The Trump administration has graduated the largest class of immigration judges in history with 82 new judges who will tackle the millions of backlogged immigration cases left over from the Biden administration.
This month, the Department of Justice swore in 77 new permanent judges and five temporary immigration judges to dive into the backlog.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) announced the swearing in of the new judges on Thursday, in a statement noting that the new judges bring the number of immigration judges to 700.
The statement added that the EOIR has “hired 153 permanent immigration judges this fiscal year, the most in any single year in the agency’s history.”
“The Trump administration is committed to reestablishing an immigration judge corps that is dedicated to restoring the rule to the law in our nation’s immigration system,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement. “Today, we are onboarding the largest immigration judge class in agency history. This could only happen thanks to President Trump’s decisive leadership and commitment to securing our borders. I also applaud EOIR’s leadership team for helping facilitate these hiring efforts and recruiting highly qualified and talented personnel in record time.”
The judges were sworn in on May 20, 2026, at the Department of Justice’s Great Hall in Washington, D.C. The department esplained:
Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for the agency. Since January 20, 2025, EOIR has completed more than 1.08 million cases and has reduced its pending caseload in immigration courts by more than 447,000 cases, bringing the pending caseload down from approximately 4 million to under 3.53 million, the sharpest decrease in caseload in EOIR’s history.
The newly minted judges come on the heels of the DOJ’s move to fire dozens of immigration judges for adjudicating based on politics and not the law and for approving far too many immigration requests.
Early this month, Blanche defended the policy, saying that judges need to adjudicate based on the law, not their “whims.”
“You take an oath and you’re not allowed to make decisions based upon what appear to be just sympathy or your whim,” Blanche said, according to ABC News.
Still, Blanche also noted that the Trump DOJ has moved forward quickly to plow through the Biden-ear backlog of immigration cases.
“We have almost 500,000 cases that were processed last year. That’s extraordinary,” he told the Appropriations Committee this week.
Since he started his second term, Trump’s deputies have sharply reduced the win rate by economic migrants in asylum courts, ensuring that only 10 percent of migrants won their asylum claims in December 2025.
Under President Joe Biden, slightly more than 50 percent of migrants won their cases for asylum in the fall of 2023, even though most were economic migrants and did not face government persecution.
Asylum wins are important because they allow illegal migrants to compete against Americans for wages and housing, to get green cards, file for citizenship, and put their back-home family relatives on the chain-migration waiting list. Roughly 2.3 million migrants have asylum cases, amid an imported population of at least 15 million illegal migrants.
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