The Trump Administration’s Campaign To Replace Immigration Judges With Fringe Right-Wingers

The Trump administration has hired a men’s rights advocate, a promoter of conspiracy theories who has expressed hostility to immigrants, and a former immigration judge, who previously questioned whether an asylum applicant was actually persecuted because he didn’t appear to be “overtly gay,” to serve as immigration judges.

The hires, first reported by The Washington Post on Monday, are part of the Trump administration’s campaign to fill immigration courts with judges who are supportive of the government’s mass deportation agenda. Since President Donald Trump took office last year, the Department of Justice has fired more than 100 immigration judges and appointed more than 140 new judges.

The Post surveyed the newly hired immigration judges and found that two-thirds listed no immigration law experience in their online biographies and that more than three-quarters had never worked for the Justice Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or immigration courts.

Melissa Isaak, who was recently appointed as a temporary immigration judge to hear cases in Atlanta, founded a law firm “to fight exclusively for the rights of men in family law,” according to her firm’s website, www.protectingmen.com. Isaak has repeatedly claimed there are two types of women: those who have nothing to offer other than being a “warm wet hole,” and “real women” who enable their husbands to be successful. She has falsely claimed that men are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than women, and that allegations of domestic violence by men against women and children are “one of the most abused allegations in family court.” Immigration judges often consider cases involving domestic abuse allegations as evidence of an individual’s fear of deportation.

In addition to her family law work, Isaak worked as a defense attorney for people accused of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol after Trump’s electoral loss. She also represented Roy Moore, an Alabama Republican whose Senate campaign failed after multiple women accused him of engaging in sexual misconduct when they were teens.

In the same press release announcing the hiring of Isaak, DOJ said it had hired Nathan Hansen, an attorney described by the Minnesota Reformer as one of the state’s “most unhinged right-wing posters.”

Hansen’s X account, which is currently set so that only approved followers can view his posts, is filled with posts endorsing widely debunked conspiracies, according to the Reformer. He has shared posts about “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory about Democratic politicians running a child sex ring from the basement of a D.C. pizza restaurant; Obama birtherism, which falsely claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. and was therefore ineligible to be president; and the Haitian Invasion of Ohio, a racist conspiracy theory pushed by Trump accusing Haitian immigrants in Ohio of eating people’s pets.

Hansen was appointed to oversee cases in Minnesota, where federal immigration agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens during an enforcement surge earlier this year. In December, ahead of those killings, Hansen commented on Facebook, “Is there anything we can do to help ICE if we want to?”

Another one of DOJ’s recent hires, Carey Holliday, is a former immigration judge who stepped down after a DOJ inspector general report found that the Bush administration had violated federal law by hiring immigration judges based on their political leanings. Although the report did not name Holliday, a former Republican Party state treasurer, the description of one of the immigration judges mentioned matches Holliday’s employment history, as the Post noted.

During his time as an immigration judge in Miami between 2006 and 2009, Holliday oversaw an asylum case involving a gay Serbian man named Mladen Todorovic who said he faced persecution in Serbia because of his sexual orientation. Todorovic was denied asylum for various technical reasons, Mother Jones reported at the time. But during his removal hearing, Holliday described Todorovic’s persecution claims as “highly suspect” because, in his estimation, he didn’t look gay.

“The Court studied the demeanor of this individual very carefully throughout his testimony in Court today, and this gentleman does not appear to be overtly gay,” Holliday said during the hearing, noting, “he bears no effeminate traits or any other trait that would mark him as a homosexual.”

A federal appeals court found in 2010 that Holliday’s decision “was so colored by impermissible stereotyping of homosexuals” that it could not conduct a meaningful review of the decision. It ordered immigration authorities to conduct a new hearing “free of any impermissible stereotyping or ungrounded assumptions about how gay men are supposed to look or act.”

In a separate case from Holliday’s first stint as an immigration judge, he denied a request by a Bolivian family to hear their claim that they were unfairly targeted for deportation because their daughter campaigned for a bill that would have protected people brought to the U.S. as children from removal. In his denial, Mother Jones reported at the time, Holliday wrote that the daughter “freely chose to draw unwanted attention to herself and her family,” and that “people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.”

Isaak, Hansen and Holliday did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Department of Justice is recruiting people to be “deportation judges” with salaries as high as $207,500 and 25% signing bonuses in some locations.

As the Trump administration is overhauling the immigration court bench, it is also implementing policies that make it more difficult for people to win in immigration court. DOJ’s Board of Immigration Appeals has directed judges not to grant bond hearings, forcing people to endure dangerous detention conditions in order to pursue immigration claims. Last year, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the DOJ agency that oversees immigration courts, issued a memo directing judges to dismiss asylum cases with even minor technical mistakes without a hearing. Asylum rejections doubled from 2024 to 2025, the Post found.