Since returning to office, President Trump has made sweeping changes to the legal immigration system,

including speeding up deportations and tamping down on asylum seekers.

The Justice Department has also fired more than 100 sitting immigration judges and is now advertising to hire so-called deportation judges in their place.

Ali Rogan recently spoke with one of the fired judges.

Jeremiah Johnson served as an immigration judge in San Francisco for eight years.

He was appointed during President Trump's first term.

In November, he was fired.

Johnson also serves as the Executive vice president of the National Association of

Immigration Judges, and since his firing, he's been traveling south of the U.S. border to

understand the implications of his and other judge's decisions. Judge Johnson, thank you so much

for joining me. President Trump has pursued an aggressive agenda of deportations and detentions since taking

office.

How did that political agenda impact the work that you and your colleagues were doing in the

courts?

What you saw were judges were given a little time to make those important decisions.

You saw an increase in cases. You saw

pressure to decide cases, dockets ballooned. So it didn't allow judges the opportunity to take the

time to consider the evidence and get everything right. For example, in before July of the past year, I was hearing

three individual cases a day. That included testimony, reading through evidence, submitted,

and making a decision. In July, I was three additional detained docket cases were added to my

docket, so I was hearing six cases a day. The stakes couldn't be

hired. These were people that were fleeing their countries, claiming that they would be murdered,

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