President Trump fired the top three officials in the immigration court system minutes after assuming office on Monday. The four were all part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the office charged with the responsibility “to adjudicate immigration cases by fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly interpreting and administering the Nation’s immigration laws.” In practice, this office can stymie any effort to deport anyone who has had contact with an immigration judge.
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Those fired were Mary Cheng, the acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review; Sheila McNulty, the chief immigration judge; Lauren Alder Reid, the head of policy for the agency; and Jill Anderson, the general counsel in the Executive Office of Immigration Review. The only public record for any of these is that McNulty was the prime mover in creating a policy that would sack immigration judges for complaining about their workload, and Anderson was sympathetic to so-called Dreamers.
Naturally, the people who pushed open borders in the service of Joe Biden aren’t happy:
Tom Jawetz, a senior lawyer in the Homeland Security Department in the Biden administration, said the move suggested that Mr. Trump would try to insert loyalists who could undermine veteran career officials into key roles, as he did during his first term.
“Politicals during the first Trump administration ran roughshod over the career civil servants who have dedicated their lives to public service,” Mr. Jawetz said in an interview. “A Day 1 blood bath like this indicates that they don’t intend to change course now.”
I also found one other interesting tidbit from this episode: acting Attorney General James McHenry directed the firing.
McHenry served during the Biden administration as the Justice Department’s chief administrative hearing officer, a position that oversaw the department’s administrative judges.
During the first Trump administration, McHenry was director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
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Remember that name; I think we’ll see it again.
The obvious signal here is that Trump was not satisfied with the pace of immigration proceedings in his first term and wants that to change. All of the people fired worked in the same or related positions during Trump 1.0. This is like the purge at the State Department I posted about Monday (First Wave of the Trump Purges Claims ‘Scores’ of State Department Bureaucrats). It isn’t sufficient to decapitate the agencies run by Biden appointees. You have to dig down into that second and third tier of leadership to eliminate nodes where resistance could grow.
