As the Trump administration carries out a wave of firings targeting U.S. immigration judges across the country, NBC Bay Area has confirmed through multiple sources that two Bay Area immigration judges were among those let go over the past week.
San Francisco Immigration Judge Ila Deiss was fired on Thursday and Concord Immigration Judge Kyra Lilien was fired last Friday, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
Like many of the immigration judges fired since President Trump took office, Lilien, appointed in 2023, was still within her two-year probation period with the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR).
Deiss, however, was appointed in 2017 and well past her probationary period, raising concerns her firing was politically motivated and that other longtime judges could soon get the ax.
“There’s no official explanation that I can point to,” said Milli Atkinson, Director of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Immigrant Legal Defense Program. “The concern is maybe these judges were not seen to align politically with the administration, and maybe that’s why they were targeted.”
Atkinson said she learned of Deiss’ firing yesterday, when an attorney who had a scheduled hearing in the judge’s courtroom was informed about the judge’s fate.
Like many Bay Area immigration judges, Judge Deiss and Judge Lilien grant asylum to respondents in immigration court at a higher rate than most of their national counterparts.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, Deiss granted asylum in about 92% of the cases that came before her between 2019 and 2024. Lilien, according to TRAC, granted asylum in about 76% of the 130 cases she decided over the same time period.
Atkinson said that likely puts the judges at odds with an administration seeking to carry out mass deportations, and their firings could be seen as a warning to their colleagues.
“That if they are not making decisions in a way that the current administration thinks that they should be, they’re at risk of losing their job,” Atkinson said.
Deiss and Lilien are far from the only casualties.
According to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), the union representing immigration judges, 17 immigration judges across 10 different states were fired “without cause” between last Friday and Monday of this week. Deiss’ firing yesterday raises the tally even higher.
“It’s outrageous and against the public interest that at the same time Congress has authorized 800 immigration judges, we are firing large numbers of immigration judges without cause,” said the union’s President Matt Biggs. “This is nonsensical. The answer is to stop firing and start hiring.”
According to the union, more than 100 judges have either been fired or voluntarily left since the Trump administration took office.
An EOIR spokesperson declined to comment on the latest round of firings, which comes after a similar wave of terminations shortly after President Trump took office.
The firing of judges comes as the U.S. grapples with a record backlog of roughly 3.5 million pending cases in immigration court, each one taking years to move through the system.
Atkinson said she’s never seen anything like it.
“We didn’t see a large-scale firing or veiled threats or memos coming down, pressuring judges to make decisions in a certain way that was favorable to the government,” Atkinson said. “Even during the first [Trump] administration, they were hiring judges, not firing judges. And then in the Biden administration, in the Bay Area specifically, they opened a whole new court so that there would be more judges available.”
The firing of judges isn’t the only way the Trump administration has toppled conventional norms at immigration court, according to immigration attorneys and advocates.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been arresting immigrants showing up for hearings in immigration courts across the country, something which only used to happen under extreme circumstances, such as serious public safety threats, according to attorneys.
One such arrest in San Francisco last week sparked a major clash between ICE agents and protestors outside the court on Montgomery Street.
NBC Bay Area has documented a number of these arrests on camera. According to Atkinson, more than 30 immigrants have been arrested in recent months at San Francisco immigration courts alone.
Source: NBC Bay Area
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