It didn’t take Eva Saltzman very long to pack up a decade’s worth of material from her tenure as an immigration judge.
Less than 24 hours after she received an emailed termination notice in the middle of a hearing, Saltzman stood with a carful of office supplies, art and certificates, trying to think through the fact that her time on the bench had come to an end.
She is one of two judges fired Thursday from Chicago’s Immigration Court, which has seen seismic changes since President Donald Trump returned to office. The local court has recently become the national leader in deportation orders.
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Saltzman had been with the court since 2016; one of the items she brought home Friday was the framed certification bearing then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s signature. The second judge fired Thursday, Elizabeth Crites, had been there since 2021.
According to the National Association of Immigration Judges, another judge was fired in June, continuing a wave of firings, resignations and buyouts from the Chicago bench as Trump, who has direct oversight of the country’s immigration courts, seeks to reshape them in the image of his hard-line agenda.
Advocates, attorneys and ex-judges all say the changing lineup on the immigration bench, combined with changes to many of the basic elements that define the life of an immigration case, have all helped transform Chicago’s court into the national epicenter of removal orders: from issuing 35 a day on average during President Joe Biden’s final year in office to more than 125 a day this year.
Jeremiah Johnson, the executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges and himself a recently terminated judge, referred to the exodus as a “purge” and added in a message to the Tribune that the firing of “experienced immigration judges without cause is another example of the attack on the independence of our immigration courts.”
A representative with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the country’s immigration courts as part of the U.S. Department of Justice, said the office didn’t comment on personnel matters.
Crites, reached by phone, confirmed she’d been fired but made no other comment.
Saltzman, for her part, said she had been stunned by the firing, but not necessarily surprised.
“I’ve served as an immigration judge for the last decade, and, under this administration, I continued to do my job the way I’ve always done it, giving careful consideration to each case and applying the law to each case,” she said. “And I’ve long anticipated that under this administration, performing my duties in this way may result in my termination.”
That said, she continued, there had been no immediate warning signs that she was about to be terminated.
On Friday morning, outside the Loop high-rise that’s home to most of Chicago’s immigration proceedings, Saltzman thought about what the rest of the day might look like. She’d have dinner with one of her daughters and some friends, she said. There would be more time to train for an open-water sprint triathlon, the first she’s attempted.
Saltzman’s time with the court coincided with explosive growth in the country’s national immigration caseload. But over the last few months, the court in some ways became busier still as Trump administration officials pushed to cut down a case backlog still topping 3 million, per the immigration data clearinghouse TRAC.
The Tribune reported earlier this month how Chicago’s immigration court had become the national epicenter of removal orders across the country, using Department of Justice data — obtained and refined by the research group Deportation Data Project — to find that even Biden-era judges saw notable swings toward issuing higher rates of removal orders once Trump took office.
That was true of Judges Crites and Saltzman as well, but the Tribune analysis found that they still lagged their peers’ prolific pace of removal orders.
When looking at all judges who concluded at least 50 cases that month — and excluding cases that ended with the immigrant voluntarily deciding to leave — the analysis found these two judges had the two lowest percentages of cases concluding in the issuance of removal orders. Crites handled the court’s juvenile cases, while Saltzman was one of two judges hearing cases from the detained docket, for people who are fighting their cases while in Department of Homeland Security custody.
For Judge Crites, the analysis found that she concluded roughly a fifth of her more than 500 June cases by dismissing, terminating or otherwise closing them without issuing a removal order — the kind of nuanced ending that can frustrate those pushing for mass deportation.
Judge Saltzman issued the fewest removal orders in the group, just 33 in an immigration courthouse where judges typically issued hundreds that month and where one judge issued more than 900. Saltzman said Thursday these findings weren’t surprising to her at all, given the caseload she worked with.
Immigrants who choose to fight to stay in the U.S. from detention tend to do so because their cases stand a good chance of getting a favorable outcome, she said: “The relief applications that I am considering are self-selected in a way that makes them more likely to be cases that should be granted.”
The other consequence of Saltzman’s hearing the detained docket was that her caseload drew a substantial amount of media attention, most recently in the case of Reuben Torres Maldonado. Torres Maldonado’s 16-year-old daughter, Ofelia Torres, was in the throes of treatment for Stage 4 cancer when federal agents arrested him at the height of Operation Midway Blitz. Ofelia Torres died in February.
Saltzman, as she made the decision to release him on bond Oct. 30, noted he is an unlikely flight risk and has a case to potentially remain in the United States.
“I wish you much luck in the future and I wish your daughter a full recovery,” she said.
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While her docket tended to attract higher-profile cases like that of the Torres family, Saltzman said she’d “never made a decision with any particular agenda or end goal in mind.”
baiduhai’s Joe Mahr contributed.