“This Department of Justice has made reducing the immigration court backlog a top priority, and these 42 new highly qualified judges will help us deliver on that goal,” Bondi said in a statement. “Under the Trump Administration, immigration judges will decide cases based on the law not politics.”

But the makeup of the new class underscores a broader ideological shift inside the immigration court system. Many of the appointees come from prosecutorial, law enforcement, military, or immigration-enforcement backgrounds rather than defense-aligned immigration advocacy work.

Several previously served in immigration enforcement roles within the Department of Homeland Security. Stephen P. Alcorn, now assigned to the Sterling Immigration Court, worked as an attorney and legal instructor for Customs and Border Protection at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy, for example.

Jonathan M. Brent, assigned to the Los Angeles immigration court on Van Nuys Boulevard, served for years as a senior attorney and deputy assistant chief counsel for CBP. Corey A. Combs, now in Newark, previously worked as an assistant chief counsel with ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, while Christopher Cusmano, assigned to New York’s Federal Plaza court, also came from ICE, according to the DOJ’s press release.

A few of the appointees also have records suggesting more overt alignment with Trump-era immigration priorities.

Kieran M. Lalor, a former Republican New York assemblyman now assigned to the Ulster Immigration Court, previously criticized public funding for lawyers representing immigrants fighting deportation and argued for tougher penalties on businesses that hire people in the country illegally, according to Reuters. Chad Dotson, now assigned to the Richmond Immigration Adjudication Center, backed the deportation of criminal noncitizens while serving as Virginia’s corrections director and parole board chairman.

The latest hires come after a major turnover inside the immigration judge corps.

According to an NPR tally, the department has seen the departure of more than 100 judges who were fired, retired, resigned, or accepted buyouts. The administration has aggressively moved to replace those who have left, emphasizing that immigration judges, as DOJ employees, fall under executive branch control rather than the independent federal judiciary.

The broader role of immigration judges was reaffirmed earlier this month when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that federal appeals courts must defer to immigration judges’ factual determinations in asylum cases when those findings are supported by substantial evidence. There is currently a 3.37 million backlog of immigration cases in the U.S., and 2.3 million of those cases involve asylum hearing delays, according to data collection by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

SUPREME COURT RULES COURTS MUST DEFER TO IMMIGRATION JUDGES IN ASYLUM CASES

In the high court’s March 4 decision, Urias-Orellana v. Bondi, the justices concluded that courts reviewing asylum denials must apply a deferential “substantial evidence” standard when evaluating whether immigration judges properly determined that an applicant failed to show persecution under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Writing for the court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the statute requires courts to defer to immigration authorities’ factual conclusions when supported by reasonable evidence.

The Supreme Court ruling reinforced the influence immigration judges wield in determining whether migrants qualify for asylum protections. Immigration judges, who operate within the DOJ’s EOIR, decide more than 200,000 asylum applications each year, with appeals routed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, another DOJ body.