A woman who was expecting to hear hundreds of immigration cases a year – but was fired by President Trump the week before she was supposed to start – said she expects the immigration “caseload will balloon.”
In Boston and other cities, immigration cases stacked up as migrant crossings along the U.S. southern border surged. While crossings have since come down, the case numbers will keep adding up, said Kerry Doyle, who anticipated hearing up to 700 cases a year regarding asylum, permanent residence and removal – until she was fired.
Immigration courts are already dealing with a backlog of about 4 million cases.
“Don’t forget that cases come into the system, not just from the border, but from the existing people that are in the United States,” Doyle said. “So as you ramp up removal … they’re getting put in front of the immigration judge, so that caseload will balloon.”
The Trump administration enacted a pause on all immigration applications filed by migrants from Latin America and Ukraine allowed into the United States under certain Biden-era programs, citing fraud and security concerns, according to an internal memo obtained by CBS News and two U.S. officials.
Days earlier, the president fired at least 20 immigration judges – Doyle among them.
CBS News asked the Department of Justice why Doyle and other judges were terminated. A spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters.
Doyle, however, said she expected this to happen because those who were fired “were sort of the last group coming in under the Biden administration.”
Doyle was an outstanding critic of the immigration system when she was an immigration attorney. That landed her on a conservative-backed group’s online watchlist of political appointees.
But Doyle said she took an oath to uphold the Constitution and do her job, not be an advocate like she used to be.
“That’s what I used to do when I was with the client in the courtroom,” she said. “Now I’m the decision maker and you need to listen to both sides and you need to weigh the case under the law and then act fairly to make decisions.”
contributed to this report.
