The Justice Department's move last week to fire at least eight immigration judges, including four from California, is raising fears among Democratic leaders, academics and others that the Trump Administration is chipping away at due process protections for immigrants.

"These firings made no sense," said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union representing the nation's 700 immigration judges. "When you do the simple math, each judge does 500 to 700 cases a year. Most of them are deportation cases. So what he's effectively done is he's increased the already huge backlog that the immigration courts face."

The Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, which runs the immigration court system, fired at least two dozen more immigration judges and supervising judges in February, including five from California courts, according to the judge's union. The administration also eliminated five in leadership positions at the EOIR and removed nine Board of Immigration Appeals judges appointed under Biden. An additional 85 professional court staff members — including 19 judges, interpreters, legal assistants and IT specialists took buyouts after receiving a "Fork in the Road" email that offered federal workers "deferred resignations."

In a memo sent out after the February firings, EOIR acting Director Sirce E. Owen said immigration judges do not have "multiple layers of removal restrictions" or civil service protection that had previously been given to them.

She referenced Justice Department Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle's statements that the agency was restoring "accountability so that the Executive Branch officials answer to the President and to the people."

"Unelected and constitutionally unaccountable (administrative law judges) have exercised immense power for far too long," Mizelle stated.

Biggs speculated that judges appointed to replace those who left could be "political loyalists."

"Do they intend to fire immigration judges because they don't rule on cases the way Donald Trump wants them to rule? he asked. "You can easily see a scenario where that could happen."

Thirteen judges who were in a probationary status have filed a class appeal to the U.S. Merit System Protection Board in Atlanta, claiming they were wrongfully terminated.

The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.

Unlike the federal district courts, the immigration courts lack the same level of judicial independence and their decisions can ultimately be overturned by the U.S. attorney general, though previous administrations have not widely used that power, said Alison Peck, author of "The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts: War, Fear, and the Roots of Dysfunction."

Legal scholars say the changes should be viewed against the larger backdrop of the administration's efforts to speed up the removal of immigrants. This month, the EOIR called on judges to terminate asylum cases in which applicants were deemed "legally deficient." The policy memo allows judges to fast-track and close cases without a hearing.

"They're experimenting with different ways in which to expel immigrants," said Sameer Ashar, a clinical professor of law at UC Irvine. He pointed to three recently detained university students who have been taken to a remote detention center in Louisiana, where they don't have easy access to representation. The administration invoked a wartime law to deport dozens more individuals who were alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, to El Salvador last month.

"We should regard all these efforts as experiments. In their effort to bring expedited removal to all, to the whole system," Ashar said. "It's part of the administration's attack on extending due process to immigrants in the U.S."

President Trump wrote on social media Monday that not everyone should be given the same rights before a judge, lashing out at the Supreme Court after it ordered a temporary pause on deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.

"We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years," he stated. "We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do."

The immigration courts are bottlenecked with 3.7 million pending cases. In California, according to Syracuse University's TRAC database, there are nearly 400,000 pending cases, with the state's largest backlog in San Francisco, where three judges were removed, and second largest in Concord, where another three judges were removed.

The backlog, says Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is partly due to the numerous hearings and extensions associated with immigration cases that can drag on for years. The administration is right to fast-track them, she said.

"The amount of due process that deportable aliens get is, what I would say, excessive," she said.

Ranking members of the Senate and House judiciary committees, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md, along with dozens of other Democratic lawmakers, urged the administration to reverse course in a letter sent in March. They asked U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to explain the administration's logic for firing so many judges and to lay out the depth of cuts inside the agency.

The lawmakers wrote that the absence of experienced assistant chief judges will harm the most pressing court cases — such as those dealing with detained individuals, families and children with credible fears of returning to their home countries — and further slow down any hearings for migrants applying to come in from Mexico, under the Remain in Mexico policy.

"These changes will lessen the quality of immigration case decisions and the speed at which immigration cases are adjudicated," the letter stated. One of the judges fired was in the middle of an asylum hearing and received notice via email and had to abruptly leave the proceedings, the letter stated.

Bondi has yet to respond, according to representatives for Durbin and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Immigration subcommittee.

"It is another tactic in the Trump administration's anti-immigrant, mass-deportation agenda that attempts to reshape our immigration system, including denying due process by increasing delays for individuals who are waiting for their day in court," Padilla said in a statement to The Times. "The courts have long struggled to keep up with a growing backlog of cases due to political meddling over the years. This most recent firing of immigration judges and professional staff members only makes matters worse."

Inside the court system, people are nervous, said Kerry Doyle. Appointed during the Biden administration as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney, Doyle was just about to complete a one-year judge training program in Massachusetts in February when she got an email that she would be let go.

Before being chosen as a judge, she had been a target of conservative groups. The American Accountability Foundation, a project of the Heritage Foundation, placed Doyle on a "DHS bureaucrat watchlist" that aimed to expose career staff in "league with left-wing open border groups."

"It's really hit the other judges in my old court hard that I was fired," she said. "People are doing really, really hard jobs and working really hard, and it's very hard to focus and do your work when you're not sure day to day if you're still going to be there, or to feel like things are happening and you don't know why or what may happen."

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