Trump Admin Shuts Down San Francisco Immigration Court After Purge of Pro-Asylum Judges

The Trump administration recently shut down the San Francisco immigration court after purging judges deemed too liberal because of unusually high asylum grants.

Trump’s Executive Office of Immigration Review has removed and/or fired over 100 Immigration Judges, including resignations, for good reason.

Judges with alleged “systemic bias”, often tied to high asylum grant rates, were terminated to ensure impartiality and improve efficiency. San Francisco had notably high asylum approval rates in some cases – over 90% for certain judges – linked to high representation rates for applicants.

The AP reported:

“The Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Department of Justice branch that oversees immigration courts, announced in March that it would close the San Francisco courthouse in 2027 as a cost-saving measure and move its cases to Concord. But the end came early after nearly all the San Francisco judges left or were fired.”

The Trump administration has stated it’s merely enforcing existing immigration laws that were ignored by President Biden.

“Over the last 4 years, the prior administration invited, administered, and oversaw an unprecedented flood of illegal immigration into the United States,”  President Trump said in an Inauguration Day Executive Order: Protecting The American People Against Invasion, issued January 20, 2025.

“Millions of illegal aliens crossed our borders or were permitted to fly directly into the United States on commercial flights and allowed to settle in American communities, in violation of longstanding Federal laws.”

A related order issued the same day, Securing Our Borders, also addresses “large-scale invasion at an unprecedented level.”

“San Francisco’s immigration court, which had the third-highest number of asylum cases in the nation, was long considered one of the most favorable to people seeking asylum,” the AP reported. “From 2019 to 2024, almost 75% of petitioners received some form of relief, compared to 43% nationwide, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit data research center based at Syracuse University.”

“The San Francisco Immigration Court falls under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge,which is a component of the Executive Office for Immigration Review under the Department of Justice,” the Executive Office for Immigration Review says.

The U.S. Attorney General has the power to hire immigration judges and fire them. Immigration judges serve under the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is part of the executive branch.

Acting EOIR director Circe Owen has criticized immigration judges for their inefficiency in managing dockets, which has contributed to the backlog of cases in immigration courts, NBC Bay Area reported.

Yet some of the fired judges claimed to have “fear” with ICE agents in their building. “There’s a very strong idea that if you don’t follow the policy, you’ll lose your job,” said former Immigration Judge Kyra Lilien. “I think a lot of judges feel a lot of fear and pressure that’s unprecedented.”

Lilien, who was appointed by the Biden administration in 2023, said more than a dozen other judges from her probationary class were fired on the same day last July.

Most people who work understand that if you don’t follow the policy, you’ll lose your job. Judges are no exception.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review announced hearings are stopped at the main location effective May 1, 2026, reassigning 100,000 – 117,000 pending cases mostly to the Concord court, located in the East Bay. To restock the fired immigration judges throughout the country, the Trump administration authorized up to 600 military attorneys, Judge Advocate General or JAG Corps attorneys, to serve as temporary immigration judges.

The Trump administration appears to be correcting immigration judicial bias and cleaning up a broken system.

Be sure to read the NBC Bay Area report, and the AP report, which mostly focusing on the trauma and injustice of the judges fired.