San Francisco immigration judge Jeremiah Johnson, 52, learned that he had been fired when he got an email from Attorney General Pam Bondi on a Friday in November.
Thirty seconds later, administrators locked his email. He became one of the 104 judges fired by the Trump administration. No reason was given, though immigration attorneys and advocates hypothesize that the administration targeted judges because of “perceived bias.”
“It was surreal and also made me feel disappointed in the immigration system,” said the 52-year-old judge, who had been working at the downtown San Francisco immigration court for eight years, and practicing immigration law for more than 20.
Instead of feeling debilitated, he felt free to do something he had long wanted to do: travel to the U.S.-Mexico border to see what it is like for immigrants coming into the United States — the very people who would stand before him in court to plead their case for why they should be allowed to stay in America.
Johnson was also interested in the impact of border crossings on local communities. So in late January, he flew to Tucson, Arizona, rented a car and, over the next 10 days, hiked trails along the border, visited shelters and churches, and chatted up local residents and Border Patrol agents.
“People agree a lot more than they disagree,” Johnson said, reflecting on his trip. And he found the border itself to be “kind of beautiful and quiet,” even as “people are continuing to die” crossing it.
For Johnson, his trip reinforced his legal philosophy that immigrants applying for asylum are not numbers or forms, but human beings, each with a unique story.
At a shelter in Nogales, Mexico, near the border wall that separates Nogales and Arizona, he sat in a cafeteria and shared pork, peppers and warm tortillas with a Mexican migrant named Jaime.
Just three days earlier, Jaime had been deported after being detained in the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in the Everglades National Park outside of Miami, Florida.
For the first time, Johnson was able to talk to the migrant not as a respondent in his courtroom, but as a peer.
“He was quite intelligent about economics and the housing market,” said Johnson.
During another moment on his trip, Johnson participated in a prayer vigil at the border between Arizona and Mexico to honor those who had died trying to cross into the United States.
Along the smog-filled roadway at the entrance to the border, he and other participants held white wooden crosses for the migrants who had died, many from starvation or dehydration. Some of the dead are never identified, but their bodies are recovered and, when possible, repatriated.
For those whose names were known, Johnson and others said “Presente!” after each one.
“It was powerful, it was part of that humanity, it can be uncomfortable, but it is incredibly powerful to allow yourself to feel and think about the person and the family who may or may not know what happened to the person,” he said.
For many of the 10 days, Johnson would hike the trails around the border, taking in the flora and fauna. He saw not only the beauty of the desert, but also signs of those trying to cross: Empty water bottles, discarded backpacks and clothes.
And then there were the walls that now line around 650 miles of the 1,954-mile border. At first sight, he had a hard time imagining that anyone could actually scale it.
They do, a border control agent later told him.
The quiet of the desert also surprised him, especially in contrast to the underlying violence and contention there.
Each day, he wrote in a journal, reflecting on what it means to have borders.
“Where nature has made whole, man has put asunder. In our scientific efforts to understand and categorize the world we inhabit; we have created differences where we should have been fostering similarities,” he wrote in an essay published in The Border Chronicle.
“Here, a slip can end dreams and hopes with a sudden fall.”
Credit: Clara-Sophia Daly
One day after hiking the trails, Johnson returned to his hotel, looked at himself in the mirror, and found a thorn sticking out of his cheek.
“I had a little thorn sticking out of my cheek, but imagine if you were out there for two, three, four days,” he said.
At dive bars along the border, he talked to long-time residents.
“People in the towns were not anti-immigrant,” he said. Instead, their complaints were more pedestrian: Traffic at border checkpoints, cuts in fences that let cattle out.
In Douglas, Arizona, he had coffee with a retired border patrol officer.
The former border agent “shared stories about how he, you know, stopped criminals from coming into the United States,” said Johnson.
“Would you just look the other way if someone committed fraud?” he recalled the border patrol agent asking.
“No,” replied Johnson.
The agent had preconceived notions that immigration judges are people who look away and tend to grant asylum. Johnson granted 90.4 percent of the asylum cases that came before him.
But they each talked about their careers working within the immigration system, and they each felt heard, even meeting up a second time for breakfast at the former border patrol agent’s home.
“When people sit down for coffee or sit down or go out for a hike … there’s a respect for each other,” he said.
Now, back in San Francisco, and without a job, Johnson will return south in April, but this time to the border between Mexico and Guatemala, where the United States has encouraged the Mexican government to stop migrants before they reach the U.S. border.
Wow, Judge Johnson is a very good man.
I wish him a lot of luck in his future endeavors- there are a lot of opportunities for someone like him. Thank you for this beautiful article, on a truly beautiful person.
Judge Johnson’s search for meaning in the wake of being ignominiously fired is commendable.
Pam Bondi too was fired. Why?
Patrick Martin in an article appearing today at the World Socialist Web Site gives three reasons:
1. Her handling of the Epstein scandal blew up in Trump’s face to threaten his political survival.
2. She failed to weaponize the Justice Department against his most hated enemies. (Her acting replacement appears to be more amenable to doing that.)
3. She was unsuccessful at pursuing legal cases brought against the illegal and unconstitutional actions taken by the Trump administration since he reentered the White House last year. (For example, some of the DOGE firings have been reversed by the court.)
The law, as laid down in the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights mean absolutely nothing to the criminal administration in power.
In spite of its setbacks, it forges ahead and operates with impunity because its timid “opposition” is more worried about winning back Congress in the Fall– in spite of every indication that Trump will disrupt the election in his favor.
The Democratic Party’s leadership and the nationalistic trade union bureaucrats fundamentally favor the imperialist directions Trump is taking.
That’s very nice, but a 90% grant rate is preposterous. To be granted asylum, one must be a refugee, someone “persecuted” because of some protected class membership. People come to the border and apply for asylum as a matter of course. It beggars belief that 90% have suffered “persecution” (which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has called an “extreme” concept) because of some immutable characteristic they possess. Instead, they have come – rationally – for economic reasons. Wanting a better life is understandable, but the lack of that better life does not a refugee make.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/12/04/sf-immigration-judges-fired-asylum-data/
Historically, the Bay Area has a lot of legal resources for people who are seeking Asylum that is lacking almost anywhere else.
It’s not surprising that they prepare well before they have a case for asylum, in front of the judge.
That does not mean “they have come – rationally – for economic reasons.”