CHICAGO — Trump administration officials on Thursday fired two more judges at the Chicago Immigration Court, which has seen seismic changes since the president returned to office and recently become the national leader in deportation orders.

Now-terminated Immigration Judges Elizabeth Crites and Eva Saltzman had been with the city’s immigration court since 2021 and 2016, respectively. The National Association of Immigration Judges confirmed their departures, which continue a wave of firings, resignations and buyouts among Chicago immigration judges that began in January 2025.

As the president, who has direct oversight of the country’s immigration courts, seeks to reshape them in the image of his hardline agenda, the lineup of judges who hear cases of immigrants seeking to remain in the U.S. has changed dramatically, as have many of the basic elements that define the life of an immigration case. All of that, advocates and attorneys say, has helped transform the city’s immigration court into the national epicenter of removal orders: from issuing 35 a day on average during President Joe Biden’s last year to more than 125 a day this year.

Crites, reached by phone, confirmed she’d been fired but made no other comment. Saltzman, also reached by phone, said she found out she’d been fired in the middle of a hearing, around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, through an email containing a three-sentence PDF.

“I was stunned and disappointed but not surprised,” Saltzman said. “I’ve served as an immigration judge for the last decade and under this administration, I continued to do my job the way I’ve always done it, giving careful consideration to each case and applying the law to each case. And I’ve long anticipated that under this administration, performing my duties in this way may result in my termination.”

That said, she continued, there had been no immediate warning signs that she was about to be terminated. The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the country’s immigration courts as part of the Executive Branch, didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The Tribune reported earlier this month how Chicago’s immigration court had become the national epicenter of removal orders across the country, using Department of Justice data — obtained and refined by the research group Deportation Data Project — to find that even Biden-era judges saw notable swings toward issuing higher rates of removal orders once Trump took office.

That was true of judges Crites and Saltzman as well, but the Tribune analysis found that they still lagged their peers’ prolific pace of removal orders.

When looking at all judges who concluded at least 50 cases that month — and excluding cases that ended with the immigrant voluntarily deciding to leave — the analysis found the two judges had the two lowest percentages of cases concluding in the issuance of removal orders. Crites handled the court’s juvenile cases, while Saltzman was one of two judges to hear cases from the detained docket, for people who are fighting their cases while in DHS custody..

For Judge Crites, the analysis found that she concluded roughly a fifth of her more than 500 June cases by dismissing, terminating or otherwise closing them without issuing a removal order — the kind of nuanced ending that can frustrate those pushing for mass deportation.

Judge Saltzman issued the fewest removal orders of the group, just 33 in an immigration courthouse where judges typically issued hundreds that month, and one judge issued more than 900. Saltzman said Thursday that that wasn’t surprising to her at all, given the caseload she worked with.

Immigrants who choose to fight to stay in the U.S. from detention tend to do so because their cases stand a good chance of getting a favorable outcome, she said: “The relief applications that I am considering are self-selected in a a way that makes them more likely to be cases that should be granted.”

The other consequence of Saltzman’s hearing the detained docket was the fact that her caseload drew a substantial amount of media attention, most recently in the case of Reuben Torres Maldonado. Torres Maldonado’s 16-year-old daughter Ofelia Torres was in the throes of treatment for Stage IV cancer when federal agents arrested him at the height of Operation Midway Blitz. Ofelia Torres died in February.

Saltzman, as she made the decision to release him on bond Oct. 30 of last year, noted he is an unlikely flight risk and has a case to potentially remain in the United States.

“I wish you much luck in the future and I wish your daughter a full recovery,” she said.

While her docket tended to attract higher-profile cases like that of the Torres family, Saltzman said she’d “never made a decision with any particular agenda or end goal in mind.”

—Chicago Tribune’s Joe Mahr contributed.

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