Judge Holly D’Andrea

I think that everybody just assumed we would probably go back to Trump won.

And so we knew where the policies were going and we just adjusted like we would normally do.

And honestly, we were pretty much right for the first couple of months.

So I think a lot of the judges thought like, oh, we're a part of immigration.

We have a 3.2 million case backlog.

Why would they fire any of us?

They need us all, right?

Well, we were wrong.

Well, the first firings were of the higher-ups.

And I think most of the people at that time were kind of like, well, it's the director and the chief judge.

Like, that's kind of your highest people in the organization.

It's not really unusual for a president to come in.

But I think judges started to get scared when Tanya Niemer was fired.

You know, at that point, I think we were still trying to reason through things.

The first mass firing, I think everyone was like, what just happened?

Just, like, shock.

And then after that, it was like every couple of weeks we were getting mass firings of judges, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 judges at a time.

And a lot of those judges were like walked off the bench in the middle of the day.

So they were locked out of the computer systems.

So they couldn't get.