Edwin Pieters is searching for reasons why the Biden administration fired him as an immigration judge.

He said he got satisfactory reviews during his time as a judge. And his decisions were roughly 50-50 in terms of approvals or rejections, so he doesn’t think that can be it.

The explanation he settles on is that he’s a Black judge brought on by the Trump administration, and that doesn’t fit well with the new team running the Justice Department, which has gone on a tear in dismissing Trump-era judges from the immigration courts.

“To be very candid, the left are sick,” Mr. Pieters told The Washington Times. “If I have an opinion opposed to yours, all of a sudden I become the enemy. That whole school of thought, and then being a Black man, a New York prosecutor. The advocacy groups made it clear Biden should not be hiring from the background of prosecutors.”

Mr. Pieters was hired under the Trump administration but wasn’t installed until the Biden administration. He had nearly two years on the job, which is when the probationary period ends and he would be “converted” into a permanent position.

But he was called in earlier this month and told he was out.

He said his supervisors told him his “performance” was not up to par. He questioned how that could be, given his satisfactory evaluations.

Mr. Pieters said the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts, investigated him after a lawyer complained about his Twitter account. The Office of Special Counsel also probed him for a Hatch Act violation — conducting politics while on the job — because of Twitter posts complaining about Democratic politicians.

He got a warning from the OSC, but no discipline was recommended. He said he never heard any outcome to the first complaint.

Immigration judges are not part of the regular court system, do not receive Senate confirmation and are not tenured for life. They are instead civil servants in the Justice Department, though they operate on similar principles of evidence and justice and courtroom arguments as other judges.

Their duties include ruling on asylum cases and other defenses illegal immigrants mount when they are facing deportation.

Mr. Pieters said when he joined the bench in 2021, he was given clear signals by colleagues that the way to stay in the agency’s good graces was to “grant everything.”

“This was advice on several occasions,” he told The Times.

He said that conflicted with his belief that a judge was there to “see justice done.”

Mr. Pieters is the latest in a string of Trump-appointed immigration judges to be ousted. One Justice Department source said more than 10 judges recruited in the Trump era have been fired at the end of their probationary period or resigned before they could be fired.

“It’s clearly ideological because only IJs appointed under Trump are being fired,” said the department source, who pointed out that the Trump administration didn’t do any similar housecleaning of Obama appointees when they took over.

“The ideological goal is to firmly establish a de facto amnesty for anyone in EOIR proceedings by breaking EOIR so that almost no one is ordered removed regardless of the law,” the source said.

The purge goes beyond line judges. Of 10 senior executive posts at EOIR, six of them have seen upheaval since Mr. Biden took office, according to the department source who also said that sort of upheaval was unheard of before the Biden era.

The Washington Times sought comment from the Justice Department for this story.

Whatever the reason behind the changes, it has done nothing to solve the major issue facing EOIR: The staggering backlog of cases, fueled by the record surge of illegal immigrants rushing the border under President Biden.

EOIR listed nearly 1.9 million pending cases as of the start of this year. That’s up from 1.3 million cases at the start of fiscal year 2020.

Last year saw the largest new volume of cases in history, with more than 700,000 new dockets in 2022. Judges completed only 310,000 cases during the year.

Few migrants win their cases before judges. Only about 10% of cases in fiscal year 2023 are granted “relief,” meaning migrants proved their claims.

Deportation is ordered in about half of all cases, while the rest are a mixture of migrants giving up their claims or Homeland Security deciding not to pursue a case right now. In those cases, the migrants are still on the docket.

Matt O’Brien, who was appointed as an immigration judge in the Trump administration before being terminated by the Biden administration, wondered why EOIR would be ousting capable judges at a time when it’s facing a stupefying backlog, with some migrants told they won’t get their first hearing for five years or longer.

“The only answer is that the efficient judges aren’t producing ideologically correct decisions, so they have to go,” said Mr. O’Brien, who is now director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute.

“I suspect Judge Pieters was terminated because he represents everything that the open borders Biden administration hates — a successful, conservative, ‘minority’ jurist who backs Donald Trump,” he said. “It’s clear that Team Biden wants to link immigration enforcement with ‘racism’ in the eyes of the American public. But Judge Pieters makes that impossible because he singlehandedly torpedoes the leftist narrative that our judicial system is rife with discrimination.”

Several sources said the upheaval stems from an active circle of lawyers who practice immigration law and see Trump-era judges as too harsh in their rulings.

Mr. Pieters said he first got crossways with the agency after a lawyer complained about his Twitter posts to his supervisors. The posts include retweets of others questioning the 2020 presidential election, backing the GOP candidate for governor in New York in 2022 and questioning high levels of illegal immigration.

EOIR launched an investigation. He says he never heard any conclusion to that probe, but somewhere along the way, his supervisors said it had become a probe by the Office of Special Counsel.

He said he was up-front with OSC about his posts, saying they were made while he was off the clock.

Still, while the investigations were ongoing he was pulled off duties, which means he hasn’t judged cases in months. He was told he would have other roles, but no work was ever given to him.

Mr. Pieters said when he was called in and told he was being ousted, he confronted his supervisors, saying, “If I had tweeted to open the borders and let everyone in and in support of Biden administration border policies, I would not be in this current predicament now?”

“Both just looked with this blanket stare with no response,” he said. “Then I said, ‘Then this is political?’ Both replied the same way with a blanket stare and silence.”

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.