Immigration courts lost a quarter of their judges in a year, then rushed to rebuild

The Executive Office for Immigration Review runs the nation's immigration courts the way any court system runs: a judge hears a case, weighs the law, and issues a ruling.▸ What sets EOIR apart in 2026 is how violently its bench has moved in both directions inside eighteen months — first shedding a quarter of its judges, then adding more new judges in a single class than any point in the agency's history.

Immigration judges are DOJ attorneys appointed by the Attorney General, and their hiring runs almost entirely on congressional appropriations and executive-branch decisions about who stays.▸ The corps grew steadily for years and reached a high of 735 judges at the end of fiscal year 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service's March 2026 staffing brief. Then it fell apart: CRS estimates 115 judges separated from EOIR in FY2025 — some through early retirement or deferred resignation, others fired — against only 14 new hires, the highest annual separation count since at least 2011. By the end of FY2025 the corps was down to 634. The first quarter of FY2026 was worse: 88 more judges departed against 11 hires, leaving just 557 judges on staff as of December 31, 2025 — a 24% drop from the FY2024 peak in about fourteen months.

The slide reversed fast.▸ EOIR pivoted to hiring military attorneys as temporary judges — the department requested the Pentagon detail up to 600 lawyers for the role — and ramped up permanent hiring behind them. On May 21, 2026, EOIR swore in 77 new immigration judges and 5 temporary judges in what it called the largest class of new adjudicators in the agency's history, bringing the corps to "nearly 700." EOIR says it hired 153 permanent judges over fiscal year 2026 through that date — more than in any single prior fiscal year. The corps is close to its FY2024 peak again, but still short of it, and well short of the staffing level of "not more than 800" judges that the FY2025 reconciliation law, P.L. 119-21, set as a target effective November 2028 — a law that also appropriated $3.33 billion to DOJ for immigration-related hiring, separate from EOIR's annual budget.

None of that staffing turbulence paused the caseload.▸ Case receipts to immigration courts grew 630% between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, and EOIR logged over 560,000 new receipts in FY2025 alone. As of the end of May 2026, 3,241,899 cases were pending before the Immigration Court, per data compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) — of which 2.3 million are asylum applications still awaiting a hearing or decision. The backlog has inched down in recent months (3,377,998 in December 2025, 3,318,099 in February 2026, 3,241,899 in May 2026), and EOIR says it completed more cases in FY2025 than in any prior year. But that faster clearance rate has come alongside a stark shift in outcomes: in February 2026, the combined rate of deportation and voluntary-departure orders reached 81.9% of completed cases.

The annual appropriations line tells its own whiplash story.▸ EOIR's FY2025 enacted budget funded 2,700 positions at $844 million. The FY2026 enacted budget cut that to 2,200 positions and $800 million — 500 fewer funded slots, right as the backlog sat above 3 million cases. The FY2027 request asks Congress to restore both: 2,700 positions and $899 million, an increase EOIR frames as necessary "to sustain its new adjudicators and support staff" hired through the separate reconciliation money.

Judge headcounts before May 2026 come from CRS's analysis of EOIR hiring data, which excludes temporary judges; the May 2026 figure is EOIR's own rounded claim ("nearly 700") and hasn't been independently reconciled against CRS's methodology. Backlog figures are TRAC's running tally and will have shifted further by the time this is read.