By Nate Raymond
March 12 (Reuters) - The Justice Department has hired 42 new immigration judges, many with backgrounds in immigration enforcement, as President Donald Trump's administration moves to reshape the immigration court system by restocking its ranks with people it dubs "deportation judges."
The Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review said a new class of immigration judges was sworn in on Wednesday to serve in immigration courts in 17 states including California, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Texas.
The hires are part of a broader push by the Trump administration to bring immigration courts into closer alignment with its hardline deportation policies, replacing judges it has fired or pushed out with appointees who largely have backgrounds in prosecution or immigration enforcement.
Immigration judges are not part of the federal judiciary but instead work as part of the Justice Department. The Trump administration has taken the position that the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi have the constitutional right to remove immigration judges as inferior officers.
The 42 new judges come on top of 20 other permanent hires the Justice Department has announced since October. It has also brought on dozens of temporary judges, many with military backgrounds, who can serve up to six months, after firing more than 100 judges since Trump took office last year.
The latest hires also include several judges with military backgrounds. More commonly, however, they share experience as prosecutors or in immigration enforcement.
More than a third previously worked on immigration matters at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, with several coming straight from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where they worked as lawyers.
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The new hires will begin to replace the at least 104 immigration judges who have been fired since January 2025 and an almost equal number that have taken buyouts, resigned or retired since then out of a total of approximately 700 judges, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges.
Those judges are being brought on as the immigration courts face a backlog of about 3.2 million cases as of December 31, according to data from Mobile Pathways, a nonprofit that analyzes immigration court data and promotes access to justice for immigrants.
"This Department of Justice has made reducing the immigration court backlog a top priority, and these 42 new highly qualified judges will help us deliver on that goal," Bondi said in a statement. "Under the Trump Administration, immigration judges will decide cases based on the law – not politics."
A few of the newly installed judges have publicly aligned themselves with Trump's hardline approach to immigration.
Among them is Kieran Lalor, who will serve as an immigration judge in Ulster Immigration Court in New York. While an elected Republican lawmaker in the New York Assembly, he took several positions consistent with Trump's immigration agenda.
In a 2017 op-ed in the Poughkeepsie Journal, he criticized the allocation of $10 million in a budget enacted under then-Governor Andrew Cuomo that would be used to fund "illegal immigrants' lawyers to fight deportation."
"New Yorkers fund ICE as federal taxpayers," Lalor wrote. "Albany shouldn't ask them to also fund the lawbreakers."
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi)