"The courts are dead." An interview with a fired immigration judge

George Pappas talks about how Trump ended due process for immigrants, and how to fight back. "The law has failed us," he says. "So now we have to turn to politics."

George Pappas. Photo courtesy of Pappas

At last count, the Trump administration has now fired more than 100 immigration judges. Dozens more have retired after seeing the writing on the wall. I interviewed several of these former judges for the article I published in this month’s New Republic. A couple of them agreed to talk on the record.

One of those was George Pappas, who was nominated to the court Merrick Garland in 2023. Pappas relocated from his home in Asheville, North Carolina to Massachusetts to accept a position as a judge at the court in Boston.

In addition to his law degrees, Pappas attended the London School of Economics as an undergrad, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of London. Along with immigration law, he also specializes in federal Indian law.

Pappas was fired by the Trump administration in July 2025. The Department of Justice didn’t provide a reason for firing most immigration judges other than citing the president’s powers under Article II of the Constitution. But Pappas believes he was likely fired for insisting on granting hearings for asylum seekers, for not following the administration’s directive to summarily dismiss asylum claims, and for advising other judges of their obligation to consider claims on their merits.

According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), while serving at the immigration court in Boston, Pappas granted relief in about 24 percent of the asylum cases that came before him. His denial rate of 76 percent was third highest among the 28 judges there. His denial rate after moving to the immigration court in Chelmsford was 54 percent, which was sixth highest among the 10 judges there. Both TRAC and Pappas point out that a number of variables can affect a judge’s denial rate, including what sort of docket they preside over. But Pappas’s track record doesn’t exactly reflect a judge predisposed to grant asylum.

Immigration judges don’t have the independence most judges have, and immigration courts aren’t part of the judicial branch. Instead, they’re part of the DOJ. While previous presidents tried to influence immigration courts by appointing judges who shared their priorities, Donald Trump spent his first term appointing the most radical people he could find. That included hardliners like Matthew O’Brien, who perviously worked at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a rabidly anti-immigrant group criticized in the past for racism and xenophobia. O-Brien, who once said that “99 percent of [asylum] claims were baseless,” would go on to deny nine of every 10 claims in his court. When Joe Biden removed O’Brien and about a half dozen other Trump appointees, conservatives denounced the firings as illegal and politically motivated. They may have been right. Immigration judges aren’t supposed to be fireable for political reasons.

But those Republican concerns evaporated after Trump’s inauguration. He has since purged immigration judges all over the country. So far he has fired about one in every seven judges, even as his administration continues to ramp up deportations. Most of the fired judges fired either had higher rates of granting asylum, were former immigration defense attorneys, or had dual citizenship.

But not all. One fired judge who had a comparatively low rate of granting asylum told me, “I don’t think anyone would have described me as a liberal judge. I’m a former immigration prosecutor. The feeling was that if they’d fire someone like me, no one was safe. Which is probably the message DOJ wanted to send.”

Trump has also replaced a large portion of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the body that, as the name suggests, hears appeals. He has stripped tens of thousands of immigrants of their documented status, and taken a maximalist position on who is eligible for expedited removal, which affords fewer due process protections. The Trump-stacked BIA also issued a decision last fall that anyone in the country without documentation is ineligible for bail, a policy that the administration continues to try to enforce despite it being ruled illegal by more than 300 federal judges.

In October, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration would begin appointing lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corp (JAG officers) to temporarily address the shortage of immigration judges. So far, those judges are denying asylum claims at a higher rate (78 percent) than other immigration judges in Trump’s second term (63 percent). In December, Trump fired one of the replacement JAG officers just a month into the job. That judge, Christopher Day, had granted asylum claims in just over half the cases he heard.

Beginning early last year, Department of Homeland Security officers started showing up in immigration courts and asking for asylum cases to be dismissed. While “dismissal” may sound good to someone without a lawyer, it actually takes their case out of the asylum process, so they no longer have the protections that come with that process. The administration’s position is that these people can then be arrested and deported under expedited removal, which circumvents traditional due process protections. DHS and DOJ have since been pressuring immigration judges to summarily dismiss asylum claims without even holding a hearing.

I’ve edited my conversation with Pappas for length and clarity. This interview took place in October 2025.

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What do you make of what the Trump administration is doing to the immigration courts?

Let me get right to the point. I can tell you that today, the immigration courts are substantively dead. They are completely absent of due process. Of fair hearings. They exist only for show, and in name only. Period. The courts are dead. If you’re concerned about doing due process of fair hearings, they’re gone. So we can start from that position.

That’s pretty stark.

There’s just no other way to put it. The Department of Justice, the White House, and ERO (ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations) continue to successfully interfere with judicial neutrality. I experienced it firsthand, though when they tried it with me it didn’t work. In May 2024, ICE agents started entering our courthouses to arrest immigrants. Our assistant chief judge then advised us — in writing — to stay out of their way. That was our guidance — to let them interfere with our courts.

I didn’t think that was helpful, so I called him him up. I said, “Judge, you’ll need to elaborate a little more. We have ICE officers in the courthouse. You have DHS showing up at these hearings for the first time ever, asking for motions to dismiss asylum claims.”

I want to elaborate a bit on that. As I understand it, it used to be that while DHS would arrest and detain people suspected of being here without documentation, the cases were then turned over to DOJ lawyers, who prosecuted the cases in immigration court. This tactic of having DHS show up, ask for cases to be dismissed, and then arresting people as they leave, that’s all new.

Right. There used to be a firewall between DOJ and DHS. That firewall quickly disappeared in early 2025.

We knew early on that the reason DHS was asking for dismissal was so that they can just rearrest these people as soon as they leave and put them into expedited removal.

So I asked our assistant chief judge for a little more guidance, given that this was such a politically charged environment. And his response was, “Grant the motions to dismiss.” I said, “Excuse me? You’re saying we should grant all of them?” He said yes.

So I pushed him, because I really wanted to hear him say it explicitly. “You’re saying we should just rubber stamp these requests, when we know exactly why they’re doing it?”

At that point he hedged a little. He said if the motion is obviously defective then maybe we shouldn’t grant it. But otherwise, we should always rule for the government.

I ended up denying every motion to dismiss. It wasn’t that I was consciously resisting the chief judge, though that’s what it effectively ended up being. It was because when I tried to look at each motion on the merits, and the government hadn’t bothered to make a serious case. DHS would stand up and say, “Judge, I move to dismiss this case,” and then they’d look at the attorney for the government. I’d ask the DOJ attorney, “Can you tell me why you want to dismiss?” And they’d say, “Our policy has changed.” I’d say, “Well that’s not good enough, counselor. What has changed about this case that you want to dismiss it? You’re the one who filed the motion. Your department brought this into court. The immigration courts decide whether a case stays or goes, not you. So what has really changed here?”

They’d say something like, “I don’t know judge. We just don’t consider these cases a priority for prosecution anymore.”

Okay. Anything else you want to tell me? “No.”

So I’d turn to the respondent, the immigrant. I’d ask them if they knew what a motion to dismiss means. Most did not. Of course they didn’t. So I’d explain it to them: “If I grant this motion from the government, your application for relief will be abandoned. You’ll be able to leave immigration court. But you can also then be re-arrested at any time by ICE. And because your application for relief has been abandoned, you will no longer have legal status. They could deport you in days. So, sir or madam, do you wish to continue your application for asylum?” And they’d say “yes, I’d like to continue my application.”

So I’d say to the government, “Your motion is denied. We need to take some pleadings and schedule a hearing date.”

Done. That’s what I did, because that’s what the law says we should do.

That happened about eight or ten times over a period of about two weeks. ICE was specifically targeting people who had been in the country for less than two years and were eligible for expedited removal. Once it was clear that would be their M.O., I knew which people in my court they were going to target. So I’d ask, does this person have any claims for relief? Most of the time the answer was yes. And if it was their first appearance I’d make sure the person had the opportunity to get a lawyer. Those things did not go over well.

The administration claims they’re removing judges who are biased against deportation.

Around 88 or 89 percent of my decisions were upheld by the Bureau of Immigration Appeals, so I had a good track record.

I had one person who had been here for three or four years and had never made an attempt to get a lawyer. I was not pleased with his lack of effort. If you aren’t making any effort to state a claim, you’re abusing the system. So I ordered that person removed on the spot. But that was rare.

I ordered plenty of removals, but only after considering the merits of the claims. If it was someone’s first hearing, I’d ask them if they’re afraid to return to their home country. If they said yes, I’d give them an application for asylum and tell them they had to fill it out and return it. And you tell them, if you come back here in three our four months for your hearing and you haven’t filed this application, you can be ordered removed. You don’t need a lawyer to file an application, and there’s no fee. But you have to file. You have to explain why you’re seeking asylum.

About 15 percent wouldn’t file the application. If they had no other claim for relief, I’d order them removed. You have to take advantage of the opportunities and protection that are there. If they gave me some flimsy excuse as to why they couldn’t fill out the application, that just wasn’t good enough.

But that wasn’t the norm. Most people filed their application. So then we’d move on to consider their claim on the merits.

Where I did consistently rule against the government is when this administration tried to dismiss an asylum case so they could then arrest the person outside the courtroom and put them into expedited removal — when they were trying to deceive people into giving up their due process rights.

When did it become clear to you that this administration was targeting due process?

From the start there was a lot of pressure to align ourselves with DHS to make it easier to deport people. That started almost immediately after inauguration. The pressure just got more and more intense from there.

Within a couple months they started with these motions to dismiss, and we were pressured to grant them knowing that the person would then be arrested the moment they left the courtroom. That started in May.

Then on July 9th they just started arresting everybody. They didn’t care if we denied the motion to dismiss or not. It didn’t matter if someone was in the midst of litigating an asylum claim. They just started arresting them regardless.

A couple days later — July 11th — I got my termination notice.

Do you know exactly why you were terminated?

I have a general idea. My assistant chief judge advised us to reflexively grant the motions to dismiss. I pushed back on that. I wanted to make sure my fellow judges knew of their obligations under the law, so I posted the relevant case law and regulations in our public Teams forum. I advised my colleagues that they can deny these motions from the government, and that they have a duty to give people 10 days to respond.

I also insisted that we should not be granting motions to dismiss just because the government asks for it. I posted the legal authorities that reinforce that judges have discretion, and that we have not just the legal standing but an obligation to deny a motion to dismiss when the law says as much.

I guess that was a form of resistance, or at least it was seen that way. I was posting the legal authorities that disputed the guidance of my chief judge. I knew he would see what I was posting, because he looks at the same forum that I and the other judges look at every day. So I suppose it was a form of legal protest. But it says a lot that just posting about our duties and obligations under the law would be seen that way.

I knew they might fire me, but I wouldn’t say I was worried. I like to be able to sleep at night. And I can only do that knowing that I did the right thing.

“[There was a] generalized pressure to order removals without a hearing. Just find reasons to remove people without giving them any say in court.”

Other than the instructions from your chief judge, how else did the administration try to pressure you?

The main way was through policy memos. They started sending us these really insulting memos. They’re all public, and you can read them for yourself. What you’ll notice is that starting on January 20, 2025, there was a drastic change in tone. They started denigrating the leadership on the immigration courts, calling them unethical, illegal, unprofessional, you name it. The tone just became increasingly overbearing, insulting, and denigrating.

They also flooded us with them. There were eventually so many memos coming down that we had to ask our attorney advisors to give us a Reader’s Digest version at the end of the week summarizing them. No one had the time to read them all.

And this comes at a time when the system has been overwhelmed with a backlog of cases.

That’s right. During the week, we have to be preparing for cases and presiding over master hearings. That takes a lot of prep time. It’s a lot of work. There’s no time to fool around with these lengthy memos, trying to decipher what they actually mean or are actually calling for.

The attorney advisors summarized the memos for us for a couple months. But after that “fork in the road” memo, most of them saw the writing on the wall and left. And those who stayed were eventually fired.

And then came the DOGE memo. Every Monday, we had to send DOGE an email summarizing what we did the previous week. Just ridiculous stuff.

This was the memo sent to basically all federal employees?

That’s right. So on top of everything else, we now had to deal with this bullshit. I did it, though. I kept sending out those emails until around the end of June. It was such a huge waste of time. I had to put a damn sticky note on my computer so I wouldn’t forget to send out that stupid email.

The hilarious thing is that a couple months later, we got a memo instructing us to focus on efficiency. Read all of these memos and send out these reports, do it without the advisors who have been helping you, and also we want you to move through your cases more quickly.

Of course what they wanted was for us to start summarily rejecting claims. If you have an application that looks frivolous on its face, don’t have a hearing. Just grant it immediately and order the person removed.

That gradually morphed into more generalized pressure to order removals without a hearing. Just find reasons to remove people without giving them any say in court.

The real insult was that they then accused the judges who still believed in due process of prolonging the judicial process because they granted motions to continue or scheduled hearings. They actually blamed us for the backlog of cases.

Then we finally got the June 27 memo. It basically said to all the judges nationwide — and I’m paraphrasing — there are some judges who are not impartial. We noticed that there are some judges that are biased. And to those judges who are biased, we would suggest you consider getting another career. Or we’ll just fire you.

And by “biased,” they meant ruling against the government.

Right. But it was much worse than just insulting us. It also basically made it impossible for judges to issue careful, thoughtful decisions. The June 27 memo came from the acting director of EIOR [EIOR is the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts]. And one big change it announced is that we could no longer schedule a separate hearing to deliver an oral decision. We’d have to enter oral decisions at the hearing. If we didn’t, then we’d be required to submit a written decision.

Now, if you don’t know how this all works, that on its face doesn’t sound so bad. The problem is that about 97 percent of my decisions were delivered orally. I was issuing decisions from the bench. Each decision took me about 30-40 minutes to dictate. These decisions aren’t just a matter of saying “grant” or “deny.” They’re detailed orders, exhibits, findings of fact, conclusions of the law, and analysis.

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The problem is that some judges, especially new ones, can’t just issue oral decisions on the spot. They need time to consider the evidence and the law to get it right. And all judges need to take some more time for complicated cases. For those cases, we had the attorney advisors to help us. You need to research the relevant law. The advisors were critically important to help us with that, to move cases along. If the opinion needed to be written, they might help with that too.

So now we get this memo telling us we can no longer schedule a hearing to issue an oral decision. It’s either on the spot or it has to be written out. Well, it takes three or four hours to write out a well-reasoned decision. There’s no way you can do that with the number of cases we hear each week. Especially once the attorney advisors left.

So now you have judges issuing oral decisions on the spot, no matter how complicated the case might be. Immigration law can be incredibly difficult. Some of these judges are brand new. There’s just no way they’ve grasped it well enough to issue immediate decisions like that. But they no longer have to explain their decisions, either.

Presumably people can still appeal those decisions to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals, right?

They can, and prior to now, if it was a bad decision they would have have won. The problem is that Trump fired a third of the BIA judges, too. So it’s just another rubber stamp for the priorities of this administration. Those decisions then tie the hands of immigration judges. Like this policy that everybody is now subject to mandatory detention without the right to ask for a bond. No one thinks that’s legal. But they have to abide by it.

It’s been pretty widely reported that this is the main lesson they learned from the first Trump administration — to just fire anyone in government who gets in their way.

Exactly. That memo created even more pressure on immigration judges who wanted to do their jobs properly — who believed that everyone deserves due process. It was designed to force those people out. And it worked.

Go back to the inauguration. Within hours of Trump’s swearing in, the entire EOIR leadership was fired. Director David Neal, fired. Assistant Director Mary Cheng, fired. Sheila McNulty, the chief immigration judge, fired. Jill Anderson, the general counsel, fired. All civil servants, not political appointees. Then, within a couple weeks, 13 or more judges were fired in one mass sweep. Six or seven assistant chief judges were terminated. This was in February.

As soon as that happened, a few folks, myself included, realized it was time to start taking things off our walls because a train wreck was coming. We didn’t know when it’s going to hit, but it was going to hit. We didn’t want to get locked out if we were told to vacate the building immediately. So I took all of my stuff down and worked in a barren room for months. I guess it was my way of protesting. I couldn’t control when they fired me. But I could at least control how I went out.

In the meantime, I still had to get up there every morning and do the job. Which I did. I prepared for my hearings. I withstood all the pressure and toxic pronouncements from the administration and I provided due process under the law. I’m proud of that.

After April, we had a second round of mass firings, three of which were in my court. Three brilliant judges were fired. That really hit me hard. That’s also when we knew for sure that we were next. So I knew that I would be terminated in July. And I was. I got the email from Serci Owen that I had been terminated under Article 2 of the Constitution.

I wasn’t shocked to be fired. I was disappointed and I was angry. But I wasn’t shocked.

Before you were fired, did you ever consider resigning in protest?

I’m not going to say I never considered it. But for me, it always came down to the fact that while I was still there I could do some good. I could actually have a fair hearing, make sure people got a fair shot. There was no guarantee the person who replaced me would do that.

I’d add that virtually every DHS attorney in Chelmsford, Massachusetts wanted me to stay — because I protected the right to a fair hearing. If you go to Linkedln, you’ll see all the comments by the private attorneys. Both sides of the bench, government and private wanted me to to stay. But none of that was taken into account. Our chief immigration judge threw us under the bus. He went AWOL after January 20th. We didn’t get any written guidance from him. If we had questions to ask, we had to get on the telephone and have a verbal discussion. We couldn’t get anything in writing. It was all designed to cover his ass and to keep us in line.

But for those of us who wanted to try to do the right thing for as long as we could, we’re getting no guidance. So let’s just focus on the law. That’s your guiding star. Do it the right way. So that’s what we did.

I’m sure you’ve talked with other immigration judges around the country. What was morale like?

After April, more judges started to resign, not only in my court, but nationwide. Morale just plummeted. People didn’t want to be subjected to this toxic environment. In my own court we lost two judges in that period. One just got tired of being insulted and treated like garbage. The last judge that was fired before me had been a 20-year judge in the Navy. He was living in Europe and left to become an immigration judge in our court. He relocated as family, enrolled his kids in school, bought a house . . . and they fired him. He was a great judge.

“You have to look at all the money involved. The commercial airline that’s been charted to fly these people around [is] making a fortune just shuffling people around. The detention centers, they’re making a fortune. It will be billions by the time this administration is out of office.”

What do you make of the administration appointing all of these military lawyers — JAG officers — as temporary replacements?

None of them are qualified to be an immigration judge right now. They just don’t have the background. If you have no background in immigration law, it’s a steep learning curve. You have to take more time to make sure your decisions are correct on the law. It can take a year or more to get up to speed.

That’s assuming you want to be sure you’re complying with existing law — which doesn’t really seem to be a priority with this administration.

No. It isn’t. But these military lawyers not only have no immigration experience, they also have an inherent conflict. When you join the military you take an oath. That oath is not only to the Constitution, but to the commander in chief. So there’s an internal conflict between their oath and what they’re supposed to do on the bench. That in and of itself is cause for a prejudicial hearing. I’d advise immigration defense attorneys who appear before these replacement judges to immediately object as a violation of the Fifth Amendment for failing to protect due process and to ensure a fair hearing. The masquerade needs to be exposed before the hearing begins on the merits.

The administration has also been shuffling people to detention facilities around the country, often without notifying their families or attorneys of where they are. Is that new?

It’s new in the degree to which it’s happening. You’d sometimes see people moved because a detention facility was at capacity, or because someone required a different sort of detention. Occasionally you’d see them try to move someone for jurisdiction reasons. But what you didn’t see was people getting moved around in express contradiction of federal judicial orders not to do it. That’s where it gets really bad. They’re just ignoring orders.

I’ve talked to immigration attorneys who haven’t been told where a client was moved until the client was already on a plane. They say the administration is moving people around to deliberately deny them access to their lawyers. Others have told me it’s about getting people into a favorable jurisdiction. Others say they’re just trying to create chaos.

I’d say it’s all of the above. As a judge, I want to control jurisdiction. I want to keep the people here within this territory so I can see them. And that’s gone out the window. They’ve shown they have no qualms about moving people even though they’re told not to. And so as a lawyer, you’ve got to tell your clients that all bets are off. The government is disregarding orders. So even though we might prevail with a petition to get your kind of friend or family member out and force an immigration judge to hold a bond hearing, we can’t guarantee that they’re going to keep them here, even though the judge told them to. We can’t guarantee they won’t send them halfway across the country without telling us. We can’t guarantee that they won’t be deported.

So immigration attorneys need to prepare their clients for the possibility that they could win their case on the law, but the government might do what it wants, anyway? That’s grim.

Yes. And if attorneys aren’t giving them that reality check then they’re not doing their job. All bets are off now, and just tracking your client’s location could be a major, major problem. It’s done deliberately for all the reasons you cited. And the administration knows that by the time the court catches up, even if they get sanctioned in a particular case, the damage has already been done.

I think the other reason for all of this that you didn’t mention is money. You have to look at all the money involved. Look at whose making money. The commercial airline that’s been charted to fly these people around, they’re making a fortune just shuffling people around. Every time that plane flies, somebody’s getting paid. It’s a gravy train. The detention centers, they’re making a fortune. It will be billions by the time this administration is out of office. They own the commissaries, under different names. They own the phone services, under different names. They’re making a fortune.

What’s also new is the acceleration of the removals and the lying to the courts. A judge here in the First Circuit screamed at DHS for violating a habeas petition grant that explicitly said, “you don’t move this person outside this jurisdiction.” And they did it anyway. And they were forced to bring him back. They’re blatantly violating federal judicial orders. That’s why you had Erez Reuveni, the whistleblower at the DOJ, being interviewed by 60 Minutes about Emil Bove telling lawyers to say F-U to the courts.

Reuveni isn’t exactly some open border activist. One former DOJ official — a Republican — told me Renveni is about as conservative DOJ lawyers get.

Yes, you can be a rock-ribbed conservative and still have some sense of legal ethics. There’s an NYU professor who has catalogued 50 cases in which a federal judge found that the DOJ had lied or misled the court. [Note: The tally of such cases now exceeds 150.] It’s appalling. That’s the norm now, and it’s really dangerous and bad.

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Do you see any hope for stopping what’s happening?

I think it’s been easy for them to intimidate immigration judges because they fall under the Department of Justice. They can’t do that with the Article III courts. And so far, we’ve seen the federal courts really push back on all of this.

That seems true at the district court level, and maybe even at the appellate level. But not at the Supreme Court, no?

Yes, what they do have is the Supreme Court. And the shadow docket has given the administration a lot of deference so far. Tons. It’s a real problem. And then to make it more insulting, you have Justice Kavanaugh criticizing district court judges for not following precedent from the shadow docket. You didn’t produce any precedent! What are they supposed to follow?

You have an 87-year-old judge with a stellar record apologizing to the Supreme Court. He didn’t do anything wrong. You aren’t doing your jobs. You want judges to follow precedent? Then write an opinion. Spell out your reasoning.

The other big change we’ve seen is the escalation in militarism, intimidation, and violence by ICE and Border Patrol. I want to ask you first about the masking. What do you make of it?

The masks need to come off. We’ve had police here for two centuries. They didn’t need masks. You have masks when people are looking to support an extrajudicial operation of government. And again, it’s straight from the fascist playbook.

We’re not the first ones to go through this. But people have to realize that this administration is tossing the rule of law onto the ash heap. It is being used as a weapon when it’s convenient for them and tossed aside when it isn’t.

But we have to understand that the assault on immigration judges and immigration courts is part of a broader assault on American identity. Look at what JD Vance is saying. He’s saying that you can only be a real American if you have a certain lineage. He’s saying that even naturalized citizens aren’t real citizens. Unless you’re of a certain heritage, you’ll always be less. They’re creating a hierarchy of Americanness. If you’re of a certain lineage, you get the full range of rights and protections. If you aren’t, you get something less. You’ll always be suspect. You’ll always need to worry about masked officers accosting you, forcing you to produce proof of your citizenship. And if they decide they don’t like you, they reserve the right to take your citizenship too.

And by “lineage” you mean white.

Well yes, of course. It’s white supremacy. That’s what it is. Look at the attacks on black lawmakers. On immigrant lawmakers. They’re pushing the idea that only a given group of elites can lead. Only people of certain bloodlines can lead legitimately. Otherwise you’re suspect.

The attacks on people like Vivek Ramaswamy seem instructive here.

Yes. It isn’t about ideology. It explains the attacks on universities. On DEI . . .

. . . and not just political office or public positions. They apparently think nonwhite people aren’t capable of being, say, airline pilots.

It’s just a broadside on all the progress of the Civil Rights movement.

But it always starts with immigrants. And we saw it first at the immigration courts. So my job is to talk about what happened in the immigration courts. I can humanize it by talking about what specifically happened to me, but it really isn’t about me. It’s about the wider picture, here. It’s about the vision they have for our society. We need to wake up.

It seems like a nonstarter at the moment, but in a different administration, could immigration judges have a role in regulating the aggressive manner in which ICE and Border Patrol are enforcing immigration law?

I’m not sure there’s much they can do at this point.

So what can be done?

Let me answer that in two ways. The first is to ask why. Why are they acting like that? And the answer to that is easy. They want to instigate violence. Once you have violence you can issue a state of emergency. You can send in the military. If you’re really bold you can try to postpone elections. It’s the classic authoritarian blueprint, and it’s where we’re headed right now. They want people to lash out. They want to be able to say Antifa or whoever is resorting to violence. And so far they aren’t getting a violent response. That’s good for us, but it’s really frustrating for them.

My second answer is that you have to go outside the courts. The Supreme Court and Justice Kavanaugh basically gave the okay to racial profiling in immigration enforcement. So now what? Well, you stop fighting in court. You fight in the public arena. People need to know what’s happening. They need to know that immigration officers can’t just tell by looking who is and isn’t a citizen. That means no one is safe. This is not an immigration issue anymore. Now it’s a civil liberties issue. We are now all vulnerable to having our due process rights and civil liberties abrogated at any time based on how we speak or look, or on where we live or work. Last I saw, at least 120 U.S. citizens have had their rights violated by immigration officers.

The law has failed us on this issue. So now we have to turn to politics.

I think it’s often lost on people that the Supreme Court only puts a ceiling on what the government and law enforcement can do, not a floor. It may not be politically popular, but legislative bodies are always free to put their own restrictions on law enforcement.

Right. Maybe with the right makeup, Congress could rein in some of these abuses with legislation. But we’re not there yet. So in the meantime it’s about raising awareness.

Governors need to speak up, like Pritzker and Newsom have done. They need to bring the outrage. How dare you arrest American citizens based on their accent or the color of their skin? Make it clear that what they’re doing is un-American.

I’m going back up to Boston next week to give a talk and based on past experience people are going to ask me, what can we do? What can regular people do?

I think a lot of people are asking that.

And we have to have an answer for them. We need to say, Here are the organizations in your area that you can work with, support, and help.” Get engaged.

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