Two of the remaining nine San Francisco immigration judges, Patrick S. O’Brien and Joseph Y. Park, will retire by the end of the year, sources close to the court confirmed.

Their departures will bring the number of immigration judges in San Francisco down to seven.

Since April, the Department of Justice has fired more than half of the bench in San Francisco’s immigration courts, twelve judges in total. The largest cut came in late November, when Judges Shuting Chen, Louis A. Gordon, Jeremiah Johnson, Amber George and Patrick Savage were all terminated on the same day. 

It is unclear why the two judges have chosen to retire. Former immigration judges note mounting pressure to process cases quickly in the face of escalating aggressions from the Trump administration— pressure that former judges  say are designed to erode due process for asylum-seekers on the local and nationwide levels (judges currently employed by the federal government are not allowed to speak to the press). 

“We have turned immigration judges and courts into another arm of the president and his administration,” said former immigration Judge Shira Levine, who was fired in September. Under pressure from the administration, Levine said, judges face an impossible catch-22: challenge the directives of the Department of Homeland Security or risk losing their jobs. Current judges are aware of this reality, she said. “Is that the type of pressure we want our judges to face?”

This rash of firings has pushed the backlog of cases  in S.F. immigration courts over 120,000 — the largest in the country. Should more judges be fired or retire, Levine said that her greatest worry is not the backlog but that due process “will be pushed off a cliff.” 

On a recent Tuesday, Judge Arwen Swink, one of the remaining immigration judges, sat inside her courtroom at 100 Montgomery St. On that day, an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security introduced a motion called a “pretermit” that orders the asylum seeker’s removal to Honduras, effectively stripping them of the ability to pursue their case in the United States. These pretermit motions are the result of a March 2020 deal between the first Trump administration and the government of Honduras, but have proliferated in recent weeks. 

Judge Swink denied the motion saying that the government had no lawful grounds to deport the asylum seeker to Honduras — a country that the asylum-seeker had never even been to. “I’m sure that will be added onto a spreadsheet somewhere,” Swink said to the courtroom, alluding to the likelihood that the government would flag her for going against its directive. 

So far, all of the S.F. judges fired by the Trump administration have a higher-than-average rate of granting asylum — the national average  is 41 percent. Judge Louis A. Gordon had the highest rate of granting asylum: He ruled in favor of 91.2 percent of asylum-seekers in his court. 

Judge Park and Judge O’Brien, who were not included in the mass firings, have granted asylum in 59.4 percent and  49.8 percent of cases, respectively.  

On Thursday morning, inside of O’Brien’s courtroom, a DHS attorney filed pretermit motions to send several asylum-seekers to Ecuador. None of these asylum-seekers had been to Ecuador, but this summer, the country had struck a deal with the Trump administration to take people who had been seeking asylum in the U.S. 

“If Ecuador does not accept my asylum case, what would happen to me and my daughter?” a woman asked O’Brien. It is not yet clear how many asylum-seekers Ecuador will accept. Honduras has agreed to accept 240 over the course of two years. Both countries can change the quota based on their discretion.

Ecuador would most likely deport the woman back to her home country — the one she was seeking asylum from, O’Brien replied 

“It is a game that this president is playing with our rights,” the woman said. Her voice was clear and calm, but angry. 

Another asylum seeker, who had received a pretermit motion to Honduras in November, was returning to the court to respond to the motion. This time, O’Brien granted the motion to pretermit, despite arguments from the woman’s attorney that she was a victim of trafficking, and would almost certainly suffer more harm in Honduras. 

More so, the attorney emphasized, Honduras is not required to accept the woman’s asylum case due to the quota, which would leave her options at indefinite detention in a federal facility, or deportation to the country she had fled from. 

O’Brien simply replied, “My hands are tied.”