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An office in the Justice Department reviews appeals from immigration courts. It is called the Board of Immigration Appeals, and it has a lot of power over the lives of immigrants. NPR's Ximena Bustillo reports it has helped to make President Trump's immigration agenda binding.
XIMENA BUSTILLO, BYLINE: Andrea Saenz is a former Board of Immigration Appeals judge. She was appointed to the board during the Biden administration. In her three years on the board, she reviewed over 4,000 cases.
ANDREA SAENZ: So an immigration judge will complete a case. Maybe it's an asylum case. Maybe it's whether somebody should get a green card through their family. And if somebody doesn't agree with the immigration judge decision, both the immigrant or DHS can file a paper appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
BUSTILLO: Of those cases, only a few dozen are published publicly every year as what's called a precedent for both immigration courts and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency at the Homeland Security Department that handles legal migration.
SAENZ: And they're intended to be binding on the whole country and all immigration judges and USCIS to say, this is how you actually follow this piece of the law.
BUSTILLO: But in February of last year, Saenz and other Biden appointees to the board got an email that they were no longer needed. Their positions were being eliminated. When Saenz was there, the board was made up of 26 appointees, with some going back to the George W. Bush administration. Now it's 15 people, and 13 of them were appointed during one of Trump's two terms. The new board quickly made its mark.
SAENZ: The board is issuing many more precedent decisions than they usually do, and they are almost all adverse to the immigrant.
BUSTILLO: An NPR analysis found that the board issued 70 decisions in 2025, a record number. That's as many as all the decisions posted publicly under four years of President Biden, and only two sided with the immigrant defendant. These decisions include rulings that have made it harder for immigration judges to grant bond to immigrants, and they've made it easier to deport migrants to countries that they are not from. These are all priorities for Trump as a part of a campaign of mass deportations. Victoria Neilson is a supervising attorney at the National Immigration Project, a legal advocacy group.
VICTORIA NEILSON: The board itself is implementing this administration's policy goals.
BUSTILLO: A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency is, quote, "restoring integrity" to immigration courts and that the board's decisions reflect straightforward interpretations of the law. Neilson said the BIA is supposed to catch mistakes from immigration judges because mistakes can happen.
NEILSON: Assuming that they are acting in good faith, they're going to get things wrong sometimes because the law is changing all the time.
BUSTILLO: The BIA is already under the executive branch of government, but it was supposed to review immigration law independently. Neilson says it's losing its perceived independence by overwhelmingly siding with the administration.
NEILSON: If someone feels like they had their fair day in court and they just didn't meet the legal standard, people can kind of accept that. But if you give up everything, follow the rules, and then suddenly the rules disappear, that seems very un-American.
BUSTILLO: The BIA is on track for another record-setting year of decisions that could shape the lives of millions of immigrants.
Ximena Bustillo, NPR News, Washington.
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