Karen Donoso Stevens had been an immigration judge for nearly a decade, and a Homeland Security prosecutor for a decade before that. She denied most of the asylum claims she heard and met her deadlines. Months earlier, on her account, a supervisor told her that unnamed higher-ups wanted four bond decisions she had already issued reversed, and that she was to vacate them herself, on her own motion, because the government would not be filing anything.
Gwen and Marc set that account aside from the question of who’s telling the truth and look at the structure it happened inside. Almost everything in this story runs on powers nobody disputes the executive branch has. Immigration judges are appointed by the attorney general, work in the Justice Department, and have none of the protections administrative law judges nominally hold. Their dockets can be reassigned. The Board of Immigration Appeals can reverse them. The attorney general can refer a case to himself and decide it. There is one thing that structure is not supposed to permit, and it is the thing alleged here.
In this episode:
• The regulation that calls immigration judges delegates of the attorney general and tells them to exercise independent judgment in the same breath
• Why that isn’t a contradiction, and where the difference lies between exercising authority through the system and reaching into a pending case
• Marcello v. Bonds, and the Court’s acceptance of adjudication inside the attorney general’s chain of authority
• Accardi v. Shaughnessy: the attorney general denies himself the right to sidestep the board while his own regulations remain in force
• Why Accardi reaches well past immigration, and what it doesn’t stop the attorney general from doing tomorrow
• Accardi’s epilogue, where the doctrine survived and the man was still deported
• The scale: roughly 700 judges, about as many as there are federal district judgeships, a backlog past four million cases, and no appointed counsel
• Why a credibility finding is often the entire asylum case
• Matter of Yajure Hurtado and what it changed about bond for people who entered without inspection
• The gap Donoso Stevens thought the board had left open, and whether disagreement about an undiscussed category is defiance
• Case completion quotas, performance reviews, and the cumulative pressure problem from last season, against something far more direct
• A termination letter citing Article II, nine months before pension eligibility, a month after the highest available performance rating
• The Article I immigration court proposal, the case against it, and why the votes aren’t there
• Smaller fixes, including the one that costs nobody any authority: put any direction about a pending case in writing, in the file
Source: This episode discusses reporting by the Washington Post: “How a respected U.S. immigration judge lost her job under Trump,” October 25, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/10/25/how-respected-us-immigration-judge-lost-her-job-under-trump/