them to produce predetermined results, and eliminates the institutional capacity for meaningful hearings, what remains may still be called a court.
But it no longer functions as one.
Please watch Jacob Soboroff’s interview with Professor Margaret Satterthwaite and share it widely. Immigration courts may be where this experiment in court capture is most visible today. The question before us is how far we will allow it to spread considering that our democracy is truly at risk.
References
MS NOW. (2026, July 19). “Capturing the courts”: Chilling new UN report shows U.S. “more vulnerable” to authoritarianism [Video], MSN Now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDxDSe0A4Gs
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2026, July 16). USA: UN experts condemn arbitrary terminations of more than 100 immigration judges. https://independence-judges-lawyers.org/
Rodriguez, O. R. (2026, May 24). San Francisco immigration court shuts down after purge of judges, leaving asylum cases in chaos, Associated Press. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-05-24/san-francisco-immigration-court-has-shut-asylum-cases-in-chaos
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (2026). Immigration. https://tracreports.org/immigration/
Ward, J. (2026, July 16). UN experts concerned by Trump’s removal of immigration judges. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/un-experts-concerned-by-trumps-removal-immigration-judges-2026-07-16/
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