The Trump administration is undertaking a sweeping expansion of the federal immigration court system in a bid to accelerate deportations and dismantle the massive case backlog that exploded during the Biden-era border surge.
According to Sean Hannity, the Department of Justice announced that it has hired 82 new immigration judges, the largest single-year hiring class in the agencys history, bringing the nationwide total to nearly 700 judges. The move marks one of the most aggressive efforts yet by President Donald Trumps team to restore order to an immigration system conservatives say was overwhelmed and effectively paralyzed by years of lax enforcement and open-border policies.
The Trump administration is committed to reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule [of] law in our nations immigration system, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. Today, we are onboarding the largest immigration judge class in agency history, Blanche added, crediting President Donald Trumps decisive leadership and commitment to securing our borders.
The incoming class consists of 77 permanent immigration judges and five temporary judges assigned through the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department division that oversees the immigration courts. This hiring surge is part of a broader restructuring of the immigration adjudication system following Trumps return to office and the launch of his renewed mass deportation initiative.
As part of that overhaul, administration officials previously removed more than 100 immigration judges who had granted asylum in roughly 46% of cases, according to reporting cited from The New York Times. The clear objective has been to replace a bench perceived as overly sympathetic to illegal immigrants with one more firmly grounded in statutory law and national security concerns.
Simultaneously, the administration has pressed immigration judges to handle asylum claims more swiftly and with greater scrutiny. In April 2025, then-acting EOIR Director Sirce Owen issued guidance encouraging immigration judges to dismiss certain asylum claims more rapidly and, in some instances, without full hearings when the claims are clearly deficient.
A separate memo issued in June 2025 warned judges against what the administration described as bias in favor of illegal immigrants. Judges who would prefer to be policy advocates favoring either aliens or DHS should consider transitioning to alternate career paths, Owen wrote, underscoring the administrations insistence that judges apply the law rather than pursue ideological agendas.
The Justice Department maintains that this tougher, more disciplined approach is already delivering measurable results. According to DOJ figures, immigration judges have completed more than one million cases since Trumps second inauguration, reducing the pending immigration court backlog by more than 447,000 cases.
Roughly 3.53 million cases remain pending nationwide, down from approximately four million. The administration has described this as the sharpest decline in the immigration court backlog in the history of the system, a notable shift after years in which the docket only grew under prior leadership.
Trump officials argue that the expanded court system is indispensable to reversing the strain caused by the unprecedented migrant influx during the Biden administration, when overwhelmed courts often left asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in legal limbo for years. From the conservative perspective, those delays functioned as a de facto amnesty, allowing millions to remain in the country despite weak or fraudulent claims.
White House border czar Tom Homan recently defended the administrations stepped-up deportation operation in an interview with the Washington Examiner, stating that roughly 800,000 people have now been removed from the country under Trumps renewed enforcement campaign. Total of 800,000 [have been removed] out of the country, Homan said, framing the numbers as a direct response to years of permissive border policies.
If you take 60% of that, criminals, hundreds of thousands of public safety threats, have been removed from this country. Name another president whos done that. Homan acknowledged that deportation numbers have recently slowed but stressed that the decline is temporary as the administration recalibrates resources and court capacity to handle the expanded caseload.
Theres a lot of argument within the world that, Are we keeping our promise? Homan said. Numbers are slightly down, but theres a plan. Get them back up and even higher.
For an administration elected on a mandate to restore sovereignty, secure the border, and prioritize American safety, the message is unmistakable: the deportation machine is not easing off it is being rebuilt, reinforced, and prepared to operate on a scale the country has not seen in decades.
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