Judge David Kim was on the bench for a merits hearing on an asylum case at 26 Federal Plaza Thursday afternoon when he received an email informing him he’d been laid off, “effective today.”

“I had to stop the hearing,” he recalled.

Kim was one of two immigration judges, both immigrants themselves, in New York City who spoke with THE CITY on Friday about their abrupt terminations and the grim and chaotic months leading up to them, as masked ICE  agents lurked in the immigration courts arresting people attending previously routine proceedings.

The other, Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, received her termination notice last month.

“All I’ve ever done is immigration,” Rey Caldas said, describing her own immigration to the United States from Spain at age 11, and having to report to 26 Federal Plaza regularly to handle paperwork with her mother while growing up in Queens.

“Immigration is very much my area of expertise, but it’s also my area of deep interest, and that interest arises initially from my own personal experiences as an immigrant to New York.”

The layoffs come as the Trump administration is racing to reshape the nation’s immigration courts, firing some judges while also reassigning hundreds of military judges to serve there to try and cut down an historic backlog, with more than 3.7 million cases pending. 

A spokesperson for the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), declined to comment on the layoffs.  This week, EOIR announced it has reduced the backlog by nearly a half a million cases since Trump took office.

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Kim, who immigrated from South Korea at age 16, said the recent layoffs seemed to fly in the face of the effort to curb the backlogs.

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It’s unclear why Kim and Rey Caldas were targeted for layoff, and neither was offered any rationale beyond a letter they received that cited Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president broad authority over personnel matters within the executive branch. Both had passed their two-year probationary window, before which judges are typically more susceptible to termination.

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In the weeks leading up to Rey Caldas and Kim’s firing, both described the status quo of courts upended by ICE’s presence in the courthouse hallways day in and day out.

“It was chaos,” Kim said.

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