Five months after he was fired as a U.S. immigration judge, Jeremiah Johnson found himself rumbling into the highlands of Guatemala on a crowded bus, a bouquet of flowers in hand.
His unusual, if poetic, mission: to visit relatives of an indigenous family who fled their village for the United States and won asylum in his courtroom.
Johnson, 52, served nearly a decade as an immigration judge in San Francisco, in a famously liberal circuit, hearing hundreds of asylum cases. Day in, day out, he heard stories of political and religious persecution, torture, violence, rape. He granted asylum89% of the time.
That statistic, he believes, is likely one of the reasons the Trump administration targeted him and the San Francisco court in an effort to rid the system of alleged bias in favor of immigrants, and against the Department of Homeland Security.
The Department of Justice, which oversees immigration judges, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
While PresidentDonald Trump's mass deportation effort has played out in dramatic U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps of major American cities and the expansion of immigration detention, the White House has also been quietly working to reshape the nation's immigration courts, where immigrants can be ordered deported or granted the right to stay.
Since Trump took office in January 2025, the DOJ has fired at least 107 immigration judges, including roughly two dozen in San Francisco alone, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union for the judges. Nationwide, another 50 or so have left or been dismissed.
"Under President Trump, asylum is now granted in just 7% of cases," the White House said inan April 9 news release, citing an investigation by theNew York Times. The release touted: "The era of amnesty is over."
That statistic likely includes not only judges' decisions but abandoned cases in which the applicant failed to appear, according to the right-leaningCenter for Immigration Studies. In PresidentJoe Biden's last year, the comparable asylum grant rate including abandoned cases was 36%.
The San Francisco court has the third-highest number of asylum cases in the nation after New York and Miami, according to theTransactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which compiles government data. The administration has ordered the court to close by May 1; the majority of the court's cases are shifting to judges 30 miles away in a smaller, suburban court in Concord, California.
"The fact that these judges are being aggressively removed and bullied by the administration – they don't have the protections that a regular judge has and I don't think people realize that," said U.S. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-California).
On the bus in Guatemala in mid-April, Johnson had no phone number and no address as he rode into the green mountains southeast of Todos Santos, not far from the Mexican border. He had only the family's name in a notebook and a local guide, a veterinarian, who spoke the indigenous Mam language of the region. He wore a bucket hat.
The asylum-seeking family's head of household "was a refugee," a married man and father of two boys, Johnson said. The family belonged to an indigenous Mam-speaking Mayan community that was at odds with the Spanish-speaking Ladinos in the area. A conflict over water turned deadly.
In 2017, the man and his brother went to pull water from a well originally built by their grandfather. A group of eight Ladino men confronted them, then violently attacked, according to the family's I-589 Application for Asylum, shared with USA TODAY. The man escaped to get help. "When I returned with my wife and mother, we found my brother's body. He had been beaten to death," he said in the asylum petition.
Their identities are redacted from the asylum application and the family's immigration attorney, Alicia Chen, asked for their names to be withheld to protect the family.
The water conflict had deep roots in the country's civil war, which pitted the military and Ladino elites against Mayan indigenous groups. Though the war ended in the 1990s, vestiges remained of the racial and ethnic conflict. The family relied on other water sources for awhile, but they dried up. When they attempted to draw water from their grandfather's well again, Ladinos again violently confronted them. He, his wife and young son were left "bleeding and severely injured," according to his statement. The family walked two hours to the nearest police station to file a report; they were mocked instead, he said.
Johnson heard all this in court. Theirs was the last case he decided.
"My last words on that bench were through the Mam interpreter," he recalled. "'You've been granted asylum in the United States. That decision is final.'"
"Their persecution goes back to the civil war," he said by phone from Guatemala. "These villages were all burned."
In the village, he sketched a church that during the war, he learned, served as a jail where indigenous Mam people were imprisoned.
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'To ever keep in mind the needs of others'
Johnson was appointed to the bench during the first Trump administration by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Originally from New Jersey, he attended the University of San Francisco School of Law. He interned at the International Rescue Committee, and was inspired by lawyers who deftly navigated complex immigration laws.
He held fast to his own father's words of wisdom, "to ever keep in mind the needs of others." He became an asylum officer for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services before applying to join the court.
If he or the San Francisco court had a higher-than-most asylum grant rate, he said, that was driven by the mix of cases on the docket; the case law of the liberal 9th Circuit and the high level of attorney representation in his court.
Nationwide, judges might see only the asylum cases of Chinese nationals; or Cubans; or, in Johnson's case, a large number of Sikhs from the Punjab region of India, where many faced religious or political persecution, he said.
But the closure of the San Francisco court is a symbolic win for the Trump administration: Immigration judges hold the power to deport immigrants, or let them stay, and San Francisco judges more often let them stay.
The DOJ put immigration judges on notice ina June 2025 memothat said some judges "appear to believe... that exhibiting bias is justifiable in certain situations, as long as that bias is in favor of an alien and against the Department of Homeland Security."
That belief is deep-seated in the White House. Trump Homeland Security adviser and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is a critic of asylum.
"Everyone involved in the asylum system knows and understands the claims are all fake: the aliens who make them, the free NGO lawyers who file them, the judges who hear them, the federal officers who process them," he wrote on X on April 1.
Johnson's termination letter landed in his inbox on the Friday before Thanksgiving in 2025; his email was locked so fast he didn't have time to print it.
Finding the family
Last year, nationwide, senior managing judges were let go first, Johnson said. In San Francisco, the new judges, still on their two-year probation, were the first fired. The remaining judges saw their caseloads balloon. Beginning in July, Johnson started seeing six cases a day, including three "detained" cases of people in ICE detention.
There are nearly3.8 millioncases in the nation's immigration court backlog. Roughly two-thirds, or2.4 million, are asylum applications, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the immigration courts within the DOJ.
A bill to establishan independent immigration court system‒ first introduced in 2022 under the Biden administration ‒ has been reintroduced this year by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, (D-California). The bill, which is supported by the immigration judges' union, would create a system that better reflects other U.S. courts and protects them from being hired or fired by the executive branch.
On that Friday in November, Johnson's docket was empty except for one case, the family of four from Guatemala.
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Tossed from the bench, Johnson packed a backpack and set off heading in the reverse direction of what is now a mostly empty migrant trail.
He had beers with humanitarians at the Arizona border in January. He spoke with border ranchers who voted for Trump. He had coffee with a retired Border Patrol agent, then was invited to his house for strawberry crepes. He took notes.
In Guatemala, the veterinarian asked around for the parents of the man who survived the water well attack and found them. "They're home," he told Johnson. "They'll see you." After pleasantries and explanations and the gift of flowers, Johnson asked about their murdered son, the refugee's brother.
"There were tears on the señora's face," he said. The father "started rubbing his chest."
He and his wife wanted to show him the grave.
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY and can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com and on Signal at laurenvillagran.57.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Federal immigration court judge embarks on odyssey to Central America
