The Brief

For three immigration judges, the day took a similar turn.

Kyra Lilien, who was hired in 2023, was presiding in a courtroom in Concord, Calif., in July when she paused the hearing of an immigrant seeking asylum to read an email.

"I told them that we were not going to have a hearing because I had just been fired," Lilien said. Present in the court was a court interpreter and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. "They asked me if I was joking."

Anam Petit, who was hired as an immigration judge in 2023 after a career in immigrant defense, was sitting on the bench in her courtroom in Virginia's Annandale Immigration Court in September. It was her two-year anniversary in the position and she was between hearings when she got the email.

"My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. My mind was racing. And I gave the decision and I dismissed everyone without mentioning anything," Petit said. One decision that day was to deny asylum, and the other was a partial denial, each for a different member of one immigrant family, she recalled.

Tania Nemer was hired as a judge at the Cleveland immigration court in 2023. She had about 30 or 40 immigrants, a DHS attorney and staff in her court one morning in February. She had just finished explaining rights and responsibilities to the group when her door opened and her manager asked her to come with him. She was later escorted out of the building.

"I didn't know at all why I was being fired at the time. And I kept asking; no one had a reason," Nemer said.

Nemer was one of the first immigration judges fired by the Trump administration after a slew of dismissals of leaders at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the branch of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. Later that month, the administration fired 12 judges — an entire incoming class that had just been trained and was about to take the bench.

Those dismissals come as the administration has ramped up mass deportations of those without legal status, and sometimes pointed to judges as obstacles in that effort.

The pattern has been consistent. Every few months this year, a new class of judges gets termination notices in the middle of the day, often while they are in the middle of immigration court proceedings. The notices often target those who have reached the end of their two-year probationary period, a trial period for federal workers before they are "converted" to permanent employees. It was previously common for these civil servants to be converted to permanent employees of the DOJ.

"None of us have been given an explanation, we are in the dark, but we've been trying to ascertain patterns," Lilien said, the former judge in northern California. She wonders if her past experience representing immigrants got her fired, even though she also worked at DHS as an asylum officer.

Her hunch has some correlation with the data. NPR has independently identified 70 immigration judges who received termination notices from the Trump administration between February and October. The number of judges who received termination letters matches the tally kept by the immigration judges' union. It also accords with NPR's past coverage of the terminations.

The count does not include assistant chief immigration judges (ACIJ), who are courthouse supervisors and also have their own dockets. The union has counted 11 ACIJs terminated.

An analysis of each of the 70 immigration judges' professional backgrounds found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants, and no prior work history at DHS, made up about 44% of the firings — more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.

NPR also analyzed the classes of judges onboarded between February 2023 and November 2024, who would have neared the ends of their probationary periods this year or are still in the probationary period. Of those judges, those who had prior DHS experience, including working as asylum officers and as attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, made up the largest share still on the bench.

NPR reached out to the DOJ, EOIR and the White House for a comment on the firings and NPR's findings. The press staff at EOIR is furloughed due to the ongoing federal government shutdown, according to automatic email replies, though immigration courts are still operational. The White House referred questions to the DOJ.

"DOJ doesn't 'target' or 'prioritize' immigration judges for any personnel decision one way or the other based on prior experience," a DOJ spokesperson told NPR in a statement. "DOJ continually evaluates all immigration judges, regardless of background, on factors such as conduct, impartiality/bias, adherence to the law, productivity/performance, and professionalism."

The spokesperson added that, "pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, IJs (Immigration Judges) are inferior officers who are appointed and removed by the Attorney General."

The spokesperson disputed the 70 count, saying the agency has terminated fewer than 55 judges, but was unable to provide more details. The agency's number is inconsistent with other news reports, NPR's prior reporting and the union. NPR reached out to reconcile the numbers. The DOJ spokesperson said staff have been furloughed and the Justice Department is not able to confirm their data.

Folders containing documents related to immigration cases are piled on a table in the office of Stephen Born, Esq. on July 31, 2025 in Everett, Mass.

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Employees search for reasons

Fired judges have been grasping at straws to understand why they were fired — some have filed Freedom of Information Act requests. Others have turned to wrongful termination complaints and lawsuits. Some worry they were targeted on the basis of protected classes, such as gender or race.

"I fit the bill," said Nemer, who had represented immigrants prior to becoming an immigration judge. Nemer listed off characteristics cited in a lawsuit she has filed, arguing she was fired based on various protected classes.

"It's hard to know without having the explanations of why judges were fired," said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on immigration policy. "But the way the Trump administration is approaching immigration courts reflects a really high prioritization of immigration enforcement and [the administration] has really made deportations this whole-of-government effort."

Immigration judges approve or deny a final order of deportation. Court officials have placed pressure on judges to move through their dockets faster, including by reviewing asylum cases without hearings.

Each fired judge can leave behind thousands of cases, according to several interviews with fired judges throughout the year. Each case is an immigrant who has likely already waited years for their day in court, to make the case for why they should be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Many of these cases have now been reassigned to other judges, at the bottom of their already years-long dockets. Immigrants whose cases were already in progress, or set to be reviewed soon, now have new dates as far out as 2029.

There were 700 immigration judges at the start of the year. Over the past 10 months, EOIR has lost more than 125 judges to firings and voluntary resignations. Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress approved a spending bill that allocated over $3 billion to the Justice Department for immigration-related activities, including the hiring of more immigration judges, to address the backlog of millions of cases at immigration court.

Federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building in June 2025 in New York City.

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Fear of retribution

Probationary judges aren't the only ones who have been fired under the Trump administration. NPR tracked 12 fired judges who started prior to 2023. This means they were fired after their two-year probationary period.

Some have been left wondering if their firings were retribution for the decisions they made on the bench.

Shira Levine had worked for EOIR since 2021 before being fired in September. She was presiding over a hearing for an immigrant who had already waited more than five years for a day in court when she got the email.

"People looked surprised, but no one looked shocked," Levine said. "That's because, unfortunately, this by that point had become a pattern." She said she didn't expect to be removed since she had passed her two-year mark. She was never given a reason.

Levine, like several others, received a standard email that they were being terminated pursuant to Article 2 of the Constitution, which gives the executive the power to dismiss federal employees.

Levine thought she might have been dismissed because of her response to some recent Trump administration policies.

During the summer months, immigration judges had already had to contend with an outsized enforcement presence in normally empty courtroom hallways. ICE attorneys — who argue on behalf of a government that an immigrant should be deported — started more regularly filing "motions to dismiss" cases. When a judge granted such a motion, migrants would be detained before leaving the building.

Levine said such motions should be granted if there is a change in the individual migrant's case, not a change in immigration policy.

"I was not told it was because of my decision to deny the motion to dismiss that I was fired," Levine said. "But I handed down a decision that contravened what they apparently wanted the judges to do."

Others, like Ila Deiss or Emmett Soper, who had been immigration judges since 2017 and 2016, served as career officials at the DOJ for nearly two decades.

Soper had been with EOIR since graduating law school in a variety of other roles. He doesn't know if his firing had anything to do with past policy work under the Biden administration's EOIR director or his handling of cases as a judge.

As the Trump administration brings in new people to the bench, he has concerns over the loss of experienced judges.

"You have to be able to manage your courtroom and you have to make very difficult, sometimes life-or-death decisions, with the person whose life is going to be affected and the family members sometimes right in front of you," Soper said.

"It's not something that you pick up right away. And with all of these judges — many of whom are very experienced — being fired, the agency is losing something that will take a long time to get back, if they ever can."

People wait outside an immigration court and ICE field office on Oct. 24, 2025, in San Francisco.

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Prior political interference

The agency is prioritizing other judges to hire.

The Trump administration has moved to bring back immigration judges it sees as unfairly fired by the Biden administration. The Justice Department, in a February memo, said that it cannot be confident the Biden administration was ethical and lawful in how it dismissed immigration judges and other adjudicators.

A handful of judges in 2022 had not been converted to permanent employment, sparking GOP outrage over what lawmakers saw as political interference.

Earlier this year, Matthew O'Brien and David White, two of those judges let go under President Joe Biden, were reinstated at immigration courts in Virginia. O'Brien was brought back to a managerial position, as NPR previously reported — though he is no longer with EOIR. White is a judge at the Falls Church court.

The Justice Department appointed a new director of EOIR, Daren Margolin, in October. Margolin has previous experience as the assistant chief immigration judge, or courthouse supervisor, throughout multiple courts in California, and a background as a military and DHS lawyer. He had been fired from a command position at a Marine base for negligently firing a gun and had left EOIR in 2024 before returning to lead the agency.

Then the DOJ last month announced its first class of 2025, which included 25 temporary judges who are military lawyers.

"EOIR is restoring its integrity as a preeminent administrative adjudicatory agency," the announcement states. "These new immigration judges are joining an immigration judge corps that is committed to upholding the rule of law."

The incoming class of permanent judges comprises mostly those with a background in federal government work, including EOIR itself and the Department of Homeland Security. Their previous jobs included training Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents, serving as asylum officers and working for ICE's legal arm.

One judge was originally going to take the bench at the start of the year, but was among the initial class of judges fired before they could start. None of the incoming judges appear to have previously worked in the field of immigrant defense based on EOIR's announcement.

Immigration judges' backgrounds vary over time

In recent years, immigration judges' backgrounds have varied. Many came to the position after several years working for ICE's legal branch. Others became judges after working for immigrant defense nonprofits or in private practice. Some have no immigration law experience, which was previously a requirement for temporary judges but not for permanent ones.

When immigration courts were first established, it was more common for immigration judges to have an enforcement background, said Dana Leigh Marks, a former immigration judge and immigration attorney who litigated landmark immigration cases before the Supreme Court.

Marks joined the court in 1987, when courts were still under the former Immigration and Naturalization Service branch of the DOJ.

"Frankly, I was one of the individuals who was hired to show that it wasn't just a career path of prosecution that led you to be eligible to be an immigration judge," Marks said.

That push for professional diversification carried through the Biden administration. That administration selected as immigration judges not just immigration attorneys, but also criminal defense attorneys, other administrative judges across the federal government, and those with military experience, as it sought to diversify the perspectives of those interpreting the complicated set of immigration laws.

Marks said that the president and his cabinet will continue to affect personnel decisions as long as these courts stay in the executive branch.

"It's common sense that the boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge," Marks said, recalling the fight to keep immigration courts separate from immigration enforcement when DHS was created in 2002. Enforcement, which is primarily ICE, was separated from the DOJ.

—NPR's Rahul Mukherjee contributed to data analysis for this story.
Copyright 2025 NPR

Alysa Liu’s comeback at this year’s Olympics — and her stunning gold medal win — has rocked the world of figure skating, making headlines due to her joy while performing and her commitment to mental health on and off the ice.

Though she primarily trained in Oakland, Liu, who’s also a psychology student at the UCLA, has used a facility in Lakewood as one of her home bases away from home. The 20-year-old started training there as she came back from retirement and prepared to take the gold medal (not that that was necessarily her goal, to hear her tell it).

It’s part of a long history for the Rinks-Lakewood ICE, which has also hosted many champions and Olympians over the years, including Mariah Bell, Nathan Chen, Ashley Wagner and Adam Rippon, and counts prominent figure skaters among their staff.

“ We're not unfamiliar with Olympic ties,” Overett said, though he also clarified, “that does not in any way diminish the fun and the coolness [of Liu’s win].”

Lakewood ICE’s place in this year’s Olympics

Working with her coaches remotely, Liu started to drill down on perfecting her skating while also attending classes at UCLA. And though she moved on to her home base at Oakland Ice Center as the Olympic training started to ramp up, the staff who worked with her at Lakewood ICE kept cheering her on.

Braden Overett, the skating manager at Lakewood ICE, said that he loves highlighting the Olympic connections at the rink, which may not be obvious to everyone who skates there.

“It's always fun just to connect the dots, right?” Overett said. “It's like going to a restaurant and then you find out later it's your favorite actor's restaurant.”

Ashleigh Ellis runs the nonprofit Unity Ice Academy, which focuses on increasing access to figure skating for kids of all backgrounds at Lakewood ICE.

“ That's just very much how the skating world is. It's very small, you never know who you're going to run into at any time,” Ellis said. “ Could you imagine just being on the ice with a national champion and Olympic skater of any sort? It's just so inspiring for the kids to see that and be within the vicinity of that.”

And Liu wasn’t the only 2026 Olympic figure skater who's used the facility. Li Yu-Hsiang, the Taiwanese national champion who represented Chinese Taipei in Milan this year, also trains in Lakewood.

The rink’s coaches

The small world of skating means that even novice skaters can take classes from world-class skaters: 1976 Olympic silver medalist Dianne de Leeuw teaches there, as do national medalists (and future Olympic contenders) Starr Andrews and Josephine Lee.

 ”To get to see them and to get to share ice with them just has a layer of magic that you can't replace and you can't get anywhere else,” Overett said. “ You see the turnover of generations, and it brings in a huge element of history.”

What Liu’s win means for the skating world

Ellis is already using Liu’s example to stress the importance of mental health to the kids and families she works with, like one parent who was worrying about her child taking two weeks off skating due to pneumonia.

“I was like, ‘Alysa Liu took two plus years off and she just won the Olympic gold. Do not worry about it this two weeks,’” she said.

A bipartisan bill aimed at protecting pets during disasters has been introduced in Congress, with a Southern California representative citing the rescue efforts of local organizations during last year’s L.A.-area fires.

The PETSAFE Act of 2026 — which stands for Providing Essential Temporary Shelter Assistance For Emergencies — would expand the use of emergency management funds so local governments can plan for evacuations that move animals to safety, as well as provide veterinary care and rescue equipment during disasters.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) helped introduce the bill earlier this month with several House of Representatives colleagues, including Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida and Democrat Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada.

Chu, who represents Pasadena and Altadena in the 28th Congressional District, said when the Eaton Fire tore through her district, many families delayed evacuations because they couldn’t bear to leave their pets behind.

She told LAist she’ll never forget seeing the cats, dogs and other animals with burned feet and singed fur who were being cared for by Pasadena Humane in the aftermath.

“But to think, if there is even one more thing we could do to keep our precious pets safe, wouldn't we want to do that?” Chu said. “So this PETSAFE Act could go a long way towards making sure that our loved pets can indeed survive a disaster.”

About the bill

Pasadena Humane teams looked for pets and wildlife in Eaton burn zones, dropping off food and water along the way.

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The PETSAFE Act now has been referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The bill would amend the Emergency Management Performance Grant program to increase the federal cost share for certain animal-related preparedness activities from 50% to 90%.

Supporters say this would lower barriers and make it more affordable for communities to roll out emergency protection plans for people and pets.

Specifically, the PETSAFE Act would allow state, local and tribal governments to use grant money awarded by FEMA toward pet supplies, crates, veterinary equipment, emergency generators and training, among others.

Pet owners whose homes are under disaster-related evacuation orders can be faced with an “impossible choice” — leaving their pets behind or staying home with them, which risks the owner’s own safety and complicates rescue efforts for first responders, according to Chu’s office.

The bill aims to address the challenges pet owners and first responders face without authorizing new federal spending, according to Mast’s office.

How we got here 

Chu said local shelters, including Pasadena Humane, and communities across California stepped up to care for all kinds of animals during the Eaton Fire, which ignited in January 2025.

Pasadena Humane helped more than 1,500 pets and wildlife during the fire and in the aftermath by providing shelter, medical care and emergency resources.

A horse was housed in the organization’s garage when Chris Ramon, Pasadena Humane’s president and CEO, ran into its owner walking down Raymond Avenue for miles.

“Part of me likes to think that this won’t happen again,” Ramon told LAist last month. “But the realist in me realizes … disaster preparedness is something that just is an ongoing conversation for us at Pasadena Humane.”

Chu also cited the work of the ASPCA, which helped more than 530 animals during the Eaton Fire, including goats, parakeets, pigs and a gecko, according to the organization.

She said local organizations did “tremendous” work and “lovingly cared for” the rush of animals affected by the fire.

“But what we would want to do is to make sure that there is an even better system for animal evacuation and ways to ensure that pets could be safe,” Chu said, adding that would relieve the burden on places like Pasadena Humane.

Other laws aiming to protect pets

This is not the first time last year’s fires have led to new legislation focused on protecting pets during emergencies.

A new state law known as the FOUND Act, which went into effect Jan. 1, was inspired by Oreo the Pomeranian, who reunited with its Pacific Palisades owner in an emotional, viral video during the Palisades Fire.

The law requires cities and counties to include procedures for rescuing pets during mandatory evacuations in their next emergency plans, which need to be updated every five years to qualify for FEMA assistance.