A Trump-appointed immigration judge believes the Department of Justice (DOJ) fired him because of his conservative views, he told “Fox & Friends First” Friday morning.
“After my two years, I got the call to come into the office. I met with the division chief, the assistant chief. I was handed a letter. The letter indicated that I wasn’t gonna be converted from a temporary to a permanent position based on my performance and conduct,” Edwin Pieters said, adding that he questioned what part of his performance led to his firing because he had a record of satisfactory reviews.
Pieters was fired after serving on the bench for two years with good performance records, he told “Fox & Friends First” host Carley Shimkus. Pieters was previously questioned about his Twitter account, where he expressed his conservative views.
“I have no doubt it was based on President Trump, I was a President Trump appointee back in 2021. I was the last class that actually President Trump’s administration appointed as an immigration judge,” Pieters said.
Pieters was previously notified that his ideological tweets had come under scrutiny, he said.
“In December, I received an email from my supervisor indicating that it was an outside complaint about some tweets that I tweeted and retweeted which would appear that I could not be fair as an immigration judge,” Pieters said.
“It was political tweets and I could not be fair to illegal immigrants who appeared before me. So, I was called in, then I was questioned,” said Pieters, who had a 50/50 case acceptance to rejection rate as a judge, adding that “By December, my Twitter account was already suspended for my conservative views and I owned up to them.”
There are approximately 650 immigration judges to handle the backlog of 1.8 million pending cases across the country, the Executive Office of Immigration Review previously told the DCNF. Meanwhile, the southern border has experienced a surge in illegal immigration in the last couple of years, with Border Patrol encounters topping 2.2 million in fiscal year 2022.
The Biden administration let 10 Trump-appointed judges go in 2022, Pieters said.
A spokesperson for the DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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