1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

Protect the Rule of Law: Demand a Judiciary Hearing on the Immigration Judge Purge I am a constituent in Des Moines, Iowa, and I am writing about something that is happening right now in courtrooms across this country that should alarm every American who believes in the rule of law, regardless of where they stand on immigration. An immigration judge in Texas was fired in the middle of a hearing. She gathered her belongings, said goodbye to her colleagues, and walked out while a case was still open involving a man from North Africa whose life she believed was in danger. She had not finished writing her decision. She was fired because the Trump administration did not like the way she was ruling. That is not immigration enforcement. That is judicial intimidation. And it is happening on a mass scale. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has fired more than 100 immigration judges without cause. These are career civil servants, many of them military veterans, with years of specialized legal training. A similar number have resigned or retired under pressure. In their place, more than 140 so-called deportation judges have been hired, many with no experience in immigration law and receiving less training than any previous hiring class. Among the new hires, according to the Washington Post, is a divorce lawyer who publicly vowed to fight exclusively for the rights of men, and a judge previously overturned by a federal appeals court for denying humanitarian protection to a man because he did not appear sufficiently gay. This matters directly to Iowa. Our state is home to as many as 75,000 immigrants, according to Pew Research Center, many of them working in the meatpacking plants in Waterloo, Ottumwa, Denison, and Mason City that keep Iowa's pork industry, the largest in the nation, running. Iowa State University economist Dermot Hayes has warned that losing this workforce disrupts production lines and raises meat prices for every Iowa family at the grocery store. These workers and their families have cases pending in immigration courts. They have a legal right to a fair hearing before an impartial judge. That right is being systematically stripped away. The numbers make the administration's intent unmistakable. Asylum approval rates have fallen from 48 percent in February 2024 to below 5 percent in February 2026, according to TRAC data. The Board of Immigration Appeals, shrunk by nearly half and restacked with Trump appointees, ruled in favor of the government in 97 percent of cases in 2025, according to an NPR analysis of more than 600 decisions. Two of the judges most recently fired had ruled against the government in cases involving international students exercising First Amendment rights. The pattern is clear: judges who follow the law independently are fired; judges who will follow orders are hired to replace them. This is not a partisan issue. It is a civil service issue and a constitutional one. The fired judges have filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, arguing their terminations violated the Civil Service Reform Act, which has protected career federal employees from politically motivated firings for nearly fifty years. An initial ruling agreed with them and ordered reinstatement. Legal experts say the administration's position contradicts more than a century of Supreme Court precedent. When a president fires judges for ruling the wrong way, that is not executive authority. That is obstruction of justice dressed up in bureaucratic language. I have three specific requests. First, I urge you to publicly and by name denounce the firing of qualified immigration judges for political reasons. Iowa deserves to know where its representatives stand when the executive branch purges the judiciary of anyone unwilling to follow orders. Second, I urge you to support the Real Courts, Rule of Law Act of 2026, backed by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which would establish immigration courts as a truly independent judiciary, permanently removed from Department of Justice political control. This is a structural fix that would protect the courts from manipulation by any future administration, Republican or Democrat. Third, I urge you to use your position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to call for a formal hearing on the mass firing of immigration judges. This is precisely the oversight role the Committee exists to perform. The American people deserve a public accounting of how many judges were fired, why, and who made those decisions. Iowa's agricultural economy, Iowa's communities, and Iowa's reputation as a state that believes in fair dealing are all at stake here. History will record how Iowa's representatives responded when the executive branch moved to replace independent judges with loyalists. I will be watching, and I will be sharing your response. Thank you for your service to our state.