From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, April 10th. Here's what we're covering.

In the breakroom of a courthouse in Massachusetts, workers put up a sign decorated with balloons saying, we'll miss you. It was part of a goodbye party for an immigration judge. Then another judge was out and another. These are the judges who decide if someone gets asylum or gets deported. Soon, the courthouse was having so many goodbye parties, they just left the decorations up. It was all part of a massive wave of firings carried out by

the Trump administration. Now, a new investigation from the Times shows just how the administration

has gone after judges in its larger effort to reshape the immigration system.

You know, these judges wear robes, but they are not part of the judicial branch. They are not independent. They work for the attorney general, and they can be fired.

And so the Trump administration has used that lever of pressure.

My colleague Nick Nehamas is part of the team who worked on the investigation.

He says immigration courts have long had a reputation for being dysfunctional with a huge backlog of

cases. That's something critics and supporters of immigration agree on. But he says the way

Trump is approaching it has alarmed many judges who work in the system. They described being

systematically pressured to deport more people and threatened with disciplinary action

if they didn't. They also sent out memos to judges. One of the most prominent basically said,

hey, it's come to our attention that some of you are, quote, exhibiting bias in favor of aliens

and against the government. And the message was,

you know, we're not telling you how to rule, but we think you're biased in favor of immigrants.

And so judges took a pretty clear message from that, that they were supposed to rule more

in favor of the government. Every president tries to bring the immigration courts in line with their own policies, but

no president has moved as quickly or as comprehensively as Trump to fire so many judges, to change

so many policies and to really fundamentally transform how the courts

work the consequences have been fast and dramatic we've seen the asylum rate drop to a record low we've

seen the number of deportation orders soar to a record high.

We've seen more people locked up in detention centers

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