Trump goes bigly to keep us safe

The Trump administration is overhauling the immigration court system and cranking up the deportation machine to levels that actually get results.

In its latest flex, the Department of Justice just hired 82 immigration judges, the most in a single year, the agency announced Thursday. The United States now has nearly 700 immigration judges on the bench.

“The Trump administration is committed to reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule [of] law in our nation’s immigration system,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Today, we are onboarding the largest immigration judge class in agency history.”

“This could only happen thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership and commitment to securing our borders. I also applaud EOIR’s [Executive Office of Immigration Review] leadership team for helping facilitate these hiring efforts and recruiting highly qualified and talented personnel in record time.”

The new class includes 77 permanent judges and 5 temporary ones.

When President Donald Trump came back to the White House and launched his mass deportation operation, officials started cleaning house by firing immigration judges who had been rubber-stamping asylum claims at suspiciously high rates.

Since then, more than 100 of those judges—who granted asylum in 46 percent of cases, according to The New York Times—have been shown the door.

Immigration judges have now knocked out more than one million cases since Trump’s second inauguration, slashing the backlog by more than 447,000 cases. The Justice Department reports roughly 3.53 million pending cases right now, down from about four million.

This is the sharpest drop in the court’s history.

The latest hiring surge is all part of fixing the absolute mess the Biden administration’s open-border disaster left behind, with those years-long backlogs that turned the system into a joke. Sirce Owen, then acting director of EOIR, dropped a memo back in April 2025 telling judges to start tossing out asylum claims faster and without the usual song and dance hearing. In June 2025, he followed up with another memo warning of “disciplinary action” for any judge showing “bias” toward illegal immigrants.

“Judges who would prefer to be policy advocates favoring either aliens or DHS should consider transitioning to alternate career paths,” Owen wrote in the memo.

In a recent chat with the Washington Examiner, White House border czar Tom Homan bragged on the Trump team’s deportation numbers.

“Total of 800,000 [have been removed] out of the country,” Homan said. “If you take 60% of that, criminals, hundreds of thousands of public safety threats, have been removed from this country. Name another president who’s done that.”

Homan admitted things have slowed a bit lately, but made it clear the pause is temporary.“There’s a lot of argument within the world that, ‘Are we keeping our promise?’” Homan said. “Numbers are slightly down, but there’s a plan. Get them back up and even higher.”

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