TRAC Reports 279 Immigration Judges Fired or Resigned in FY2025–FY2026 (38% Turnover) as Asylum Denials Hit 94%
Opening paragraph
On August 31, 2026, TRAC Immigration (the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University data-research project) published report #779, “Asylum Denials Rise to 94% Amid the Remaking of the Immigration Court.” Citing EOIR’s own personnel records, TRAC reported that 279 Immigration Judges were fired or resigned during FY2025–FY2026 — approximately 38% of the 735 judges employed at the end of FY2024, the last full year of the Biden administration. TRAC contrasts this with a 5%-per-year average attrition rate during the Biden administration (FY2021–FY2024).
What Happened / Key Facts
Fetched directly (curl + HTML-strip, confirmed against the WebFetch summary) from tracreports.org/reports/779/, dated “Published Aug 31, 2026” on the page itself. Key figures, quoted or closely paraphrased from the primary text:
- 279 Immigration Judges fired or resigned, FY2025–FY2026 — “EOIR records indicate that a total of 279 Immigration Judges were fired or resigned during FY 2025 – FY 2026.” No further breakdown (by month, by court, or by fired-vs-resigned) is given in this report; TRAC does not itemize names.
- 38% turnover — 279 of 735 (the judge corps at the end of FY2024).
- Hiring, same period: “President Trump has hired 192 new judges, plus an additional 53 temporary judges,” for 743 total judges deciding asylum cases during FY2026, of whom only 322 (43%) had served before Trump took office.
- Asylum outcomes: In June 2026, 94.1% of asylum decisions were denials and only 5.5% were grants (from over 50% grant rate earlier in the Biden administration); of 130 judges on the bench continuously since FY2021, three-fourths increased their individual denial rate in FY2026 vs. FY2021, by an average of 33 percentage points.
Independent corroboration: immpolicytracking.org’s tracker (last updated through Sept. 10, 2026, sourcing DOJ/EOIR press releases and tier-1 reporting including Politico, NPR, NYT, WaPo, AP, plus federal court filings) reproduces the identical “279… 38 percent… 735” figure attributed to “EOIR records,” and separately documents dated batch terminations that sum toward that cumulative total: Feb 15, 2025 (20 judges, incl. 5 assistant chief IJs and 13 not yet sworn in — all Biden appointees); Apr 22, 2025 (8); Jul 22, 2025 (15); September 2025 (19, the largest single-month cohort that year); Dec 1, 2025 (8, New York City). That tracker also names eight individual fired judges with litigation or press confirmation: Kerry Doyle (fired Feb 14, 2025, notified by email), Christopher Day (military-lawyer temporary IJ, fired ~5 weeks after starting, Dec 2025), Roopal Patel and Nina Froes (both fired ~April 2026 after rulings against deporting pro-Palestinian-speech students Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi respectively), Tania Nemer (fired Feb 2025; sued Bondi/DOJ Dec 1, 2025 alleging sex/national-origin discrimination), Kyra Lilien (fired; sued Blanche/DOJ ~May 1, 2026), Carla Espinoza (fired; sued Blanche/DOJ ~May 5, 2026), and Chloe Dillon (San Francisco, fired Aug 2025; sued Sept 10, 2026). None of these underlying sources characterize any of the 279 as “resigned” rather than fired — the 279 figure’s “or resigned” framing is TRAC’s own aggregate language, not attributed to any named resignation in the sources reviewed this pass.
Why This Event Matters
This is the tier-2, EOIR-records-sourced figure behind the “279 out, ~38%” claim that motivated this research task. It supersedes the corpus’s prior cumulative snapshots — Feb 23, 2026 (NPR, “a quarter fewer” judges), Apr 15, 2026 (NAIJ, 113 fired/forced out), Jun 10, 2026 (NPR, “over 130”) — documented in 2026-eoir-immigration-judge-firing-record, extending the tracked cumulative total through the end of August 2026.
Broader Context
TRAC’s report frames the turnover figure as one driver of the corpus’s asylum-denial thread, alongside the bench’s compositional shift (57% of FY2026 asylum adjudicators newly appointed under Trump) and a documented rightward shift in denial rates even among judges who served continuously since FY2021.
Research Gaps
- No EOIR primary-source personnel/termination document was independently pulled. TRAC and immpolicytracking.org both attribute the 279 figure to “EOIR records,” but EOIR does not appear to publish a public-facing personnel-action series (its adjudication-statistics series covers case outcomes only — see reference-eoir-adjudication-statistics-primary-source-locations). Whether TRAC obtained the 279 figure via FOIA, a EOIR-published dataset not yet located, or a secondary compilation is unconfirmed.
- No month-by-month or court-by-court breakdown of the 279 exists in any source reviewed this pass — TRAC gives only the FY2025–FY2026 cumulative total.
- A full name-level roster of the 279 is not available from public records located this pass. Only 8 names (of 279) are confirmed via litigation/press coverage (immpolicytracking.org, see above); the remainder (~271) are undocumented at the individual level in the sources checked.
- “Fired” vs. “resigned” is not broken out — TRAC’s figure combines both categories without a published split, and no source reviewed states a specific judge resigned (as opposed to being fired) among the named individuals.
Related Entries
Sources & Citations
The Cascade Ledger. “TRAC Reports 279 Immigration Judges Fired or Resigned in FY2025–FY2026 (38% Turnover) as Asylum Denials Hit 94%.” The Capture Cascade Timeline, August 31, 2026. https://capturecascade.org/event/2026-08-31--trac-report-279-immigration-judges-fired-resigned-38-percent-turnover/