U.S. Immigration Courts

Trump’s second term has dramatically expanded 287(g) partnerships, turning a once‑underused program into a major vehicle for local immigration enforcement. At the same time the administration has overhauled immigration courts—firing judges, installing retired Col. Daren Margolin who has hired temporary JAG “deportation judges,” reduced the backlog by about 341,000 cases and is pushing limits on appeals while designing the system around his estimate of 25–30 million undocumented people.

Axios reports that President Trump’s Justice Department fired 55 immigration judges in 2025, saw roughly 80 more retire, and then put retired Marine Corps colonel and former immigration judge Daren Margolin in charge of the Executive Office for Immigration Review to drive a fast‑track, mass‑deportation agenda. Since Trump returned to office, the immigration‑court backlog has dropped by about 341,000 cases to 3.6 million, and Margolin says he is moving to limit appeals and expand categories of people eligible for swift removal while openly recruiting 'deportation judges' through a social‑media campaign that has drawn about 1,700 applicants. To quickly bulk up the bench, he has already hired roughly 50 temporary military JAG attorneys—personally interviewing them and then running them through 6–8 weeks of training—despite his own 2013 dismissal from a Marine command at Quantico after firing an M9 pistol into an office floor. Margolin told Axios that under Biden he felt like a 'co‑conspirator in treason' during the border surge, and now claims, without supporting evidence, that 25–30 million people are in the U.S. illegally, roughly double DHS and Pew estimates, as he designs courts to handle that potential caseload. The restructuring, largely happening out of public view, effectively turns the immigration bench into another enforcement tool in Trump’s deportation machine and raises sharp due‑process and independence concerns that are already echoing across legal circles and immigrant‑rights groups online.