Nicholas Nehamas

that Trump is pushing through the immigration courts.

And in fact, these changes have led to a reduction in the enormous backlog of cases.

And when our story came out, the White House actually put out a press release touting it as evidence of how much its policies are working.

Exactly.

But to Judge DeAndre, who very much thinks the system needs fixing, this is just not the right way to do it.

Because at this point, the cat is out of the bag, and presidents from both parties could now treat this immigration court system as a purely political tool to execute whatever their agenda is.

And the fact that Trump is mostly operating within the system is a sign to her of what's fundamentally wrong with the system.

And what she and many other judges have come around to is advocating for a system that is more independent of the executive branch than we've ever seen before.

That's a great question.

And there has been legislation put forward in Congress to accomplish this.

But you're right.

It would require a president to give up a tremendous amount of power that they have over immigration policy.

Exactly, yeah.

He has very little incentive to empower more obstacles to his policy goals.

There's no other legal system in the United States that operates like this, where judges on the one hand are having to make, you know, really life and death decisions for people about who gets to stay in the country, about who might be a danger to others in the country, while facing down this political pressure from above.

And to Judge DeAndre, this is not why she became an immigration judge.

She became an immigration judge to keep the country safe and to give people who deserve it the chance to become an American.

And right now, she doesn't see that kind of impartial justice being carried out.

You know, these judges wear robes, but they are not part of the judicial branch.

They are not independent.