In January, Brea C. Burgie told an Aurora courtroom that an official in Washington, D.C., had emailed her and the rest of the nation’s immigration judges.
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The judges weren’t bound, the email said, by a California court that had ruled it was illegal for the Trump administration to deny bail hearings to many immigrants sitting in America’s detention centers.
Burgie brought it up in her courtroom, she later said, because she wanted it on the record that she would follow that court order anyway. It was a Thursday. On Saturday, she received two more emails: one from her direct supervisor, telling her she needed to be counseled about her position, and the other, sent two hours later, telling her she’d been reassigned. Then she was summoned to a meeting the next week with the chief immigration judge, the official who had sent the first email.
Five months later, her phone buzzed again. She was on a tour of the Pentagon with her kids, part of a spin through D.C. to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday. When it ended, she read the boilerplate message that had been received by dozens of her colleagues in the prior 18 months.
She was fired, with immediate effect. The email provided no cause or explanation.
“I thought I was gonna get fired when I got back,” Burgie said from her home south of Denver. “I didn’t think they’d do it on vacation, but I guess nothing should surprise us from this administration.”
As it seeks to rapidly arrest and deport millions of immigrants without proper legal status, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken unprecedented steps to bend the nation’s immigration system to meet its goals. Federal officials have remade the immigration courts and exercised new, and intensely granular, control over the judges, like Burgie, who are tasked with overseeing them.
Within hours of Trump’s inauguration last year, he fired four senior officials in that system, which is an administrative court. Rank-and-file immigration judges have followed.
Burgie was the second Colorado immigration judge fired under the Trump administration in his second term, and she joins roughly 120 judges nationwide who have lost their jobs in the past 18 months, said Jeremiah Johnson, the vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. He served on a San Francisco court until he, too, was fired last fall.
In their place have come temporary judges, former lawyers for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, military personnel and attorneys with little immigration experience. One of the new judges in Aurora is Robyn Ross, who worked on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential campaign. Before that, she was a research director at his anti-vaccine organization, according to the New York Times.
The goal, Burgie and Johnson argued, has been to remove judges who may buck the administration’s efforts to rapidly deport people by doing their jobs: holding hearings, following case law and providing due process.
Unlike other federal judges, who are appointed and thus cannot be fired, immigration judges are Justice Department employees, and Trump officials have claimed the constitutional authority to dismiss them. Burgie said she suspected she was fired because she was perceived as “too liberal.”
“This has been a complete strategy to not have hearings, by firing experienced immigration judges like myself and like Judge Burgie — who were judges who followed the law and followed a full and fair hearing process,” Johnson said. “You want to get rid of those judges.”
A representative for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration court system, did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story. A Justice Department spokesman told the New York Times earlier this year that the Trump administration was conducting “re-evaluations of personnel and processes to deliver a better system.”
‘The point is deportation’
The effort to expedite deportations and limit court proceedings has perhaps been most evident in the administration’s efforts to sharply curtail immigrants’ ability to get out of detention.
For decades, federal law allowed judges to consider bail for immigrants without legal status who were arrested within the United States, posed no flight risk and were not a danger to the community. But last July, the Trump administration announced that it would treat those immigrants as if they’d been arrested at the border — meaning they wouldn’t be eligible for bail.
Detentions and deportations spiked. Lawsuits followed, too, in Colorado and elsewhere.
In December, a federal court in California declared that the new legal interpretation was unlawful. Following the ruling, Burgie and other immigration judges in Colorado began granting bail at a faster pace than they had in months.
Among those newly released was Jeanette Vizguerra, a Denver activist with a national profile. Burgie oversaw her bail hearing, and when she approved Vizguerra for release, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security derided her as an “activist judge.”
Then came the email from the nation’s newly appointed chief immigration judge — the one telling hundreds of lower-level officials they weren’t bound by the decision, and which Burgie publicly set aside. The California decision was later suspended, but other courts have issued similar rulings, including the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Colorado and neighboring states.
Priorities often shift under different administrations, Burgie and Johnson said, and there has always been pressure on judges’ dockets.
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But Trump’s return to office has brought sweeping and unprecedented change to the immigration court system, the former judges argued. It has included an intense monitoring of court proceedings, with Burgie recalling that officials based in Washington listened in on bond hearings in Aurora and questioned why judges used specific procedural codes that were once routine and uncontroversial.
Johnson said judges have been asked to justify any decision to grant bail to a detainee, and supervisors have “essentially established competition among judges to see who can complete the most cases.”
Burgie said her supervisors would pass on complaints from ICE lawyers, which she likened to “tattle-taling” — albeit with the implication that displeasing them could upend her career.
Judges’ dockets were suddenly so packed that it felt like the only way to work through them was to rapidly order detainees’ removal from the country.
“The point is deportation,” Burgie said. “The point is not to reduce the backlog — or at least the reducing the backlog is a secondary goal.”
Reassigned cases
Though Burgie suspected she was fired because she was “too liberal” in her application of immigration law, she also noted that her first disciplinary emails came barely a month after she granted bail to Vizguerra, whose court case had drawn intense media scrutiny. The Mexican national had lived in the United States for nearly 30 years.
Burgie was initially assigned Vizguerra’s broader immigration case, which would determine the activist’s ability to stay in the country. But before the assignment was publicly disclosed, the case was quickly reassigned to a judge in Texas, Burgie said.
She said her supervisor told her that the bail case would’ve been reassigned away from her, too, had it not already been public.
Burgie worked for the federal government for 17 years, the last seven as a judge. A former social worker, she’d left a brief stint at a humanitarian nonprofit during Trump’s first term because she felt she could be more impactful from the bench.
“I mean, I can’t say I liked being a judge the last year,” she said. “They changed the job dramatically. But I loved my job before that.”
Though she suspects she was fired for being liberal, she said she followed the administration’s position on bail hearings until the California court ruled otherwise — and court data shows she granted relatively few bail requests up until the December order. She’d previously granted asylum more frequently than her colleagues, according to federal records published by researchers at Syracuse University, but her denial rate surged as the Trump administration clamped down.
After she was reassigned in January, some of her cases were transferred to an acting supervisor from Arizona, according to legal filings obtained by The Denver Post. That judge, Irene Feldman, then reversed Burgie’s prior rulings in the cases reviewed by The Post.
The federal immigration court system, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, did not respond to questions about Feldman.
Every judge in Aurora received a late January email reminding them of the administration’s policy on bail hearings, Burgie said. If they didn’t follow the policy, judges were told, they would be subject to disciplinary action. In a follow-up call, their acting supervisor said that included termination, she recalled.
The effect of the change to bail hearings was longer detentions, with little prospect of release. Voluntary departures — when an immigrant requests to be deported as a speedy route out of detention — surged to unprecedented levels.
“I had one guy, I remember, who’d been here for 40 years and didn’t speak Spanish, and had been here since he was 3 years old,” Burgie said. “And he just asked for voluntary departure because he couldn’t stand being (in detention) anymore. It was just tragic.”
Like other fired judges, Burgie wants her job back. She wants reforms, too. To curb political interference, the immigration judges association is pushing federal legislation that would insulate them from the agendas coming out of the executive branch and instead treat them like other judges.
Johnson and Burgie are both challenging their firings, as are other immigration judges, who argue they can’t be fired without cause.
Those challenges will go before the federal Merit Systems Protection Board. Last year, Trump dismissed the board’s chairwoman.
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