Trump administration removes five immigration judges in Texas, union says

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The Trump administration fired five judges from federal immigration courts in Texas, according to a union representing them, raising concerns that existing case backlogs will worsen and the administration will expand its reliance on fast-track deportations that avoid courts altogether.

The judges worked in courts located in Houston, Laredo and El Paso, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Three of them were associate chief judges who managed courts and implemented policy.

The five are among 28 employees of the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review who have been removed in recent weeks, according to the union. There are about 700 immigration judges in the country’s 71 immigration courts.

The Texas Tribune identified two of the associate chief judges removed: Brandon Jaroch of Houston, and Noelle Sharp of Houston. Jaroch and Sharp confirmed they had been removed from their respective benches but declined to comment further when reached by telephone.

Jaroch is a former assistant United States attorney and federal public defender with more than two decades of experience in the government and military, and Sharp is a former immigration lawyer who’d been serving on the bench since at least 2021, according to their biographies included in 2021 press release.

The Tribune requested a list of all judges removed across the country from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, but a spokesperson said the office “declines to comment on personnel matters.”

The shakeup in the nation’s immigration courts comes as President Donald Trump undertakes his promise to deport millions of undocumented people from the United States. In a little more than a month in office, Trump has issued a litany of executive orders and directives that have begun upending the nation’s immigration and asylum system — and rattled immigrant communities.

But removing judges charged with deciding a record 3.6 million immigration cases that are currently pending won’t help those efforts, said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Federal immigration judges typically hear 500 to 700 cases a year, he said.

“Of all places, you would think that they wouldn't be firing judges in Texas,” Biggs told the Tribune. “We can give President Trump congratulations ‘cause he just increased the backlog of immigration cases.”

Lawmakers, government watchdogs and researchers have long declared that the nation’s immigration courts are in crisis.

A 2023 report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the backlog of cases in immigration court had more than tripled since 2017. The government oversight agency had previously recommended that the immigration courts office develop a strategic workforce plan, but that did not happen.

“The effects of the backlog are significant and widespread,” the GAO wrote in a 2023 post. “Some noncitizens — including children and families — wait years to have their cases heard. The delays postpone decisions for vulnerable populations who may be eligible for protections, such as asylum. They also prolong the removal from the U.S. of those who do not have valid claims to remain.”

By the end of last fiscal year, the backlog had swelled to nearly 4 million.

As a result, immigration judges — tasked with navigating an area of law whose complexity is sometimes compared to that of the tax code — are managing increasingly bigger caseloads without enough support personnel that help them research relevant case law and make sense of the latest legal precedents, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants who might be eligible for protection may not receive it and those who are ineligible might not receive a case decision in a timely manner. The quality of their decisions suffers, leading to more appeals, further exacerbating courts, Bush-Joseph said.

“The Trump administration overall, in my assessment, is trying to avoid the courts,” Bush-Joseph said, pointing to the expansion of a program that fast-tracks deportations.

The process of expedited removal lets the U.S. deport someone without a hearing before an immigration judge. The process has traditionally been used near the U.S.-Mexico border to expel people who recently arrived in the country.

The Trump administration has expanded it to apply to undocumented immigrants farther away from the border who have been in the country for less than two continuous years.

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