~New “deportation judges” (military lawyers + ex-ICE) are ordering removals in 77% of cases in L.A. — asylum grant rate collapsed to 2.7%.
~Due process is officially gone: rushed hearings, no interpreters, skipped rights, decisions made before court even starts.
~Mass judge firings, courthouse arrests, and fear tactics mean 57% of people in L.A. now miss their hearings and get deported without ever stepping into court (up from 14% last year).
In a Southern California detention facility, a man sits alone in a padded cell facing a Webex camera. He has been locked up for nearly a year waiting for this hearing.
On screen are Los Angeles' first "deportation judge," Gabriel Bradley, and a DHS prosecutor. His lawyer joins from her office in Los Angeles.
This man has not been charged with a crime. L.A. TACO is withholding his and his attorney's identifying details because of the risk of retaliation.
Before the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) took his case, he was hauled to court dozens of times, woken before dawn and shackled, only to be reset for lack of an interpreter. His credible fear interview was marked "failed" after it was conducted in English.
The one time out of dozens an interpreter was provided, he was advised of his rights and handed a list of pro bono attorneys. Then his case was reset and he was sent back to his cell to wait for the next hearing without any way to reach the lawyers on that list.
ImmDef says there were problems from the start. While the court normally gives at least 30 days to prepare for a merits hearing, an intricate, evidence-driven process, his attorney was given less than two weeks. In seven years of practice the ImmDef attorney says, "I've never seen merits set that quickly."
Before anyone sees the judge, the court is supposed to address any requests from either side, explain the charges, advise the person of their rights, and put all the evidence on the record. ImmDef says they skipped it because DHS had already decided the case.
"Marking of evidence, advisals of rights, different things that should have happened at the beginning either didn't happen or kind of were lumped in at the end," the ImmDef attorney says. "The decision came first, and the process came second. That's not due process."
600 Pentagon Lawyers, ICE Veterans Tapped as ‘Deportation Judges’
In September, Pete Hegseth authorized 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges. Others are recruited from ICE and CBP. About 50 have already joined the bench, at least two that we know of in L.A.
DOJ is also recruiting on social media. One ad featured a Judge Dredd cartoon captioned "deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens." The DOJ website lists a salary of roughly $200,000, with a 25 percent bonus for working in L.A. The seven-year immigration law requirement dropped.
The ads promise what they call "generational consequences" and seek judges who will "remove aliens" and "restore integrity and honor to our Nation's Immigration Court system."
We asked DOJ what they meant by "generational consequences." They responded to our email, but did not address the question directly.
Daren K. Margolin, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), is hiring them. Margolin served as ICE counsel in Adelanto and then as an immigration judge until he retired out of "disgust" with the previous administration's immigration policies, which he called "treason."
He says the ads received 1,700 applications, and will personally interview every hire. He is also pushing to make it harder to appeal a deportation order. And the first wave will start imminently.
Margolin was a security officer at Marine Base Quantico, where he was dismissed for firing his M9 into the office floor in 2013, according to UPI.
A Marine spokesperson said Margolin was removed because he had lost the confidence of leadership.
EOIR's website lists Margolin as a member of the State Bar of California. As of Feb. 28, the State Bar shows his license as inactive.
Bartlomiej Skorupa, chief operating officer of Mobile Pathways, an immigration tech nonprofit that tracks asylum cases through federal data, estimates fewer than 3 percent of people asking for asylum in January got to stay. A year earlier the rate was 18 percent.
Mobile Pathways focuses on asylum cases because they represent roughly 70 percent of the immigration court caseload. A wrong outcome means being sent back to face serious harm.
L.A.’s First ‘Deportation Judge’ Orders Removal in 77 Percent of Cases
Judge Bradley arrived in Los Angeles in late October 2025, the first assigned to L.A. He was a Navy Reserve judge advocate who most recently served as a deputy attorney general in Los Angeles.
Federal data shows in Bradley's first two months, about 77 percent of the people who came before him, about 100 people, left with an order to leave the country, either by removal order or "voluntary departure."
Across all military judges, 41 percent of cases end in voluntary departure.
ImmDef gives reason to doubt how voluntary these agreements are. “We absolutely have firsthand accounts and evidence and reports that people are signing either voluntary departure or withdrawing claims in order to be removed and get out of detention ... that is happening very frequently.“
Judge Bradley’s numbers are below the deportation judge average and he has not deported anyone to a country they’re not from, but his rate is still far above the career immigration judge average.
L.A. TACO asked DOJ in what circumstances judges are allowed to grant relief, including asylum. Again, they did not answer the question.
In February, a second deportation judge, Jonathan Driscoll, joined the L.A. bench. His numbers aren't public yet.
Over a Quarter of Career Judges Fired or Pushed Out
Over a quarter of immigration judges have been fired or pushed out. NAIJ's most recent count is 103 fired, and an almost equal number who left voluntarily. By the time this goes to press, the number will likely be higher.
San Francisco, once the busiest immigration court in the state, had 21 immigration judges. Now it has four.
DOJ told the court it would be shuttered by the end of this year. The building is up for lease.
"There were many fired, or have been encouraged—and I don't know to what extent it was completely voluntary or not—to take early retirement," says Shira Levine, who served as an immigration judge in San Francisco since 2021.
"But what's happening now is the vast majority of judges who have not been fired, who remain on the bench, are granting these motions," she says.
Levine says some of the judges who remain are trying to follow the law, but they know "their colleagues have been terminated." They know they're in "a system that is trying to control them,"—not one “created to support fair and independent judgment."
Levine let people stay in about 98 percent of her asylum cases. She was removed.
"We're seeing an immigration court system completely implode," Levine says.
Judges Are Sending Asylum Seekers to Countries They’ve Never Been To
“Rather than hear someone’s asylum claim of why they’re afraid to return to their home country, the judge is saying, ‘I’m going to send you to Honduras unless you can prove to me why you’re more likely than not to suffer persecution in Honduras,’” Levine says.
These are called motions to pretermit.
The person in court may know nothing of Honduras and have no way to prove it. Levine says: “The judges are saying that it's out of their hands, that they're actually not allowed to deny the department's motions, which runs counter to everything that Congress has enacted with its laws.”
Skorupa says granted pretermits were once rare but have “skyrocketed under this administration.” DHS is filing them in courts around the country.
"It's never been a particularly fair process for immigrants," ImmDef says. "But at least there was an attempt at maintaining judicial neutrality. … At this point the judges are just rubber stamping DHS policies."
We asked DOJ, EOIR, and DHS about third-country deportations, the directives given to judges, and why Los Angeles's abandonment rate is three times the national average. A Justice Department spokesperson responded on behalf of DOJ and EOIR. DHS did not respond.
The "abandonment rate" is the percentage of people who never show up to their immigration court hearing—so the judge automatically orders them deported without ever hearing their case.
"After four years of the Biden Administration forcing Immigration Courts to implement a de facto amnesty for hundreds of thousands of aliens, this Department of Justice is restoring integrity to our immigration system."
L.A. Asylum Case Abandonments Hit 57% in January, Up From 14% a Year Earlier
Federal courts in several states have issued injunctions against ICE courthouse arrests. California law prohibits them, but without a district court injunction or enforcement, ICE continues to take people out of L.A. courts.
Skorupa estimates that about 1 in 100 immigration court hearings end in an arrest. Miss one, “and it is 99 percent that you do not go to your hearing. An order for your removal is going to be issued. You're going to be ordered deported,” he says.
Across Southern California's detention facilities like Adelanto, California City, Otay Mesa and Imperial Regional, conditions have drawn federal lawsuits and civil rights complaints. Detainees have died in custody.
At Otay Mesa, they have thrown handwritten notes over fences describing sickness and substandard conditions. Last week, Imperial's first congressional oversight called conditions “inhumane.”
Before Trump, about 8 percent of cases nationwide were marked abandoned. By the end of 2025, the national average had more than doubled. In Los Angeles it was 42 percent by year’s end, and 57 percent this January.
"That is something wider," Skorupa says. “The data can tell us who appeared and who did not, but it cannot show what fear does beforehand, especially when ICE is present in the courtroom and someone decides it is simply too dangerous to enter.”
In Immigration Court, There Is No Public Defender
In immigration court, “you have a right to an attorney, but at your own expense,” the ImmDef attorney says.
"On any master-calendar day, dozens and dozens of people represent themselves, you see children, small children representing themselves in court, asking for more time to find an attorney because, obviously, it's very difficult," says the ImmDef attorney.
Though DHS has kept the ImmDef client detained for well over a year, he has never had a bond hearing. They have made no argument that he is a flight risk or a danger to anyone. And like most, he has never been convicted or charged with a crime in any country.
Immigration court data and graphs provided by Mobile Pathways unless otherwise mentioned.
