President Donald Trump's Justice Department has been bleeding staffers, from those lost due to mass firings to those who have left as a result of plummeting morale. Yet according to a new report, Trump has not only failed to reverse the trends that are causing its staffing crisis, they have actually been pressuring one of the Justice Department's top immigration judges into leaving her job — at a time when their immigration policies are already widely criticized as cruel.
"And yet, in the first year of Trump’s second term, the Justice Department fired some 100 of the country’s roughly 700 immigration judges and began to replace them with what the administration called 'deportation judges,'" reported by The Washington Post's John Woodrow Cox on Sunday.
Cox added, "Donoso Stevens, 53, should have been insulated from the institutional chaos, according to fellow judges and attorneys whose cases she oversaw. Before joining the bench in 2016, she’d spent a decade at Homeland Security, earning a reputation as a formidable prosecutor. She was Annandale’s most tenured “detained judge,” one of three who decided what to do with migrants in custody, the court’s highest-stakes cases."
The Post journalist went on, "Every year, Donoso Stevens had denied asylum in more than half the applications that came before her, a record consistently in line with national averages. She hadn’t resisted case quotas imposed by the first Trump administration and seldom took sick leave. She never fell behind on her docket."
He continued, "But on that morning in Northern Virginia, she feared none of it mattered. By then, Donoso Stevens said, another supervisor had already ordered her to reverse four rulings at the direction of unidentified 'higher-ups,' a violation of judicial authority she once considered inconceivable. The interference, she said, had only escalated since."
The allegations, Cox explained, are being disclosed for the first time now to illuminate the public about the Trump administration's actions.
"The allegations, which she’s sharing publicly for the first time because of her deep concern for the court’s integrity, were corroborated by her extensive contemporaneous notes as well as colleagues, family and private attorneys interviewed by The Washington Post," Cox wrote. "They contradict Trump officials’ insistence to the public and to The Post that — as required by law — immigration judges serve under the administration as independent arbiters of justice."
Cox then wrote, "Outside her courtroom, Donoso Stevens tried to make sense of what was happening. She would remain on the bench but no longer oversee cases for migrants in detention, she was told by Robert K. Lundberg, Annandale’s acting assistant chief immigration judge, a largely administrative role he’d been moved into a week earlier."
