Trump names new head of immigration courts

The Justice Department on Tuesday named a new head of its immigration court system a retired Marine Corps colonel who was fired from a command post as chief of security at Marine Base Quantico for negligently firing a gun on the floor of his office.

The colonel, Daren K. Margolin, who served as a military lawyer in various roles in the Marine Corps, began working for the first Trump administration after he retired from military service, according to a Justice Department biography. In June 2020, the Trump-era Department of Justice appointed Colonel Margolin as an associate immigration judge and he served in this role until 2024.

In 2013, Col. Margolin, who had been commander of the Quantico Security Battalion, was removed from command after allegedly discharging a personal firearm, according to news reports at the time. Ground rules at Quantico prevented Marines from carrying personal weapons on its grounds, and Colonel Margolin, as chief of base security, was responsible for enforcing the weapons ban.

Maj. Gen. Juan Ayala, then in charge of monitoring the marine bases, said he removed Colonel Margolin because he had lost confidence in his ability to command.

Colonel Margolin will now head the Executive Office of Immigration Review at the Justice Department, effectively overseeing the entire U.S. immigration court system, which reviews migrant asylum applications and deportation orders. The immigration courts are part of the executive branch and their judges are employees of Colonel Margolin’s office.

President Trump had purged high-level officials from the Immigration Bureau immediately after taking office, including the bureau’s previous chief of staff and the chief immigration judge.

While Mr. Trump carries out a mass deportation campaign, a substantial backlog of immigration cases has hampered that effort. As of July, there were nearly 3.8 million pending immigration cases, and Mr. Trump has often complained that providing due process to all of the country’s undocumented migrants through immigration courts thwarts his mass deportation plans.