San Franciscoโs immigration court will lose three more judges, after two of them are set to retire and a third was fired on Friday.
Immigration judge Arwen Swink was terminated this afternoon by the Department of Justice, according to three court sources. That leaves just seven judges on the court today. Three more will retire by the end of January.
That would mean the court, which started 2025 with 21 judges, will soon have just four. San Francisco has the worst backlog of any immigration court in California, and nationally there are 3.4 million cases in the backlog.
Between fiscal years 2020 and 2025, Swink, who was fired on Friday, granted asylum at a rate of 77.9 percent, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse from Syracuse University.
Milli Atkinson, the head of the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, said today that judges Howard Davis and Charles Greene will also retire in the coming months.
President Donald Trump has fired more than 100 immigration judges across the country, though San Francisco appears to be one of the heaviest courts hit.
Judges with high grant rates, like fired judge Shira Levine, face a higher risk of being targeted by the administration. Levine said that immigration judges would receive memos from the administration telling them to โconsider becoming a policy advocate for aliensโ or to โget another jobโ if they used a creative argument to help a non-citizen in their case.
Swink is the 13th judge to be fired this year. Earlier in November, the Trump administration fired five judges in one day, the largest cut to the court in 2025.
Correction: This piece has been updated to note that the court will have four judges left by the end of January, not the end of the year.
How dare they try to help people stay?
It’s not like they commit crime at far lower rate here than American citizens.
“Levine said that immigration judges would receive memos from the administration telling them to โconsider becoming a policy advocate for aliensโ or to โget another jobโ if they used a creative argument to help a non-citizen in their case.” Huh? Creative arguments? Judges are supposed to LISTEN to arguments, not make them. Did this ridiculous judge (who approved 98% of her cases!) have any comprehension at all that she was supposed to be impartial? How are we supposed to have any confidence in this joke of an immigration court when we hear stories like this? Trump is right to shut it all down.
This is good news for the United States. He was letting in 77.9% of economic “asylum” seekers. A turnstile could do that. No judge is better than a bad judge.
Whoever appointed clowns like this was having a big joke at the expense of the American people.