A former Assistant Chief Immigration Judge on the Fort Snelling Immigration Court's 2026 asylum grant rate
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Author's note. The Minnesota Star Tribune retained me as a strategic advisor on its reporting about immigration court transparency, including the article discussed below. I am quoted in the article. The views in this post are my own.
I served as the Assistant Chief Immigration Judge supervising the Fort Snelling bench until I retired in February 2025, one month into the second Trump administration. Before that, I sat as an immigration judge on the detained docket. Before that, I prosecuted removal cases as an ICE Assistant Chief Counsel and tried federal criminal cases as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. Since leaving the bench, I have built a private immigration practice representing noncitizens and the institutions that employ them. I have been on every side of these proceedings. I spoke with the Star Tribune on the record about the data and the firings because the people who can speak with first-hand knowledge largely cannot, or will not.
I trained Amy Zaske when she joined the Fort Snelling bench as a new immigration judge. I mentored and supervised her. She was fair. By some metrics her denial rate was higher than others on the bench. That is why firing her made no sense as a matter of policy. The only logic, and what I told the Star Tribune, is that the firing was meant to create fear for everyone else on the bench. I stand by that.
The numbers compound. The pressure on the trial bench does not stop there; it is reinforced by the precedent coming down from above. The Board of Immigration Appeals published seventy decisions last year, more than the entire Biden administration produced over its four years. Of those, only two could arguably be read as favoring the noncitizen. The rest move in one direction. One published decision from September 2025, Matter of Yajure Hurtado, 29 I&N Dec. 216 (BIA 2025), holds that immigration judges lack authority to hear bond requests from noncitizens who are present in the United States without admission, mandating their detention under 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(2)(A). The Eighth Circuit, which governs Fort Snelling cases, affirmed that approach in Avila v. Bondi, 170 F.4th 1128 (8th Cir. 2026), in a case out of Minneapolis. The Fifth and Seventh Circuits have reached the same conclusion. The Second, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuits have reached the opposite one, holding that 8 U.S.C. § 1226(a) governs and that bond hearings are required. The split will certainly require Supreme Court resolution. Article III review on these questions takes years, and the clients in front of the Fort Snelling bench today cannot wait on that timeline.
For institutional clients, the implication is different. A workforce that depends on noncitizen labor cannot rely on the timing or the outcome of removal proceedings the way it could a year ago. Cases that would have been continued for pending applications are ending with removal orders. Cases that would have been granted are being denied. Hearings that should have been open are being closed, in violation of federal law, as the Advocates for Human Rights have alleged in pending litigation. If your organization employs people whose work authorization depends on TPS or on the outcome of immigration court proceedings, plan for shorter timelines and worse outcomes, and structure contingencies accordingly.
The picture is not uniformly bleak. The Star Tribune piece closes with an adjustment of status that was granted on facts that deserved a grant. The bench still includes judges who follow the law as they read it. Three circuits have rejected the government's most expansive detention theory, and the split will likely require Supreme Court resolution. The clients who win are the clients whose lawyers built records for the next stage from the start.
What I said on the record is what I will say here. If you do not like the immigration laws, you can change them. Congress has that power. The administration does not. We are not changing the laws. We are ignoring them right now. That is the issue. Not the policy preferences of any administration. The question of whether the laws Congress wrote are still the laws being applied is an open one.
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