Summary:
Judge David Paruch served more than a decade in Detroit Immigration Court
Trump administration increased deportation orders by 57 percent in fiscal year 2025
Executive Office for Immigration Review replaced judges and changed leadership
In 2023, after more than a decade presiding in Detroit Immigration Court, Judge David Paruch wanted to retire. His wife, Pat, a former Royal Oak mayor who still served on the city commission, was ready to join him. The two wanted to travel. To find new experiences. To enjoy each other.
Then Pat got sick. Cancer.
As David sat by her death bed, he said Pat made a request. You need a reason to get out of bed when I’m gone, she told him. You love what you do — stay, she said.
A dutiful husband of 51 years, David remained on the job. But when Donald Trump returned to the White House, everything changed.
“I had perceived that the mindset of the people in Washington was no longer due process and respect for the parties, but just grind it out and deport them,” Paruch said, during a recent interview.
“I said, ‘I just don’t agree with that.’”
Agency leaders changed. Demand to churn through cases increased. And the expectation was clear, if not explicitly dictated to Paruch: Deport more people.
The Trump administration is not hiding from this shift.
In a recent news release, the White House championed what it called, “the most aggressive and successful immigration enforcement overhaul in modern history — and that extends to immigration courts.” Specifically, it highlighted the idea the administration ousted “activist” judges.
“After four years of Biden-era chaos turned immigration courts into de facto amnesty factories for unvetted illegals, the Trump Administration is remaking the broken system,” the release states.
“President Trump took decisive action, replacing activist judges — who slow-walked deportations and granted asylum at sky-high rates — with professionals committed to enforcing the law, not undermining it.”
Paulomi Dhokai, a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the entity within the U.S. Department of Justice that oversees immigration courts, gave a more muted response to Free Press questions about Paruch's comments.
"Immigration judges adjudicate all matters before them on a case-by-case basis, according to U.S. immigration law, regulations, and precedent decisions," Dhokai said in an emailed statement.
"Immigration judges consider all evidence and arguments presented by both parties, including country conditions, and decide each case in a manner that is timely, impartial, and consistent with applicable law and case precedent, and consistent with due process."
'I was outraged'
Paruch spent decades in immigration law — first, at a law firm where he took over the immigration caseload after a friend left for a new job. A senior partner told him to finish up the pending immigration cases, and he never ran out.
Then, after more than 30 years representing clients, he successfully applied to become an immigration judge, appointed by then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder under President Barack Obama in late 2010. His education at University of Detroit Jesuit High School taught him to be a man for others — he saw serving as a judge as a way to give back to his community.
When a space opened on Detroit's immigration court, Paruch was skeptical he'd get the gig. He knew he was experienced, but it was competitive: Thousands of people applied for one role. He had recommendations from then-U.S. Sen. Carl Levin and his brother, U.S. Rep. Sandy Levin, both Michigan Democrats, and practiced for years in front of current judges.
Still, it was a pleasant surprise when he got the interview. More than 15 years later, he still remembers what they asked. Specifically, what he called "the Nuremberg question."
"What would you do if the attorney general ordered you to do something you thought was illegal?" Paruch recalls.
He told them he would first make sure he understood the question and the order to get a firm sense that it was illegal.
"(I'd) raise that internally, but if it wasn't resolved, I said I would resign. Not signing up to do something illegal," he said.
Nationally, after Trump shifted the direction of immigration courts in 2025, some judges reported feeling undue pressure. A recent investigation by The New York Times found the administration systemically pressured judges to deport more people, irrespective of their circumstances or due process. If they did not act, they were fired — the Times found more than 100 judges removed from their positions as the administration appointed more than 140 new people to the bench.
For months, Paruch tried to make the best of the situation. He’d worked on the court through all of Trump’s first term. And, to be clear, Paruch says during the latest Trump administration he was never asked specifically to break the law or told directly how to rule on any specific case.
"I guess I'll put it this way: I looked at each case before me as an individual case with individual people, and if they were entitled to relief I was going to grant the relief. If they were not entitled to the relief under the law, I was going to deny the relief," said Paruch, who read the Times investigation.
Even without the threat of discipline, Paruch said the changes were obvious. Leaders of the Executive Office for Immigration Review changed. Before, Paruch said there were “more adults in the room.” Now, he felt they were gone.
Dhokai, the spokesperson for the office, declined to address leadership changes, saying the office does not comment on personnel matters.
Paruch said he modeled his approach to the bench off a judge he’d practiced before for years: The law is the law, but there was time for respect and dignity. He tried to embody that, and he said he saw that from lawyers representing both immigrants and the government.
But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security lawyers, who represent the government’s case in immigration proceedings, received different, stringent marching orders to push for deportations under this administration, Paruch said.
"The information coming down, the orders and the tone coming down from Washington was to disrespect the parties and to not respect due process, to look at the court as a deportation machine rather than a place where due process would be accorded," Paruch said.
Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the entity that could overrule Paruch and other immigration judges, also changed. And with that turnover came a new pattern: The board increasingly ruled against immigrants.
He called it “stacking the cards” in a way that prioritizes deportations. Data presented by the administration bears that out.
In fiscal year 2025, immigration courts issued more than 485,000 deportation orders, according to data compiled by an anti-immigration thinktank cited by the administration. That’s a 57% increase over 2024.
During the first Trump administration, immigration court judges granted asylum on anywhere from 20% to 40% of cases, according to monthly data provided by the Executive Office of Immigration Review.
As of this February, only 7% of decided asylum cases resulted in judges granting asylum, according to the same administration review of immigration court data.
New rulings required judges to interpret the law in ways Paruch said they had never done before; in July 2025, the Trump administration indicated essentially anyone suspected of not being in the U.S. with legal authorization could be detained and imprisoned without a bond hearing.
“I remember the first time it was presented to me by the (lawyer representing the government), and I was like, ‘That’s not the way the law is. We’re not going to do that,’” Paruch said.
“But then it became clear that the (appeals) board had sanctioned that policy and we were gonna have to follow it. (Private immigration lawyers were) outraged. I was outraged. But unfortunately, I had marching orders.”
The Free Press and others reported on the policy playing out in real time: hundreds of federal lawsuits filed by people detained for months without bond. Amid ongoing legal wrangling that's likely destined for the U.S. Supreme Court, even when immigration court judges in Detroit and elsewhere are ordered to hold a bond hearing, they're frequently denying the requests, as reported by Michigan Public and supported by data reviewed by the Free Press.
'The government isn't exactly being subtle'
Others interviewed by the Free Press corroborated Paruch’s assessment.
Marie Celentino is the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law. She’s also still practicing, with more than a decade of experience in immigration court — including in front of Paruch.
Told how he felt about the shift in the Trump administration’s approach to using the court, Celentino said it’s obvious.
“The government isn't exactly being subtle. Since the current administration took office, the Board of Immigration Appeals has ruled in the government's favor in almost every published case,” she said in an emailed statement.
“And the government is pursuing policies that have the sole purpose of limiting access to asylum protections on a large scale — judges are essentially dismissing asylum claims when immigrants don't fill out the application form to the exacting standards set by a particular judge, and are largely granting DHS' requests to send asylum applicants to countries like Uganda and El Salvador to apply for asylum there instead. The current administration is using tools that have long existed in our system but have never previously been deployed at this scale, I presume because they are so draconian.”
By the fall of 2025, Paruch couldn’t take it anymore. He had health issues, and he was “closer to 78 than 77.” Yet the push to get him to change how he approached a job he respected and took seriously played a large part in his decision to leave.
He wasn’t alone: Multiple media reports note a substantial turnover in the number of immigration judges last year.
Dhokai, the spokesperson for the office, said in an email there are approximately 700 immigration judges currently serving across the country. Paruch heard the number was far lower, but the administration has appointed new judges in recent weeks.
Paruch grappled with the choice, though. Chiefly, because he was afraid of who might replace him. Without naming anyone specifically, he said he thinks others currently on the bench are going through their own, similar struggles.
The hardest part of the job wasn’t enduring protesters outside his office on Michigan Avenue in Detroit, home to the only immigration court in the state. It wasn't the ever-changing rules or the 700-per-year case quota crafted during the first Trump administration.
It was telling good, hard-working people they had to leave, Paruch said.
“The people who appeared in front of me were human beings who had come, sometimes, not for the right reasons, sometimes not for legally recognizable reasons. But they were entitled to be treated with respect and listened to, even if the decision wasn’t going to go their way,” Paruch said.
'The system, ultimately, needs to be revamped'
There are more than 3 million immigration cases pending nationwide, roughly 32,000 in Detroit. It would take all four of Detroit’s immigration court judges years to clear that backlog, even if they never received another new case.
And those cases are piling in.
The solutions are not simple: Paruch said the country can’t just open or close the border.
Instead, lawmakers and policy leaders need to find a way to prioritize reunifying families, Paruch said. He believes they need to review how many people are allowed to come to the country, evaluating the economic and societal contributions anticipated from those who are allowed to enter the U.S. to work and live.
“This country has been a beacon to the world in terms of due process and freedom to be who you can be. I think the system, ultimately, needs to be revamped to address modern situations,” Paruch said.
“I wish that Congress would sit down and start doing its job.”
In terms of immigration court specifically, he thinks it’s obvious the system needs more resources. Judges need more support staff, and courts need more judges.
Paruch heard they’re desperate for more jurists; the system is already temporarily assigning military judges to oversee immigration cases.
There’s also a rumor he heard that's kicking around that the administration would like retired judges to come back to the bench, even on a part-time basis. They’d hear cases just as they did before but could still keep their pension benefits.
In fact, Paruch's name is still on the wall outside the Detroit courtroom where he presided for years. But he said he’s not interested in returning.
Like many immigration judges, Paruch ordered thousands of people deported during his career. It’s not a choice he reveled in, though. He knew the law, rules and precedents, and vowed never to violate them. And yet, there was nothing that said he shouldn’t be decent to the all-too-often desperate men and women who appeared before his court.
He cared deeply about this role of the court. And now, when he looked at federal job postings to fill roles like his across the country, the Department of Justice stopped calling them “immigration judges.” Now, the job is called “deportation judge.”
“It’s a mindset: we are immigration judges. I was an immigration judge,” he said.
“That just was a signal of the change.”
Reach Dave Boucher at [email protected]
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: ‘I was outraged’: Detroit judge reveals how Trump changed immigration court
Reporting by Dave Boucher, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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