U.S. President Donald Trump, next to Ivanka Trump's husband Jared Kushner, salutes as a U.S. flag is raised on a new flagpole installed on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 18, 2025.
President Donald Trump has long made it clear that he does not get along with judges, from fuming at Supreme Court justices he appointed who vote against him to outright defying judicial decisions. Yet a Trump/judge split occurred on Tuesday that was remarkable even by Trump's standards — namely, a judge appointed by Trump quitting simply because he could not handle Trump's workload.
"A former immigration judge appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term revealed he left his 25-year government career because the demands of the president’s second administration made it impossible for him to ensure immigrants received due process," reported Mediaite's Kathryn Wilkens on Tuesday.
She added, "David Cheng, formerly an assistant chief immigration judge in Newark, New Jersey, spoke to Law.com about his decision to resign in July 2025 after spending eight years on the bench." Quoting Cheng as telling Law.com that "in 2025, with the new administration, the demands and what they were asking for were just sort of in conflict with why I dedicated my life to public service. It got to a point where I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ So I had to step away.”
Wilkens continued, "Cheng, who was appointed by Trump’s former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2017, previously spent 15 years as a government immigration attorney, including at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He explained that while immigration courts had long struggled with enormous backlogs, the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigration compounded the problem. According to Cheng, judges were urged to move through an overwhelming number of hearings quickly, leaving little time to consider each case — a demand he felt compromised his responsibility to ensure due process."
Cheng complained, “If you had 100 cases in the morning and you dedicated two minutes per case, you know, that’s 200 minutes. That’s — rough math — about three and a half hours. And you were expected to do that in about two hours. It came to where you weren’t doing what you were supposed to do to make sure that everybody has due process.”
Trump has often expressed rage when judges do not do his bidding. For instance, he was reportedly livid in June when the Supreme Court did not rule as he wished on the issue of his ability to suppress mail-in ballots.
“He is completely livid over the mail-in ballot ruling,” CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said at the time. “And of course, part of this is about the justices who decided to rule against him in this case. Just a reminder — this was the Republican National Committee challenging a Mississippi law that allowed mail-in ballots that came in after Election Day to still be counted.”
Holmes added, “if you look at the justices who voted against Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, one of them sticks out in particular, and that is Amy Coney Barrett — whom President Trump himself appointed to the bench. Trump has been growing increasingly frustrated. We've reported multiple times that behind closed doors he has slammed Amy Coney Barrett, saying that she has not stepped up and has not done basically what he put her in place to do.”
