Deportation Judges, Counter-DEI Lawyers Top DOJ 2026 Hiring List

Lawyers predict more Justice Department action on its civil rights priorities, immigration enforcement, and protecting loyalist US attorneys as the Trump administration continues to reorient the department in 2026.

Upheaval at DOJ has led to more than 5,500 career employees leaving since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to estimates from Justice Connection, an organization supporting former and current employees.

The administration is recruiting for the Civil Rights Division’s election integrity and anti-DEI focus, while seeking “deportation judges” to replace the dozens of judges fired in DOJ’s immigration courts in the past year.

The Trump administration is also searching for more lawyers to fill in offices of loyalist US attorney picks, including three that have remained at offices after judges ruled they were unlawfully appointed.

As congressional Democrats demand answers from a DOJ they see acting as the president’s political arm, former congressional aides say they expect Republican leadership to remain slow in probing what allies characterize as a return to DOJ’s mission of upholding the rule of law.

The Trump administration is “trying to bring the Justice Department back into nonpartisan, objective enforcement of the law,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a former senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who worked as counsel in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during George W. Bush’s administration.

Civil Rights Enforcement

Legal scholars and former DOJ lawyers say the department’s civil rights arm, which lost roughly 75% of its career staff in the last year, will be even more active in filing litigation under leader Harmeet Dhillon’s reorientation of the division.

This will include additional lawsuits against states declining to turn over voter registration lists, along with universities and other institutions related to their DEI programs, von Spakovsky said.

But the division faces the challenge of finding staff willing to carry out these priorities, said Mark Yancey, the former leader of DOJ’s training academy for federal prosecutors.

“When you’ve lost three quarters of your attorneys, many with years of expertise, I am just wondering what’s going to happen with respect to civil rights prosecutions,” Yancey said.

Dhillon and other political appointees have taken their recruiting efforts to social media, with a recent X post from the division chief looking for “competent and motivated” lawyers who want to “fight DEI pushed by woke schools, governments, & employers,” among other work.

Immigration Court Shift

DOJ is advancing its goal of detailing up to 600 military lawyers to serve stints as judges in immigration courts.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review plans to bring in a new class of judges at least every quarter and is “re-committed to following the law and fulfilling its core adjudicatory mission,” DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said in an email.

Former office employees see this, among other changes, as an attempt to advance the administration’s detention and deportation focus.

Many of the dozens of immigration judges fired this year were known for having higher asylum grant rates, which sends a “not-so-subtle message to the remaining judges that they should issue only certain kinds of decisions or their jobs are at risk,” said Margy O’Herron, who oversaw DOJ’s immigration portfolio under the Biden administration.

Early analysis by the nonprofit Mobile Pathways found the first batch of Judge Advocate General’s Corps lawyers tapped to serve as judges had a significantly higher rate of removal orders, 78%, compared to 63% from all other judges in November.

This, along with the administration’s recruitment for “deportation” judges, “suggests the system is being designed now so that people lose” requests for deportation relief, said Carmen Maria Rey Caldas, a former immigration judge fired in August.

Immigration advocates and former DOJ employees are calling for legislative changes to insulate these judges, who are DOJ employees and not housed within an independent court system, from political influence.

“Something has to be done to protect judges’ independence,” O’Herron said.

US Attorney Limbo

Trump’s DOJ has so far failed to get judges’ support for its loyalist US attorneys serving in acting roles. Legal analysts expect this will force the administration to delegate more responsibilities to offices’ first assistants and put more nominees before the Senate.

In each of the four offices with US attorneys whom courts have said were unlawfully installed, the Trump administration has designated the legally contested prosecutor or others in their office under new titles, including “first assistant.”

In some Democrat-led states, the administration is likely to continue this approach and “then delegate almost all of the job to that first assistant,” Stanford Law professor Anne Joseph O’Connell said.

Congressional Republican leaders have resisted Trump’s demand to remove the “blue slip” authority offered to home state Senators to effectively block judicial nominees. This could force Trump to nominate more picks for some of the more than 60 US attorney’s offices without a Senate-confirmed federal prosecutor, Yancey said.

“That system has worked, and it’s worked well for decades,” Yancey said of the Senate confirmation process.

Congressional Oversight

The chairmen of judiciary committees in both chambers—Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)—will likely continue showing little interest in investigating actions by Trump’s DOJ, former congressional legal aides say.

The department is “doing what they want with the workforce and the structure and offices and everything, and there’s no pushback from Republicans in Congress,” said Dave Rapallo, director of Georgetown Law’s Federal Legislation Clinic and former Democratic staff director for the House Oversight Committee.

Grassley is poised to continue “the committee’s top oversight priority” of probing actions by Joe Biden’s DOJ, including former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election, said Kim Hamm, co-chair of Morrison & Foerster LLP’s congressional investigations practice who served as general counsel to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Meanwhile, a major theme for congressional Democrats, Rapallo said, is probing how “the administration is converting DOJ itself into a partisan instrument of the president, rather than a neutral law enforcement agency.”