Thousands of people took to the streets of Minneapolis after immigration officers shot and killed a local nurse named Alex Pretti in January — among them was a recently retired immigration court judge.
“A life had been lost, and so I went down there really just to bear witness,” David Koelsch, who served for several years as a judge in the Baltimore and Detroit immigration courts, told Michigan Public.
Koelsch is a Michigan native and was visiting family in Minneapolis when protests broke out over Pretti’s killing. Pretti’s death marked the second time immigration officers killed a U.S. citizen in the city during the two month long “surge.”
“I'm not against immigration enforcement,” Koelsch told Michigan Public in a recent interview, but he said the kind of massive and largely indiscriminate sweeps launched by the Trump administration tear at the fabric of society by arresting people with no criminal history and strong ties to local communities. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.”
According to Koelsch, immigration court is the wrong way to decide if people should be allowed to stay in the U.S.
"Beyond saving"
“I think [immigration court] is sort of beyond saving,” he said.
Koelsch was appointed to serve as an immigration judge in 2018, during the first Trump administration. When he retired last September, Koelsch said he was motivated primarily by “personal reasons.” But, he said, he felt it was becoming harder for judges to decide cases based on their merits amidst the Trump administration’s effort to deport millions of undocumented people.
The immigration court system is part of the Department of Justice, but, until recently, many judges felt they could exercise judicial independence. Koelsch and others who recently left the bench have said that the Trump administration is directing immigration judges’ decisions.
Koelsch said judges have received more “directives” from federal officials about how to decide cases, in addition to “pressure to hit the numbers and move cases along much faster than has been the case before.”
The immigration court system has a backlog of nearly 4 million cases.
“Reducing the immigration court backlog is one of the highest priorities for the agency,” Executive Office for Immigration Review Acting Director Sirce E. Owen said in a statement. “This administration is committed to using all of its resources to continue to adjudicate immigration cases fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly.”
In September, Owen credited changes made since President Donald Trump took office with the “sharpest decrease” during a single fiscal year in the agency’s history.
Koelsch thinks a change in how cases are decided could address the backlog while still considering the merits and circumstances of each case, with some basic protections.
“My proposal actually is to essentially get rid of the immigration courts,” he said.
The former immigration judge thinks judges shouldn’t decide on cases. Instead, he thinks asylum officers and people in similar roles should be empowered to make decisions on who can stay in the U.S. Having worked as a supervisor to asylum officers, Koelsch has a good sense of the extensive training and oversight involved in determining if asylum seekers face threats in their home countries that would qualify them to be granted legal residency in this country.
“The adjudication that people receive at the asylum office is actually, in my view, at this point, a higher quality than what you get at many immigration courts,” he said.
![An editorial collage combining a black-and-white photograph of the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building, home to the Detroit Immigration Court, with colorful torn-paper fragments of text clipped from immigration court bond hearing documents. The scraps — in pink, blue, and green — display partial phrases including "Granted" (with a checked checkbox), "Denied" (with a checked checkbox), "a flight risk," "Respondent is a flight risk," "the Immigration Judge denied Pe[titioner]," "(ICE), released Petit[ioner]," "under bond of $5,000," "bond of $15,000, with," and "Denied, because." The overlapping fragments visually contrast bond grants and denials, evoking the bureaucratic and high-stakes nature of immigration detention proceedings.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c57a8e5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x1070+0+5/resize/560x312!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F75%2F7b%2Fa875b7d043b4b67d5862f5501af5%2Fbond-headers-5.png)
The Trump administration has fired many longtime judges and replaced them with Department of Homeland Security prosecutors or military court judges or who have less experience with immigration court proceedings.
Even experienced immigration judges tend to have less familiarity with the political climate an asylum seeker might be fleeing from, or the nuances of their cases, than the asylum officers who process their applications.
Political influence
Still, there aren’t a lot of people who share Koelsch’s view that the immigration court system itself is the problem.
“I don't feel like it's beyond saving, said Marie Celentino, who directs the University of Detroit Mercy immigration clinic — a job Koelsch used to have. She agreed that a lot is broken in the immigration court system, but she said more judges, more funding, and more independence would go a long way toward fixing it.
Celentino doesn’t see how moving immigration decisions from courts to offices would address her primary concern, which is far fewer people granted legal status in the U.S.
The rate at which asylum seekers were granted that status dropped by half between August 2024 and August 2025, per government data processed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
“We're seeing the statistics of the asylum grant rates just plummeting with this current administration,” Celentino said. “The legal definitions have not changed. Conditions in the world have certainly not improved. And so there's no real explanation for why we're seeing drastic changes in asylum adjudications besides who's in the White House.”
Immigration courts are a part of the Department of Justice, and past presidents have created new programs and policies in line with their priorities, said Celentino. But the Trump administration is exerting more influence over the courts through firing judges, issuing directives to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, and setting legal precedents with decisions from the appeals court for immigration cases.
To protect immigration decisions from political influence, many immigration reform advocates want to see immigration courts moved out of the executive branch of government and into the judicial branch, which encompasses the country’s civil and criminal court systems.
Former Immigration Judge Koelsch can see an argument for that, too.
“I think they’re right, that that would actually lead to greater due process,” he said, but that change would likely make immigration courts even less efficient.
