Adding to the pile of lawsuits from fired immigration judges, a California attorney is suing the Trump administration's Department of Justice (DOJ) and alleging she was "terminated in retaliation for her whistleblowing activity."
Immigration judges, unlike federal U.S. district judges, circuit judges, and Supreme Court justices, do not have lifetime jobs and are not part of the judicial branch. Rather, they serve in the executive branch and are appointed by the U.S. attorney general after a "full background investigation."
To propel its mass deportation campaign forward, the Trump administration has recruited "deportation judges" and reportedly ousted more than 100 immigration judges along the way.
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Chloe Dillon's complaint, filed Thursday, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, began with a quote from George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
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"If liberty means anything at all," the quote said, "it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
Dillon maintains that her firing shows she was robbed of that right approximately 48 hours after she raised concerns to a supervisor that ICE may have "unlawfully detained" a minor.
The lawsuit said Dillon received "excellent reviews" for her work as an immigration judge in San Francisco from September 2022 until August 2025, during which she...
In a 2017 piece in The New York Times, voting expert Ari Berman wrote, “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed tactics that prevented blacks, Hispanics and other minority groups from voting. But fo...