Six of seven judges fired: what is happening to US immigration courts

Status as of September 8, 2026. The Sacramento immigration court now has three judges, down from seven in September 2025. The San Francisco immigration court, which lost more judges than any other in the country, has been dissolved as a separate court: hearings at its remaining location continue under the administrative control of the Concord immigration court. According to TRAC, immigration judges denied asylum in 94.1% of cases decided in June 2026. The legal question of whether these judges can be removed at will is still open: the case is before the Federal Circuit.

Over one year the Sacramento immigration court shrank by more than half, and this is not an isolated episode: by February 2026 the corps of permanent immigration judges was about a quarter smaller than a year earlier, asylum denial rates have reached record levels, and the power to remove these judges without cause is now being tested in court. What follows is what happened in Sacramento, what it says about the system as a whole, and what is changing for someone whose case is heard in immigration court.

What happened at the Sacramento immigration court

According to The Sacramento Bee, the Sacramento court now has three judges, down from seven in September 2025, with all six firings occurring in the past year. The paper cites an NPR analysis finding this to be one of the largest percentage declines among immigration courts nationwide.

The first three — Alison Daw, Loreto Geisse and Print Maggard — were fired in September 2025. Another judge of that court, Denise Hunter, appointed to the Sacramento bench in 2022, was fired in December 2025, as KQED reported.

Two judges were added in return: Joseph Weiner was transferred from the West Los Angeles immigration court, and Bayleigh Pettigrew was appointed in May 2026 as part of the largest class of new judges in the agency's history.

Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers — the body with which the National Association of Immigration Judges is affiliated — described the situation in Sacramento as extreme.

What the fired judges have in common

The Bee points to a common feature across all six: their asylum grant rates were higher, and their denial rates lower, than average. The paper and the experts it interviewed treat that record as one possible factor in the firings.

Independent data supports the pattern. In TRAC's individual judge reports for the Sacramento court, the asylum denial rate is 15.9% for Alison Daw, 15.6% for David Neumeister and 16.2% for Denise Hunter. By comparison, judges at that same court denied 25.8% of cases over a comparable period, and immigration judges nationwide denied 58.9%.

Blake Nordahl, director of the immigration clinic at University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, told the Bee that the asylum approval rate appears to be one factor. That does not establish causation on its own.

The Bee also records other patterns among those removed nationwide: women, appointees of the previous administration, judges with backgrounds representing immigrants, and people with Hispanic-sounding last names.

Career judges were removed too

The pattern cannot be explained as an ordinary turnover of political appointees. Maggard's dismissal drew particular attention because of his career: he served for a year as chief immigration judge under the Obama administration and as deputy chief immigration judge during Trump's first term. Geisse was appointed an immigration judge in June 2004, served on the Sacramento court, and before her appointment was a trial attorney at the Department of Justice.

Why an immigration judge can be fired

Here lies a feature of the American system that surprises even people familiar with ordinary federal courts. An immigration court, despite the word "court" in its name, is not part of the independent judicial branch. Immigration courts are the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), a component of the Department of Justice under the Attorney General. As the Bee puts it, these judges decide whether a person is deported or granted a form of relief while working for the DOJ, and they can be fired with little notice or without reason.

The legal footing for that arrangement is recent. On March 20, 2026, the Merit Systems Protection Board, in the consolidated case Jackler and Jaroch v. Department of Justice, 2026 MSPB 3, held that two assistant chief immigration judges are inferior officers under the Constitution whom the agency head may remove at will, and that the for-cause removal protections of the Civil Service Reform Act cannot constitutionally be applied to them. In reaching that conclusion the Board assessed the powers of an immigration judge as such: these judges conduct proceedings on inadmissibility and deportability, administer oaths, receive evidence, question witnesses, issue subpoenas and decide whether a person is removable — powers the Board found comparable to those of SEC administrative law judges and Tax Court special trial judges, held to be inferior officers in Lucia v. SEC.

This was a sharp break from prior practice, under which immigration judges were treated as employees entitled to procedural protections. The two removed assistant chief immigration judges appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which took the unusual step of agreeing to hear the case en banc from the outset. A group of senators filed a brief warning that the reasoning would extend at-will removal across broad swaths of the federal civil service.

San Francisco: from firings to the closure of a court

The neighboring example went further than Sacramento. According to NPR, the San Francisco immigration court lost 16 judges in 2025 — more than any other court in the country — and at least 12 of them were fired. According to current and former judges interviewed by NPR, judges there were required in early 2025 to hear four cases a day, roughly double the usual load, and were steered toward granting asylum more sparingly.

The court was then closed. The Bee links the two directly: after firing the majority of San Francisco's judges, the DOJ closed the immigration court. The shutdown came in two steps: hearings first stopped at the 100 Montgomery Street location, and then the San Francisco immigration court was dissolved as a separate court, with the remaining Sansome Street location placed under the administrative control of the Concord immigration court. Roughly 120,000 cases were transferred to Concord, which already had 60,000 of its own. An EOIR spokesperson said the move would be more cost-effective.

What happened to the immigration judge corps nationwide

The scale is visible in NPR's figures: on February 4, 2025 — the day before the first immigration judge firing of Trump's second term — the corps of permanent judges numbered 726, made up of 683 immigration judges and 43 assistant chief immigration judges across 75 courts. By late February 2026, 520 permanent judges and 33 assistant chiefs remained, even after accounting for all new hires.

The losses were not spread evenly. Fourteen smaller courts operate with two permanent judges or fewer, and five with one. Of the 17 new permanent judges onboarded at that point, only one was assigned to a court that had lost the majority of its bench.

Who is being hired instead

An unprecedented hiring drive is running alongside the removals. On May 20, 2026, in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice, 77 permanent and 5 temporary immigration judges took the oath of office — the largest class in EOIR's history; the corps grew to nearly 700, and the agency hired 153 permanent judges in a single fiscal year, also a record.

The public recruitment campaign ran under the banner of becoming a "deportation judge." Some of the temporary judges are military lawyers assigned in coordination with the Pentagon. NPR also reports the reverse case: Christopher Day, a judge from among the military lawyers whose rates of granting asylum and relief from immediate deportation were higher than those of his counterparts in the same group, was removed from his post.

How asylum outcomes have changed

The starkest figure is the national one. In TRAC's report of August 31, 2026, the asylum grant rate in June 2026 fell to 5.5% and the denial rate rose to 94.1%; another 0.4% were denied asylum but granted another form of relief. That month 771 people were granted asylum — less than a quarter of the number three years earlier.

The decline did not begin in 2025: TRAC notes that grant rates exceeded 50% early in the Biden term and had fallen to 32% by its end. In the year and a half since, the rate dropped from 32% to 5.5%.

Both sides of the staffing ledger matter. The same 279 departures were accompanied by 192 permanent and 53 temporary judges joining, so 743 judges decided asylum cases in FY2026. What is happening cannot be described only as a contraction of the bench: as the previous corps leaves en masse, a new one is being assembled at speed. Of those 743 judges, only 322 — 43% — were serving before the current administration took office.

Turnover does not explain everything, either. TRAC separately examined 130 judges who decided asylum cases continuously from FY2021 through FY2026: three-quarters of them denied at a higher rate in FY2026 than their own prior average. The behavior of those who stayed changed as well.

The rules of adjudication are changing too, not only the people

The restructuring runs along a procedural line as well. On September 4, 2026, The Guardian reported on a mandatory training held for hundreds of immigration judges, titled "Motions to Continue: Efficiently Advancing Cases to Completion," led by Board of Immigration Appeals judge Keith Hunsucker. Its thrust was to tightly restrict continuances in favor of faster adjudication, including where a person is awaiting a USCIS decision on a parallel application or is still looking for a lawyer. According to the report, the presentation argued that where a party lacks diligence and sleeps on their rights, a continuance is unwarranted.

This matters: the outcome of an immigration case is not determined solely by who sits on the bench. It is shaped by precedent decisions of the Attorney General and the Board of Immigration Appeals, docket-management rules, the availability of a continuance, access to counsel, and time to gather evidence.

The Department of Justice's position

The department describes events differently. Responding to NPR's questions about the loss of personnel, a DOJ spokesperson said that after four years in which the previous administration forced immigration courts to implement a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens, this department is restoring integrity to the immigration system by following the law, completing cases in a timely manner and hiring the most talented legal professionals. The same argument was made in a comment to the Bee.

The administration cites its own productivity figures: as of May 2026, EOIR had completed more than 1.08 million cases since January 20, 2025, and reduced its pending caseload by more than 447,000 — from roughly 4 million to under 3.53 million, which the department called the sharpest decrease in its history. By September 2026 The Guardian put the national backlog at roughly 3.2 million cases.

The dispute, then, is not about whether the system became faster — it did. It is about the cost of that speed and whether judicial independence in an individual case survives this model. Jeremiah Johnson, who served as an immigration judge in San Francisco until he was fired last year, describes what is happening as the administration wanting to dismantle the immigration court system, and as an attack on independence.

What this means for someone with a case in immigration court

• The bench hearing a case may have turned over completely, and hearings may be continued and rescheduled; notices of new dates come from the court, and those notices govern appearance.

• When courts close or merge, cases are transferred elsewhere, as happened with the San Francisco cases moved to Concord.

• The national asylum denial rate as of June 2026 was 94.1%; that is context, not a prediction for any individual case.

• Judges are being pressed to take a stricter approach to continuances, including where a person is awaiting a USCIS decision on a parallel application; the legal standard applied to any particular motion, however, is set by governing law and the circumstances of the case, not by a training session.

• The legal status of the removals is not settled: whether the agency may remove immigration judges at will is before the Federal Circuit sitting en banc.

Each fact admits of more than one explanation on its own. A shrinking bench can be explained by reorganization, rising case completions by a backlog priority, new hiring by staffing needs. Together they amount to a systemic restructuring in which the correlation between a judge's record and that judge's removal remains a correlation: no public document sets out a high grant rate as grounds for dismissal.

Frequently asked questions

How many judges are left at the Sacramento immigration court?

Three, down from seven in September 2025. All six firings occurred over the past year, and two judges were assigned in return: Joseph Weiner, transferred from the West Los Angeles immigration court, and Bayleigh Pettigrew, appointed in May 2026.

Why can an immigration judge be fired without cause?

Immigration courts are not part of the independent judicial branch: they are the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a component of the Department of Justice. On March 20, 2026, the Merit Systems Protection Board held in Jackler and Jaroch v. Department of Justice, 2026 MSPB 3, that two assistant chief immigration judges are inferior officers — assessing the powers of an immigration judge as such — and concluded that the agency head may remove them at will. The decision was appealed to the Federal Circuit, which is hearing the case en banc.

What is the current asylum denial rate?

In TRAC's report of August 31, 2026, immigration judges denied asylum in 94.1% of cases decided in June 2026 and granted it in 5.5%, while another 0.4% were denied asylum but granted another form of relief. That month 771 people were granted asylum.

What happened to the San Francisco immigration court?

In 2025 it lost 16 judges — more than any other court in the country — and at least 12 of them were fired. The Department of Justice then dissolved it as a separate court: hearings at 100 Montgomery Street stopped, the remaining Sansome Street location was placed under the administrative control of the Concord immigration court, and roughly 120,000 cases were transferred there, where 60,000 cases were already pending.

How many immigration judges has the system lost overall?

According to NPR, the corps of permanent judges numbered 726 across 75 courts on February 4, 2025, and by late February 2026 stood at 520 judges and 33 assistant chief immigration judges, after new hires. According to TRAC, 279 judges were fired or resigned in FY2025–FY2026, about 38% of the bench at the end of FY2024, while 192 permanent and 53 temporary judges joined.

What does the Department of Justice say about this?

The department says that after four years in which the previous administration forced immigration courts to implement a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens, it is restoring integrity to the system by following the law, completing cases in a timely manner and hiring the most talented legal professionals. As of May 2026, the department reported more than 1.08 million cases completed since January 20, 2025, and a pending caseload cut from roughly 4 million to under 3.53 million.

Official sources

This material is informational and is not legal advice. Information is current as of September 8, 2026; court staffing, statistics and the legal status of the removals may change. Information about an individual case should be verified against notices from the court and official sources, and decisions made with a licensed attorney.