Salt Lake City Immigration Court has shrunk since President Donald Trump took office in January. It now has four judges, down from six.
With fewer judges in Utah’s only immigration court, one attorney worries that processing times will get longer, or that the federal government will speed up deportations by circumventing the courts.
As of July 12, Judge Douglas Nelson no longer appeared on the Salt Lake City Immigration Court staff directory. His name was listed as recently as July 2, according to an archived version of the webpage. KUER checked the site on July 12, and Nelson’s name was gone.
Nelson would have been at the court in West Valley for two years next month. He was appointed to the job in August 2023 by the federal Executive Office for Immigration Review, the part of the U.S. Department of Justice that oversees the nation’s immigration courts. Immigration judges are considered career employees.
Another judge, Nathan Aina, was also removed from the court’s staff directory earlier this year. In June, Kathryn Mattingly, a spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, referred KUER to the staff directory and said the agency does not comment on personnel matters.
According to the directory, there are now three dedicated judges in Utah. Another, the assistant chief immigration judge, splits her duties across multiple courts and generally hears cases in Tacoma, Washington, Mattingly said.
As of May, data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse says that 51,684 cases were pending in Utah’s immigration court. Cases had been pending for an average of 530 days.
The bulk of those cases are for asylum, said Ogden-based immigration attorney Dan Black. But others are for immigrants who’ve been in the United States for many years and are seeking cancellation of removal to obtain a green card.
Reducing the immigration court backlog is a priority, Mattingly said in an email when KUER inquired about Nelson’s status. She added that “EOIR continues to manage its caseload as efficiently as possible and consistent with due process.”
Mattingly declined any further comment.
Reassigning Nelson’s cases will be a massive undertaking, Black said. He noted he had over a hundred cases assigned to Nelson that now need a place on another judge’s calendar.
“It's going to result in fewer cases being adjudicated and longer wait times,” Black said, which could lead to fewer deportations and is counterintuitive to the Trump administration’s goals. Some hearings are being scheduled for as far out as January 2029, he said.
Black is wary of the federal government’s intentions.
“This is speculation on my part,” he said, “but I believe that the only justification that the administration has for mass firings of immigration judges is the clear intent to circumvent the removal proceedings process and try and achieve deportations in any other way.”
That could look like expedited removal, he said, as in a recent case with a colleague’s client. A man with a pending asylum case was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for being “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Black said. The Department of Homeland Security moved to put the individual into expedited removal. Generally, that means that if an asylum officer rules that they do not have a credible fear of returning to their home country, they can be deported without making their case to a judge.
And that frightens Black.
“They're basically saying, ‘We want to take this out of the hands of qualified immigration judges and give it to an ICE officer who is just simply going to say, we want to remove this person because they're in the United States without documentation,’ and deny them due process and deny their ability to have their asylum claim adjudicated,” he said.
NPR reports that more than a dozen immigration judges were recently fired across the country, adding to the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the courts. The affected judges were finishing their two-year probationary period.
Nationwide, the total number of pending cases fell by roughly 268,000 between Trump’s inauguration and the end of May. The pace of completion saw little change, but the number of new cases dropped dramatically as Trump suspended asylum at the southern border.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
