Judge David Kim was on the bench for a merits hearing on an asylum case at 26 Federal Plaza Thursday afternoon when he received an email informing him he’d been laid off, “effective today.”
“I had to stop the hearing,” he recalled.
Kim was one of two immigration judges, both immigrants themselves, in New York City who spoke with THE CITY on Friday about their abrupt terminations and the grim and chaotic months leading up to them, as masked ICE agents lurked in the immigration courts arresting people attending previously routine proceedings.
The other, Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, received her termination notice last month.
“All I’ve ever done is immigration,” Rey Caldas said, describing her own immigration to the United States from Spain at age 11, and having to report to 26 Federal Plaza regularly to handle paperwork with her mother while growing up in Queens.
“Immigration is very much my area of expertise, but it’s also my area of deep interest, and that interest arises initially from my own personal experiences as an immigrant to New York.”
The layoffs come as the Trump administration is racing to reshape the nation’s immigration courts, firing some judges while also reassigning hundreds of military judges to serve there to try and cut down an historic backlog, with more than 3.7 million cases pending.
A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), declined to comment on the layoffs. This week, EOIR announced it has reduced the backlog by nearly a half a million cases since Trump took office.
A spokesperson for International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union representing immigration judges, described the situation — that military judges with limited training are being asked to step in even as more than 100 immigration judges with years of experience have been fired or accepted deferred resignations since Trump took office — as “absurd.”
“They’re planning two weeks of training for military attorneys who have zero immigration experience, zero experience with juveniles,” a spokesperson said. “It’s going to open the door to a lot of appeals. It may even slow the backlog.”
Kim, who immigrated from South Korea at age 16, said the recent layoffs seemed to fly in the face of the effort to curb the backlogs.
“If you keep firing immigration judges who are fully trained and experienced, how can you expect to reduce the backlogs,” Kim wondered. “It’s only going to worsen the backlogs.”
It’s unclear why Kim and Rey Caldas were targeted for layoff, and neither was offered any rationale beyond a letter they received that cited Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president broad authority over personnel matters within the executive branch. Both had passed their two-year probationary window, before which judges are typically more susceptible to termination.
Kim had the highest grant rate for asylum cases among New York City immigration judges, according to TRAC, which compiled data through 2024, while Rey Caldas had drawn right-wing ire in 2022 for tweets and public statements made when she was an advocate critical of ICE during the first Trump administration’s crackdown. Before becoming an immigration judge in 2022, she worked in nonprofits on legal advocacy for survivors of domestic violence, while Kim worked in private practice as an immigration attorney.
In the weeks leading up to Rey Caldas and Kim’s firing, both described the status quo of courts upended by ICE’s presence in the courthouse hallways day in and day out.
Federal agents detain a woman after her immigration court date inside 26 Federal Plaza was postponed, July 24, 2025. Credit: Madison Swart
“It was chaos,” Kim said.
Rey Caldas recalled watching people have panic attacks inside her courtroom, and both former judges noted that fewer and fewer people showed up to court as fear spread across immigrant communities about the rise of being arrested at court, as THE CITY previously reported.
“There were days where I would order 40 people removed in absentia out of a docket of 60,” she said. “These numbers were much higher than they had been in November and December, so one can speculate.”
Rey Caldas said she got through it by assuring people in her court room they would have due process and a fair hearing.
“Most of us understand that there are things that are outside of our control. We can’t control whether or not someone is able to have their hearing at liberty or whether they have to have a hearing detained,” she said.
The only thing within her control, she continued, was to “ensure that you are given due process. We ensure that the law is followed and adhered to and that you are treated with respect that is within our control.”
Rey Caldas said she feared her and Kim’s firings were a harbinger of more presidential encroachment on the idea of independent judges.
“If you think that this is going to stop with immigration judges, you’ve got another thing coming,” she said. “The world that we are potentially facing is one where there is no longer even the specter of judicial independence.”
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