Federal immigration judge fired after resisting ICE deportation request, lawsuit claims

A San Francisco-based federal immigration judge was fired after she questioned Trump administration legal tactics and resisted a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to fast-track the deportation of a teen asylum seeker, a lawsuit claims.

In the complaint, filed Thursday in federal court, Chloe Dillon alleges she was fired roughly 48 hours after sending a message to a superior relating her concerns over an August 2025 incident. In the message, Dillon wrote that she was alarmed a teenage asylum seeker had been arrested by ICE after they left her courtroom, where she had just delayed ICE’s request to dismiss the individual’s case and place them into expedited removal proceedings.

Prior to the arrest, Dillon gave the individual, who had been representing themselves, time to find a lawyer.

“When you have judges who are in fear that they will be fired for the decisions that they’re making, it has completely undermined the basic principles of judicial adjudication,” Dillon told SFGate. “I don’t see how you have fair and unbiased tribunals in the immigration court when there is this atmosphere of fear and intimidation.”

The asylum seeker had originally shown up to court representing themselves, and Dillon concluded the individual was “almost certainly a designated unaccompanied minor who could not be placed into expedited removal proceedings, and who thus had the right to have his already-filed asylum application decided first by an asylum officer, and then, if necessary, by the Immigration Court,” according to the suit.

The San Francisco immigration court was already under pressure from the Trump administration to comply with requests from ICE to transfer cases to other venues, according to the suit. Dillon alleges a superior told her in spring of 2025 that the White House “was watching the issue and cautioned her against resisting the directive.”

Nonetheless, Dillon refused to comply with some of these requests, and she similarly pushed back in cases where she felt ICE lacked the jurisdiction to re-calendar cases involving unaccompanied minors.

In her August email to her superior, Dillon argued ICE had been “disrupting the orderly administration of justice,” the suit claims.

The complaint, which names the Justice Department and Attorney General Todd Blanche, among others, seeks to have Dillon reinstated and given back pay, damages and a declaration the firing was unlawful. The lawsuit argues Dillon’s constitutional rights under the First and Fifth Amendment were violated, along with federal law, and it alleges the judge was fired without notice or an opportunity to challenge the decision.

The Independent has contacted the White House and DOJ for comment.

Over the last year-and-a-half, the Trump administration fired most of the immigration judges in San Francisco and shuttered one of the main immigration courts there.

Under the Trump administration, immigration officials have stepped up arrests near courthouses, schools and other sensitive locations. Numerous individuals have reported being arrested after appointments checking in with immigration officials about their pending legal status that had previously occurred without incident.