868: The Hand That Rocks The Gavel

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. This summer, three people from our show, Zoe and Nadia and Angela, spent weeks at immigration court in New York City, witnessing this extraordinary thing that you might have read about or heard about happening in the hallways there. And there was one group at the center of that thing that nobody ever got to hear from. They would not talk to reporters, until now, when they've been talking to us.

We had them on today's show. We're going to get to them in a few minutes. But first, Zoe Chace now joins me in the studio. Zoe, let's first describe what you witnessed at the courthouse.

Zoe Chace

OK, so we visited the courtrooms at 26 Federal Plaza downtown, and it's basically just a bunch of very old looking courtrooms. Normally, immigrants are coming in and out, going for their hearings in this place. It looks like it hasn't been redone since the '90s.

And now, you take the elevator. You get to the 12th floor. The doors open, and it's just crowded, like three or four different kinds of law enforcement-- ICE, DHS, FBI. I saw the diplomatic security service.

Ira Glass

Whatever that is.

Zoe Chace

Don't know. Plus reporters, a lot of photographers, activists, lawyers. Everyone's kind of huddled around one courtroom door, like a celebrity is going to come out of it. And the feeling of it, it's tense, and then it's boring. And then when somebody steps out of the courtroom, ICE surrounds them and handcuffs them and starts hustling them down the hall, and it gets very rushed, like an ER. Everyone's chasing them.

Zoe Chace

Volunteer lawyers are racing down the hallway after this guy, asking for a phone number for a family member they can call for him.

Zoe Chace

3, 4, 7, 3, 4, 7. Say more! I can contact your family! The guy says, I don't remember. He's pushed into the elevator.

Ira Glass

And just to be clear, these are people showing up at court. The government told them to. They're following the rules as part of this legal process, and then they are suddenly getting arrested in the hallway and thrown into detention.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. And we're doing so many of them here, it can feel almost routine. Between the detentions, the agents and the press and the lawyers are just standing around chitchatting about the podcasts they listen to or Lord of the Rings. And then something happens that almost reminds everyone of what we're doing here, no matter how many times we see it. It's one person's life turning completely upside down.

Like this one guy, his name was Luis, from Venezuela. He was around 50 years old. He'd actually entered the country legally at a port of entry. He broke no law. He was detained in the hallway, pulled into the elevator. His sister was with him, trying to follow him in. The doors closed in her face. She started jumping up and down.

Zoe Chace

Everyone just stood there, the agents hunched over. They seem miserable. Some look down at their shoes. The sister, Anyela, eventually tracked him down in New Jersey. He's still in detention there now.

Ira Glass

And were the judges in on this? They're having these cases, and then people are leaving the courtrooms and being taken away in the hallway.

Zoe Chace

We didn't know. But by the end of the summer, it didn't seem to matter what happened in the courtroom, what ruling the judges made. The agents were picking up whoever they wanted. And so we were like, what's going on with these judges? We really wanted to talk to them, but none of them would talk to us.

Ira Glass

Well, at first.

Zoe Chace

At first, but that changed because what was happening in the hallways was just part of this dismantling of the immigration court. There was all sorts of stuff happening on the inside, really in the guts of the place, that we could not see, that we didn't even know was there. And then, suddenly, the judges started talking.

Ira Glass

Talking and saying some stuff that is totally eye-opening, and that is going to be our show today. Today we're going to hear from people who we normally never hear from, immigration judges-- the people who are supposed to make the decisions about who stays and who goes in our country. And they are saying now that is becoming very hard to do in a fair way because of the way their jobs have changed in the last few months. Some of them are being told straight up what their decision should be.

Today they take us behind the curtain at the court. The robes come off. The judges get real. They talk about stuff that I have never heard was happening at all. To hear for yourself, stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. So like I was saying before the break, for months, no judge would talk to us. Then, this summer, they started talking because of what they're seeing behind the scenes at immigration court. Nadia Reiman talked to them. Here she is.

Nadia Reiman

It takes a very specific person to be an immigration judge, the kind that likes minutia, likes listening to hours of translations from Quiché to Spanish to English, just to get someone to confirm their mailing address. And obviously, you have to believe in rules. One main rule they have-- don't talk to the press.

I ended up talking to 15 judges from all over the country. Desperate times, I guess. George Pappas was one of them. He works at a court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, close to Boston-- a pretty new judge. He's been on the bench about two years.

An average day for him until recently was usually one of two kinds of hearings-- either a lot of quick, repetitive, boring hearings just to schedule the next hearing or a full asylum case.

Nadia Reiman

In those asylum hearings, a person would have to make the case that they cannot live anywhere in their home country because they're being persecuted due to their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or the ever so squishy membership in a particular social group.

Nadia Reiman

Rough going, but being chased by a loan shark doesn't make you a member of a particular social group, so you can't get asylum. Pretty clear cut. Jorge denied those cases.

Kyra Lilien, a judge from another court on the other side of the country-- Concord, in the Bay Area-- she also approaches her cases with a healthy level of skepticism, a discerning ear, because, you know, that's what she's supposed to do, and some people lie.

Nadia Reiman

So that's the job-- hearings. And the people appearing in these hearings in Kyra's court, day after day, broke down like this-- people who wanted to stay in the US, their lawyers, if they had one, interpreters, and Department of Homeland Security lawyers. And no matter what horror story from what corner of the world she hears from the bench, she keeps things calm and orderly, which is why I was so shocking when I showed up at her courthouse this summer, and she could hear the chaos right outside her courtroom.

Nadia Reiman

All the judges I talked to said they were on edge about ICE now being inside the building, just outside their doors in the hall. This was a huge change. And at the same time, things inside their courtrooms began to change, too. Jennifer Durkin is a judge at a courthouse on Varick Street in Manhattan.

Right around the time I showed up in New York, a DHS lawyer, a lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security, showed up for court. They are the side that represents the government, usually arguing to deport someone.

Two things were unusual that day-- first, DHS lawyers usually appear via video for this kind of routine hearing. This guy came in person. And second, he filed a motion to dismiss the case. In fact, he said to her--

Nadia Reiman

What was up was-- instead of arguing why a person should be deported, the government was like, we don't want to do that anymore. Instead, we want to dismiss the case, which, if you're the immigrant sitting there, can sound good. Like, great, I'm free!

But the problem is you didn't win your asylum case. Your case was dismissed. And the fact that you had a pending asylum case was the only reason you could stay in the country. Suddenly, with no pending case, you have no grounds to be here. And you're standing just a few feet away from ICE who are ready to detain you.

And the judges understood that better than the people in front of him. They were like, how can we just close this case? For what legal reason? It looked like a way to just trap people and detain them. The judges didn't know how to respond.

So some of them called their supervisors, who are also judges, known as ACIJs, Assistant Chief Immigration Judges. Jennifer Peyton-- she goes by Jenna-- is an ACIJ in Chicago supervising 22 judges, has been a judge for nearly a decade. She was about to board a flight when her phone rang.

Nadia Reiman

In other words, keep being a judge. Follow the rules and make your judgment. It seemed simple to her. Even if the government is asking for something weird, do your job like normal. In this situation, the practice is-- when one side moves to dismiss, you don't have to say yes right away. You can give the other side 10 days to think about it.

But then, about a week after that, immigration judges got an email from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, EOIR-- their bosses who work for the Trump administration. It was about the motions to dismiss. And it said, "You don't need to give immigrants 10 days to respond. You may grant them motions that DHS is asking for on the spot." Most of the judges I talked to read this as instructing them to grant all the motions to dismiss, to side with Homeland Security. Even though the email used the word "may," judges heard it as "shall."

Nadia Reiman

George went to his supervisor, another judge, immediately when this all went down.

Nadia Reiman

Some judges did just grant the motions, but George wanted to consider each request and rule according to each specific case. He didn't want to rubber stamp anything. So he looked up case law about how to deny these dismissals legally. And then he decided to share this info and stick it to his boss.

Nadia Reiman

Jennifer Durkin from New York didn't see it the way George did.

Nadia Reiman

And for a minute there, that was exactly what happened. She would rule on something based on what she thought was right, which was mostly denying motions to dismiss from the government, and ICE respected that. They didn't pick up people from those cases-- let them walk out. But then, all of a sudden, ICE changed their approach.

Nadia Reiman

OPLA, by the way, is what judges call the government attorney-- Office of the Principal Legal Advisor.

Nadia Reiman

To be clear, ICE had the legal authority to detain any immigrant whose case was pending. They just rarely used it. But now that it was happening so regularly, that brought up an existential question-- what is the point of the judge? Whether they granted the motions to dismiss, whether they denied them, it didn't seem to affect what happened to the people in their courtrooms either way.

Nadia Reiman

We have a big, complicated immigration system designed to answer a pretty simple question-- who can stay and who can't? And up until now, most immigration judges felt and acted like they were part of the judicial branch of government, an independent branch that just interprets and applies the laws. But they're not, not technically.

They're actually part of the executive branch within the Department of Justice. They work for the president. But till now, no administration has ever given them very direct orders about how to decide their cases. They weren't used to it, and they didn't like it. But the orders kept coming in the form of policy memos from their bosses at the Department of Justice-- a lot of policy memos, actually, that would start to transform immigration court from the inside.

Some targeted a problem that the Trump administration was blaming on Biden, the giant backlog of immigration cases on the books. Under President Biden, so many people entered the United States that the number of asylum cases exploded, which added to an existing backlog. The total is now more than 3.5 million pending immigration cases, with a comparatively tiny pool of judges to adjudicate them, under 700.

Immigration judges who worked under the first Trump administration figured they would be given quotas to deal with this. That's what happened last time. Close this many cases in this amount of time, move through that backlog as fast as humanly possible. But that didn't happen, not at first, anyway.

Instead, they got all the memos, like this one, that began this way-- "EOIR adjudicators have a duty to efficiently manage their dockets. It is clear from the almost four million pending cases on EOIR's docket that has not been happening." Sick burn. This memo was like, we're going to suggest that you change the way you do asylum cases in the first place. It told the judges to look at the initial asylum application, usually the first step in this long process, often filled out by hand by people without a lawyer. And if that had anything incomplete or incorrect, throw out the whole case. Don't even hear it. It was called "praetor mission of legally insufficient applications for asylum. Here's Kyra.

Nadia Reiman

The memos are explicitly furious with everything related to the Biden administration, saying basically that the Biden administration stacked both judge hiring and immigration court policy in favor of immigrants. And so many memos rescind Biden era policies to fix that.

They accused the judges, especially the newer ones, of being too into the immigrants, of being foot draggers and taking too long with this imperfect process that we have for ensuring immigrants get a chance to plead their case. There's one memo that was such an obvious dig at the judges, it was hard to miss.

Nadia Reiman

In other words, you judges think bias towards immigrants is OK, and you keep ruling in their favor instead of fully considering the arguments from the Department of Homeland Security. It also said, quote, "Judges who would prefer to be policy advocates favoring either aliens or DHS should consider transitioning to alternate career paths."

Nadia Reiman

I kept wondering if this impartiality memo actually did change something in the way judges acted? Did it seep into the courtroom in some way?

Nadia Reiman

I asked EOIR about the memos, if they were trying to get judges to decide cases in DHS's favor. They said that the, quote, "numerous policy memoranda were supposed to make the judges impartial again" and undue, quote, "over 20 policies that were unfounded in law or discourage the timely completion of cases." That's it. We also asked for interviews with the director of EOIR and officials at the DOJ about all the changes the judges told us about to get the administration's side of it. They turned us down.

Everywhere these judges turned, they seemed to be getting the message that the job as they knew it, that didn't exist anymore. ICE was grabbing people no matter what they said. They were getting these memos where they were both pressured and disrespected. And to be honest, they'd been living in an environment where a lot of them felt under threat since the beginning of the Trump administration.

Within hours of Trump taking the oath of office, the acting attorney general abruptly fired a bunch of the immigration bosses at the DOJ-- four of the top people. This had never happened before. There was no reason given other than pursuant to Article 2, basically, the president can decide everything that happens at DOJ. It was a loud, blaring signal to the immigration section that everything would be different this time.

Jenna is senior staff. She knew the four bosses who got fired, and it really freaked her out. Also she'd been put on this DHS watch list, this website funded by the Heritage Foundation. It calls out, quote, "America's most subversive immigration bureaucrats."

Jenna's picture was there, under Targets. So she felt like she was being watched. She wouldn't wear headphones when she walked the dog after that, asked the police to come and check in on her home. She started looking at all kinds of normal things with extra trepidation, like her Teams group chat, which was your typical office group chat where a bunch of work friends talk about the job, complain about the boss, get a little snarky.

Nadia Reiman

So she sees herself out of the group chat and finds that really soon, she gets FOMO, so she comes up with a workaround.

Nadia Reiman

This becomes a good Band-Aid. The immigration judges in Ass Crack Instant Jokes do the same thing they do in Teams-- send each other memes, gossip about work, until February 14.

Nadia Reiman

Actually, it was 20-- 13 judges-in-training and seven ACIJs, people at Jenna's level. Everyone left standing started doing the math, looking at people's records in the courtroom, being like, were they more likely to grant asylum than not? Is that why they got fired?

Jennifer Durkin in New York heard about the firings, and she was like, oh crap, the people getting fired are former immigration lawyers. Sounds a lot like me. It was overwhelming for the people who were left. Here's George.

Nadia Reiman

And before you think that all these judges who were feeling this way must be big asylum granters, not really. George, for example, denied like, 3/4 of his cases, but still he didn't feel safe. George packed up his office after the February firings, took everything off his walls so he'd be ready just in case. Three of the judges I talked to did this. The pressure caught up to each of them somehow.

Nadia Reiman

I don't know how to emphasize how hard these demands were on these judges. They felt completely squeezed between a duty to give the immigrants in their court a fair hearing and all that the DOJ was asking them to do. One judge told me they were feeling suicidal. Everyone talked about crying, crying at work, crying outside of work. I've never heard of so many judges crying.

Ira Glass

Nadia Reiman. Coming up, an immigration judge walks into a drag club. Actually, the judge doesn't walk into a drag club. He does not talk to the owner. That is the problem. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- The Hand That Rocks the Gavel. Nadia Reiman's story about immigration judges and the things that they are witnessing inside immigration court these days continues.

Nadia Reiman

Its Fourth of July weekend. Jenna, the boss judge, decides to go out with her family to a summer home they have on a river. It's nice, and it's rural. She leaves her government phone charging and isn't looking at it-- really wants to unplug. But at the end of the day, she gets tempted.

Nadia Reiman

Jenna had been on the bench for almost nine years. EOIR didn't say why they fired her.

A week after Jenna got fired, George in Massachusetts was approaching the end of his two year probationary period. That's the time before judges are made permanent, which is usually not even a question. Basically, everyone gets made permanent. The first batch of judges who got fired back in February, though-- it happened right at the end of their two-year probationary period. So George knew what was coming.

Nadia Reiman

Jennifer Durkin from New York got fired that exact same way-- short letter, end of the day, also was at the end of her two-year probationary period. And Kyra was also at the end of her two years. And out of all the firing stories I heard, hers was the nuttiest.

Nadia Reiman

Almost all of the 15 judges I talked to no longer work at the DOJ. A few retired when they were given the option, but most were just fired. None of them have real answers about why, beyond those short letters. Some have sued.

We asked EOIR about all these firings. They declined to comment. Under Biden, a small number of judges were also let go, and that was seen as political and scandalous then to many Republicans. It's fair to say, though, that the kind of mass reshaping that's happening now is on a different level.

Since the Trump administration began, more than 60 judges have been let go, and around 40 resigned, which means, that out of the roughly 700 judges we had pre-Trump, about 100 are gone. Recently, the administration has been talking about bringing in 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary judges to speed through the backlog. Sitting judges we've talked to say they're worried that these new judges won't get enough training, so they'll just rubber stamp anything the administration wants.

If all this sounds like the Trump administration is trying to reduce the power of the immigration court and bring it to heel, well, some people think that's way overdue. We talked to Scott Mechowski, former deputy head of ICE New York. He was the removal officer for 27 years.

His job was to find immigrants who were here illegally and deport them. And the way he sees it, the main thing that got in his way-- immigration courts. My colleague Zoe Chace talked to Scott.

Nadia Reiman

Say you're in court and you lose your case, Scott says. You're deportable. But they don't just throw you on a plane. You walk out of the courtroom. The government sends you a letter.

Dear so-and-so, you've been ordered deported on this date. Please show up at my office in 30 days with one bag weighing no more than 44 pounds for your removal. As you can imagine, most people don't show up. But if they were in detention, Scott says, easy-- ICE can just deport them.

So he says, anyone with an immigration case, let's just get them into detention and do the whole thing from there. The way former New York City immigration Judge Jennifer Durkin sees this, this is exactly what the memos and policy changes are adding up to.

Nadia Reiman

They'll self-deport because being in detention is terrible, even in the best of circumstances. Or if they don't, the government will do the job for them.

I spent a lot of time while I was reporting this story trying to put together the puzzle pieces and see what this all adds up to. What does the Trump administration want the immigration courts to be? In the end, I don't think it's that complicated.

Trump made a promise of mass deportations, so he's finding a way for the courts to not get in the way. His people are good at this sort of thing-- pulling any lever available to them, showing every institution exactly where their power ends. And if judges are the obstacle, like wrenches in the gears of the mass deportation machine, that's no problem. There are a few ways to put pressure on a judge to co-sign on deportations.

You can change procedure, the rules of the court. That's what the memos did. You can intimidate-- the firings, the threat of more firings coming up every few weeks. And there's one more cleaner, more direct and effective way if you run the DOJ-- change the case law, set new legal precedents, precedents that judges now have to follow, which is exactly what Trump's DOJ has been doing.

Since March, decisions have been coming fast and furious out of the Board of Immigration Appeals, setting new legal precedents for how things will work now. For example, the Trump administration has narrowed the kinds of cases that are eligible for asylum and made it much harder to prove them. Also maybe the biggest change-- any undocumented person, even if they have a legal case in process, even if they've been in the US for a decade, they can now be detained indefinitely.

Before, you could post bond and get out while you fight your case. Now, no more bond. Just detention, nothing but detention, potentially for millions of people. And in a big-picture way, there's no one left at the top to disagree with all these big changes. Because a month into the new administration, the DOJ removed nearly half the judges on the Board of Immigration Appeals-- everyone who'd been appointed under Biden, pretty much. So all this new case law now matches the Trump policy objectives almost completely. And the judges, of course, have to adhere to it.

So say this all works out the way the Trump administration seems to be hoping, and we start detaining more people and having them do their entire legal process from detention. What does that actually look like? What's the result when you put all these cases inside that used to be outside?

I want to tell you about one person who had to do this, had to navigate this new world of detain now, figure it out from there. It's a case from where we started-- New York. And the reason I want to take you through his story is because it illustrates the positive side of what the Trump administration is doing. His case speeds to a quick resolution, and it also illustrates the downside, which I'll get to.

I'm going to call this person David. He's an asylum seeker. David's from Ecuador. I talked with him on the phone. When I asked him about his life in New York, which was only five months, listen to the feeling. You can hear him smiling.

Nadia Reiman

David loved New York, like many gay men before him. He was happy here. Back in Ecuador, he actually ran this drag club.

Nadia Reiman

It's Time to Get it On-- that's the name of the place.

Nadia Reiman

Because he says, when you do drag, you get on your heels. You get on your wig and whatever else you want to get on. David told me that, in Ecuador, it's not an automatic death sentence to be gay like it is in some places. There's gay marriage, for example.

But for him, it got really bad there because he had dated a politician who was closeted. After they broke up, he came after David. David thinks he sent cops to harass him, smashed up his car. So David moved to the capital, Quito, to get away from this guy. And he says the politician and his people followed him-- beat him up so badly he woke up at the police station hours later, not knowing how he got there.

This was the moment that David thought, I'm not safe anywhere in Ecuador. He decided to leave. And he did everything our government told him to do in order to come here the right way. He entered the United States without breaking any laws.

He crossed at a border checkpoint, which is legal. He used the official government app to schedule his crossing, which is how we told immigrants to do it at that time. It meant he waited for months till it was his turn. And once he was here, he had permission to work. And now he was going through the required process to stay. It was all above board.

David has a sister who lives in New York. He's 33, number six out of nine siblings. He decided to go stay with her, live his New York dream. And he got a job he liked, doing marketing for a supermarket chain. And he met someone.

Nadia Reiman

David says, the first thing he remembers is he asked me if I could speak English, and I was like, nope. The man that would become his boyfriend didn't let that stop him. He sat on the sidewalk with David and Google Translate, and they talked for hours.

David was like, he's cute. They started dating. And then David gets his first immigration court date. It's a routine scheduling hearing at the courthouse downtown on June 4. He wants to be prepared. So ahead of time, he goes to a law clinic, gets help with his asylum application, makes two copies-- one for himself, one for the judge. But he was watching the news and started to see that ICE was picking up people in the courthouse. I was afraid to go, David says, but my boyfriend insisted. He was like, you want to do things the right way.

Nadia Reiman

So David wakes up the morning of his hearing, puts on his suit to go to work. He was hoping, if it all went well, it would just be a quick thing, and he'd go to work right after. And he heads downtown.

He says there were bad signs along the way. Like at breakfast, they wouldn't serve him and his friends. It took forever. And then he dropped all these napkins. They blew everywhere in the wind. It was like a dark omen.

When he finally got to court, he sat in the waiting room, went in front of the judge when it was his turn, offered the two copies of his asylum application, and the judge didn't take them. He heard the DHS attorney ask for his case to be dismissed. He heard the judge agree to the dismissal. Because he'd been watching the news, he knew what that meant. As soon as he walked out of the courtroom, ICE officers cuffed him and walked him to the elevator.

Nadia Reiman

I went into shock, he says. All I did was walk. I didn't know what was going to happen, what was happening. I didn't feel hot or cold or sadness or happiness, just nothing. They cuffed my waist, my feet, my hands, and they took me down to the parking lot.

Nadia Reiman

I tried every time I could to tell my boyfriend what was going on, David says. And the last message that I sent him, that he still can't forget, is when I texted him, they're taking me.

David got held on the 10th floor at 26 Federal Plaza in New York for three days. There's a holding cell there that's supposed to be temporary, but this summer has become the de facto detention center. And all reports out of there say that it is rank. David says it was so packed in there you could only sleep standing up.

David then got sent to a detention center in Newark, New Jersey. He would be there for about 10 days. While he was there, he kept asking ICE to let him do a credible fear interview, which is one of the first steps in the asylum process. He was like, I had my application. I'm afraid to return to Ecuador.

He says the ICE officers would just stare at him and not say anything back, or they would tell him to do it in writing, which he did. There was no response. He never got an interview-- just to say he's supposed to get one as soon as he asks. ICE is supposed to facilitate it, but that doesn't mean they always do.

And this, judges and immigration lawyers told me, is one of the biggest problems with having people pursue their cases from inside detention. ICE sometimes ignores the legal process, and the detainees don't have much access to a lawyer to force them to follow it. We asked ICE about all of David's claims, including how they ignored his request to get a credible fear interview. They didn't respond.

One day in June, ICE put David on a flight. He didn't know where he was going, and no one told him. He was brought to a detention center in Louisiana. Lots of people with cases from New York get sent down south to Louisiana and Texas, where judges are extremely strict; the case law is harsher against detainees, and there are more detention centers.

Nadia Reiman

There are so many people there, David says, so many. Tons of bunk beds in one giant room, and it was super dirty. It was unbearably hot, he says. Everyone hung out in their underwear because it was so hot.

Nadia Reiman

I was ready to put up with New Jersey, put up with that as long as I needed to, David says. But Louisiana, I didn't want to be in Louisiana one more second.

Nadia Reiman

He says he was ready to self-deport, but he didn't even think he'd have the right to do that. Two days later, ICE put him on another flight. Again, he didn't know where he was going. He found out when he landed. He was back in Ecuador.

As soon as he got to Ecuador, David went into hiding. He barely leaves his house, does all of his work from his phone or computer. He's scared his ex-boyfriend, the politician, will know where he is, which is why we can't tell you where in Ecuador he is, or his real name, because David is scared for his life now that our government returned him to the one country where he felt he was in the most danger.

David's lawyer told me David's asylum case, pretty solid. He was fleeing a government that was actively trying to harm him, and he has documentation showing what happened. He's exactly the type of case, she thinks, the law is designed to protect. And at the very least, it's a case that deserves a hearing in front of a judge to figure out what's right.

He never got to do that, though, because our government decided to sweep up all kinds of people-- some with weak cases, some with strong cases-- put them all in detention and leave them to figure out the legal process from there. So David's case went down the way the administration seems to want. It was decided quickly, and he was deported right away. The whole thing took about three weeks, but it only went so fast because we skipped the part where he got due process. This is what our new immigration system is starting to look like right now. This is what it's becoming.

Ira Glass

Nadia Reiman is one of the producers of our show. David, by the way, is now part of a lawsuit against the federal government about these courthouse detentions and due process. Just today, as we're finishing the show that you're listening to right now, we heard that five more judges got fired.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was reported and produced today by Nadia Reiman and Zoe Chace, with help from Angela Gervasi, who was edited by Laura Starecheski. The people who put together today's show include Michael Comite, Suzanne Garber, Cassie Howley, Seth Lind, Tobin low, Katherine Rae Mando, Steve Nelson, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swetala, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Kevin Gregg from Kurtzban Kurtzban Tetzeli and Pratt, Lindsey Gauzza, Cheryl David, Allison Cutler, Benjamin Remy, Jeremy deVine, Dana Leigh Marks, Elizabeth Young, Matt O'Brien, Brian Lonergan, RJ Hauman, Britney Dickerson, Jacob Martinez, Kristin Kepplinger, Lauren Kostes, and Heather Betz from the New York Legal Assistance Group, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Joseph Gunther, Caitlin Patler, Mary Georgevich and the National Immigrant Justice Center. Also thanks to all the other former immigration judges who talked to us about the court.

A reminder that if you sign up to be a Life Partner with our program, you get ad-free listening. You get bonus episodes, and you get an archive of over 250 greatest hits episodes right in your podcast feed. So anytime you need something to listen to, there's something good right there.

And of course, by becoming a Life Partner, you're helping us keep making this show, doing projects like this one where we're calling judges for months and months. To sign up, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. There was a farmer had a dog And Torey knows his name-o.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, Back, next week with more stories of This American Life.