Trump’s Latest Picks for Immigration Judges Include a Woman Who Says She’ll ‘Fight Exclusively for the Rights of Men’
If there’s one thing Trump’s made disgustingly clear about his hiring process in the last 15 months, it’s that he really knows how to pick the worst of the bunch. And as much as I spend every waking moment unsure how much more I can take of Kash Patel bungling another important investigation; Pete Hegseth running the Department of War Defense like some unloved demon-child playing with toy soldiers; or RFK Jr. mishandling another dead animal carcass—alas! A new report by the Washington Post reveals that Trump’s latest picks for immigration lawyers—who will replace the dozens he’s fired since he first took office—promise us another new, fresh spread of disappointments to come.
Of the 140 new immigration judges swooping in to manage the immigration system’s colossal backlog of more than three million cases, many of them have never practiced immigration law, many are reportedly less trained than their predecessors, and many seem to be MAGA-friendly pettifoggers to help progress the administration’s mass deportation agenda. Currently, more than 60,000 individuals are in ICE detention.
Included in these spate of judge hirings is Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who tried in 2010 to deport a Syrian man he didn’t believe was actually gay when he testified that he was raped in the army for being gay; Nathan Hansen, who in 2024 amplified racist rants about the “Haitian invasion of Ohio” on social media; and Mellisa Isaak—a divorce attorney whose legal website is literally ProtectingMenDotCom, and which asserts she’ll fight “exclusively for the rights of men.”
During an anti-feminist convention in 2021, Isaak also delivered a speech where she called accusations of domestic violence against men “one of the most abused allegations” in family court; wrongly claimed men are more likely to suffer from domestic abuse than women; and proclaimed there are “two types of women”—a real tradwife-like one, and a promiscuous one, aka what she calls a “warm wet hole.” Oh, and she helped defend Jan. 6 rioters. Nothing like a woman with a career telling women to serve their husbands!
The role of temporary immigration judge is typically a six-month contract, and in less authoritarian times, being selected as one would require years of experience with adjudicating and litigating, as well as with immigration law. But in August, the DOJ issued a new rule saying “any attorney” can become a temporary immigration judge, if they are selected. It’s a result of this that in September, Hegseth sent 600 military lawyers from the Pentagon to serve as immigration judges—which is as bad as it sounds. The administration has also taken to calling immigration judges “deportation judges”—a term that never existed before.
But what also didn’t exist before was a DOJ working hard to get justice off the streets—and all this follows the firing spree in which more than 100 immigration lawyers were dismissed by the administration, many of whom had backgrounds with actual immigration law.
Writing to Congress in a letter in March, one of these judges, Christopher Day—who was dismissed for granting asylum to too many immigrants—warned that the incoming temporary judges are “completely inadequate and highly biased.” But, well, I guess inadequate and biased are really just job requirements for serving under Trump 2.0.