The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it swore in a record number of new immigration judges, as the Trump administration seeks to deport a historic number of illegal immigrants.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review said over 80 judges were onboarded, marking the largest immigration judge class in the office’s history. The move will enable deportation cases to move faster through the system, allowing Washington to fast-track its immigration agenda, after White House border czar Tom Homan revealed earlier this week that a record 800,000 illegal immigrants have already been removed from the United States.
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“The Trump administration is committed to reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule to the law in our nation’s immigration system,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement hailing President Donald Trump’s actions on immigration reform. “This could only happen thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership and commitment to securing our borders.”
Severe backlog in immigration courts remains a key impediment to Trump’s deportation agenda.
“With nearly 3.8 million pending deportation cases as of mid-2025, delays in the courts hamper core functions of the broader U.S. immigration system—including leaving individuals who are in need of protection waiting years for a decision in their asylum case, while those who are ineligible are not ordered removed in a timely manner,” Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, wrote in a brief last November.
The DOJ said Thursday that reducing the immigration court backlog is “one of the highest priorities” for the department. Since Trump’s second term began, EOIR has seen the sharpest decrease in case load in its history, after it hired 153 permanent immigration judges “this fiscal year, the most in any single year in the agency’s history,” according to the DOJ.
“Since January 20, 2025, EOIR has completed more than 1.08 million cases and has reduced its pending caseload in immigration courts by more than 447,000 cases, bringing the pending caseload down from approximately 4 million to under 3.53 million,” the department said.
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In addition to 641,000 illegal immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement and federal partners have arrested over the past 16 months, and 800,000 who have been removed from the United States, another 300,000 illegal immigrants have been kicked off Social Security, and 100,000 off Medicare, Trump revealed recently. Pressing for people to self-deport has also been a key component of reducing the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S., Homan told the Washington Examiner earlier this week.
“I was a part of the plan from the very beginning that sent a message to the whole world that there’s no free ride here anymore,” the border czar said. “And we knew the self-deportations, self-removals would climb at an extraordinary number, and it has, so I think if you look at the number, if we take self removals out, if we still have a record, historic record of the rest of removals, but if you add the self-removals to it, it’s just three times as much as ever happened before.”
