DOJ fires Black immigration judge in the ongoing purge of Trump hires

Edwin Pieters is searching for answers to why the Biden administration fired him as an immigration judge.

He said he received satisfactory reviews during his time as a judge. His decisions were roughly 50-50 in terms of approvals and rejections, so he doesn’t think it was perceived partiality.

The explanation he settles on is that he is a Black judge brought on by the Trump administration. That combination doesn’t fit well with the team currently running the Justice Department, which has gone on a tear in dismissing Trump-era judges from the immigration courts.

“To be very candid, the left are sick,” Mr. Pieters told The Washington Times. “If I have an opinion opposed to yours, all of a sudden I become the enemy. That whole school of thought, and then being a Black man, a New York prosecutor. The advocacy groups made it clear Biden should not be hiring from the background of prosecutors.”

Mr. Pieters was hired under the Trump administration but wasn’t installed until President Biden took office. He had nearly two years on the job, after which he would have ended his probationary period and been “converted” into a permanent position.

He was called in this month and told he was out.

He said his supervisors told him his “performance” was not up to par. He questioned the reasoning, given his satisfactory evaluations.

Mr. Pieters said the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts, investigated him after a lawyer complained about his Twitter account. The Office of Special Counsel investigated him for a Hatch Act violation — conducting politics while on the job — because of Twitter posts complaining about Democratic politicians.

The special counsel’s office gave Mr. Pieters a warning but recommended no discipline. He said he never heard any outcome to the first complaint.

Immigration judges are not part of the regular court system, do not receive Senate confirmation and are not tenured for life. They are civil servants in the Justice Department, though they operate on similar principles of evidence and justice and courtroom arguments as other judges.

Their duties include ruling on asylum cases and other defenses from illegal immigrants facing deportation.

When he joined the bench in 2021, Mr. Pieters said, colleagues gave him clear signals that the way to stay in the agency’s good graces was to “grant everything.”

“This was advice on several occasions,” he told The Times.

He said that conflicted with his belief that a judge’s responsibility is to “see justice done.”

Mr. Pieters is the latest in a string of Trump-appointed immigration judges to be ousted. One Justice Department source said more than 10 judges recruited in the Trump era have been fired at the end of their probationary periods or resigned before they could be fired.

“It’s clearly ideological because only IJs appointed under Trump are being fired,” said the department source, who pointed out that the Trump administration didn’t do similar housecleaning of Obama appointees.

“The ideological goal is to firmly establish a de facto amnesty for anyone in EOIR proceedings by breaking EOIR so that almost no one is ordered removed regardless of the law,” the source said.

The purge goes beyond line judges. Of 10 senior executive posts at EOIR, six have seen upheaval since Mr. Biden took office, according to the department source. The source said the upheaval in the Biden era is unprecedented.

The Justice Department said it wouldn’t comment on specific personnel moves, but defended its process and said “the vast majority” of judges do get converted to permanent positions.

“All decisions related to career civil service employees are based solely on performance, the presidential administration an individual was hired in has no bearing on decisions related to performance or other evaluations,” the department said in a statement.

The purge has done nothing to solve the major issue facing EOIR: the staggering backlog of cases, fueled by the record surge of illegal immigrants rushing the border.

EOIR listed nearly 1.9 million pending cases as of the start of this year. That was up from 1.3 million cases at the start of fiscal year 2020.

Last year’s volume of cases, with more than 700,000 new dockets, was the largest in history. Judges completed only 310,000 cases during the year.

Few migrants win their cases before judges. Only about 10% of cases in fiscal year 2023 are granted “relief,” meaning migrants have proved their claims.

Deportation is ordered in about half of all cases. The rest is a mixture of migrants giving up their claims and Homeland Security deciding not to pursue a case immediately. In those cases, the migrants are still on the docket.

Matt O’Brien, who was appointed as an immigration judge in the Trump administration but terminated by the Biden administration, wondered why EOIR would be ousting capable judges while facing a stupefying backlog. Some migrants were told they wouldn’t get their first hearings for at least five years.

“The only answer is that the efficient judges aren’t producing ideologically correct decisions, so they have to go,” said Mr. O’Brien, now director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

“I suspect Judge Pieters was terminated because he represents everything that the open borders Biden administration hates: a successful, conservative, ‘minority’ jurist who backs Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s clear that Team Biden wants to link immigration enforcement with ‘racism’ in the eyes of the American public. But Judge Pieters makes that impossible because he single-handedly torpedoes the leftist narrative that our judicial system is rife with discrimination.”

Several sources said the upheaval stems from an active circle of lawyers who practice immigration law and see rulings from Trump-era judges as too harsh.

Mr. Pieters said he first got crossways with the agency after a lawyer complained about his Twitter posts to his supervisors. The posts included retweets of others questioning the 2020 presidential election, backing the Republican candidate for governor in New York in 2022 and questioning high levels of illegal immigration.

EOIR launched an investigation. Mr. Pieters said he never heard any conclusion to that probe, but his supervisors said somewhere along the way that the Office of Special Counsel had taken over the probe.

He said he was upfront with office about his posts and sent them while he was off the clock.

He was pulled off duties while the investigation was open, which means he hasn’t judged cases in months. He was told he would have other roles, but no work was ever given to him.

When he was called in and told he was being ousted, Mr. Pieters said, he confronted his supervisors by saying, “If I had tweeted to open the borders and let everyone in and in support of Biden administration border policies, I would not be in this current predicament now?

“Both just looked with this blank stare with no response,” he said. “Then I said, ‘Then this is political?’ Both replied the same way with a blank stare and silence.”