Donald Trump is firing immigration judges who grant asylum. Immigration courts granted asylum to 2,753 people in March 2025. One year later, in March 2026, the number was 700. That is a seventy-five percent collapse. Two thousand asylum-seekers who would have been granted protection one year ago are being denied it now. Some of them will die in the countries they fled. Nina Fróes, an immigration judge at the Chelmsford Immigration Court in Massachusetts, was presiding over an asylum case on April 10, 2025, when an email appeared on her screen with the subject line “NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION.” She suspended the hearing, walked out, and emptied her office. Sarah Cade, a former immigration judge in Boston, resigned in May 2025 after receiving what she described as directions to ignore precedent and to grant stipulated removal requests the moment they arrived. George Pappas, another Chelmsford judge, was fired in July and filed a wrongful termination lawsuit this month alleging the government dismissed him in part because of his past association with immigrant rights organizations. The plain English word for what the Trump administration is doing to the immigration court system is purge, and the country is owed the courage to use the word.

The judges who are speaking describe a system under pressure from headquarters to expedite deportations and deny asylum. Cade said her supervisor at the Boston Immigration Court told judges to grant stipulated removal requests immediately, recalling the instruction: “Headquarters has said the moment you get that order or that request … You get it out.” She said the changes happened so quickly that she could not go home confident the work was fair. Fróes said she did not believe leadership directly ordered judges to raise asylum denials, but said the overall objectives were clear and that the system pressured judges on case handling. She described Chelmsford as going from nineteen judges to five while caseloads stayed the same, and said individual judges were handling dockets of up to six thousand cases. The Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest immigration court in the country, issued ninety-one precedent-setting decisions in four years under the Biden administration and one hundred eighteen in just fifteen months under Trump. Fróes said the flood of narrowing decisions amounted to micromanaging every possible ruling an immigration judge might make.

The mechanism the administration is using is termination of judges who do not follow administration goals, combined with directives that judges describe as undermining due process. Cade said she was told to ignore precedent in cases involving special immigrant juveniles. Fróes said she received directives to deny bond hearings even after federal judges ordered them through habeas filings, and said she followed the directive while reading it into the record so it would appear in the federal court docket. Pappas, in his lawsuit filed May 14 in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, alleges the government wrongfully terminated him in part because of his prior association with immigrant rights organizations before he became a judge, and alleges patterns of wrongful termination tied to age, national origin, gender, race, and political affiliation. The terminations are not accidents. They are policy.

“I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” Jesus said. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” The asylum-seeker standing before the immigration judge in Chelmsford or Boston is the body of Christ. The judge who is ordered to deny the asylum claim on direction from headquarters without regard to the facts of the case is being ordered to deny Christ. The administration that fires the judge who refuses the order is firing the judge for welcoming Christ. Matthew 25 is not metaphor. It is judgment. The goats are the ones who did not welcome the stranger, and the sentence is eternal. The Trump administration is building a deportation machine that operates at the level of the bench, and the machine is sending people to their deaths in the countries they fled while the judges who would have granted them asylum are being walked out of the courthouse mid-hearing.

The Torah commands the love of the ger — the resident alien, the stranger in the land — in more passages than any other commandment. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The asylum-seeker is the ger. The judge who hears the asylum claim is the last line between the commandment and its violation. When the Trump administration fires the judge for granting asylum, it is removing the last person standing between the stranger and the wrong the Torah names. The firing is not administrative. It is the systematic removal of the people who would have obeyed the commandment.

Pope Francis stood on the island of Lampedusa in July 2013 and named what the world had become: a globalization of indifference in which we have grown used to the suffering of migrants because their deaths no longer move us. Seven years later Fratelli Tutti commanded Catholics in public office to welcome, protect, promote, and integrate the stranger, and the encyclical is binding. The immigration judge is the last person in the system with the authority to say no to the deportation. When the judge grants asylum, the asylum-seeker is allowed to stay. When the Trump administration fires the judge for granting asylum, Trump removes the last check on his own cruelty. The administration is not asking judges to apply the law faithfully. It is asking them to expedite removals, and when they refuse, it is terminating them.

Those of us who built the bipartisan deportation consensus across thirty years—who accepted the framing that immigration was a policy question and abortion was the moral question, who voted for border security appropriations under both parties, who remained silent while the Obama administration deported more than two million people and while the Biden administration kept Title 42 in place for two years—helped build the machine the Trump administration is now operating at maximum capacity. The sin was bipartisan. The present purge does not erase that complicity, and the complicity does not soften what Trump is doing now. No prior administration terminated immigration judges at this scale for this reason. The conduct is new. The conduct is evil.

An immigration court system that honored human dignity would hire more judges, not fire the judges who grant asylum. It would give judges the time to hear each case fully. It would allow judges to grant continuances when asylum-seekers need time to gather evidence. It would respect precedent rather than flooding the system with narrowing Board decisions designed to eliminate avenues to relief. It would recognize that the asylum-seeker is a person, that the judge is a person, and that due process is not an obstacle to enforcement but the floor beneath which the system becomes a machine for expelling human beings without regard to whether they will be killed when they are returned. The Trump administration is dismantling that floor. The seventy-five percent collapse in asylum grants in one year is not an accident. It is the result of firing judges who grant asylum and pressuring the judges who remain to deny.

Mr. President, you can stop the terminations; you can rescind the directives. The door of return is open. The Christ you claim is the Christ who said the stranger is his own body, and the judges you are firing are the ones who recognized him. The asylum-seekers are still standing in the courtrooms; the judges who remain are still hearing cases under your pressure. Stop.