New Orleans is dealing with what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is grotesquely marketing as “Operation Catahoula Crunch.” As was the case in Washington, D.C., Portland and Chicago, it has used the pretext of searching for dangerous criminals to actually detain immigrant roofers and physical laborers without making the city any safer.
A recent New York Times study shows that these aggressive sweeps with additional manpower and presence are actually less effective than more routine efforts at immigration enforcement. According to data from the National Crime Center, “the share of people with criminal convictions ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has detained fell to 28 percent in mid-October from 46 percent at the start of Mr. Trump’s term,” Albert Sun wrote. “Another 26 percent had pending charges.” The share of people arrested for crimes like assault, robbery or homicide dropped from 15 percent in 2024 to 5 percent in mid-October.
“Less than 30 percent of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime, an analysis of the data shows, and a very small share had been convicted of a violent crime,” Sun wrote. “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.”
These operations have clearly been an effort to detain quantity over quality—so to speak—and that’s ugly enough on its face. There are many knock-on effects to these operations, one of which is what happens next. Detained immigrants have to go to court, where an already stressed system has become unworkable.
The president’s budget bill allotted money to DHS to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, 5,000 customs officers and 3,000 Border Patrol agents, but it only authorized the Department of Justice—where the immigration courts are housed, not the Judiciary—to hire 100 new immigration judges.
That brings the number of immigration judges up to approximately 800 to deal with a backlog of roughly 3.4 million cases as well as the new ones coming in daily.
According to Jory Heckman at the Federal News Network, “the total number of immigration judges this year has dropped from 700 to 600. The Trump administration terminated more than 80 immigration judges since taking office, while others have retired or accepted voluntary separation incentives.”
Judges describe the current workload as unmanageable and made worse when judges are fired or retire since their cases then have to be redistributed to the other judges.
“The caseload is crushing. I think it’s probably one of the most overburdened court systems,” said Ted Doolittle, a former immigration court judge who had 57 cases scheduled on his docket the day after he was fired.
In a recent Politico.com story, Judge Jennifer Peyton—who was fired in July in Chicago—told Politico, “New York is decimated. Chelmsford (Massachusetts) is decimated. The San Francisco court is decimated. Chicago is down half. There’s literally millions—millions with an ‘m’—millions of cases that are pending.”
According to Payton, “We all felt like you can’t do more damage than you already have to the immigration courts and to justice and to due process. Yet it’s like, ‘Hold my beer, watch this.’”
A recent NPR report examined the backgrounds of 70 immigration judges who were fired by DOJ and found the biggest difference between those fired this year and those who remain in the job is a history of representing immigrants. DOJ denied that any judges were targeted, but according to writers Ximena Bustillo and Anusha Mathur, “An analysis of each of the 70 immigration judges' professional backgrounds found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants, and no prior work history at DHS, made up about 44 percent of the firings—more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.”
One of DOJ’s solutions to the shortage has been to bring in temporary immigration court judges. On August 28, the DOJ published a rule that changed the qualifications required to be an immigration court judge. They previously needed to be a former immigration judge or appellate immigration judge, an administrative judge in another executive branch agency, or a DOJ lawyer with at least 10 years of immigration law experience.
According to Adriel Orozco of the American Immigration Council, “The Trump administration removed those requirements and now the DOJ can select any attorney to serve as a temporary immigration judge, including military attorneys and attorneys from the private sector with no immigration experience.”
DHS certainly made it clear how they view the job when they advertised openings on the social media platform X. “@TheJusticeDept is seeking legal professionals to serve as Deportation Judges to ensure that only aliens with legally meritorious claims are allowed to remain,” identifying the job as “deportation” and not “immigration” judge.
These changes create doubt about the justice meted out by the immigration courts. Can a detainee's case get a proper hearing when judges who might not have a background with immigration law have to deal with them knowing the massive backlog they have to work through? And does the Department of Justice even want a fair hearing?
That was the concern for Jeremiah Johnson, an immigration court judge in San Francisco since 2017 who was fired by email without explanation this year. "I was fired for doing my job,” Johnson told NPR. “And frankly, I think this administration doesn't want judges following the law.”
Photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash.
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