The Hangin' Judge and the Endless Frontier

The Department of Justice seeks to re-define America for generations.

November 22, 2025

A quirk of the legal system undermines the independence of the judiciary when it comes to immigration (and a few other matters). Immigration Judges are a species of Administrative Law Judge, which means that they are technically part of the executive branch. As such, they effectively serve at the pleasure of the President.

This president is displeased.

On Thursday, DHS Director Kristi Noem posted a recruitment call on X:

Restore integrity and honor! It sounds like those scurrilous judges have been handing out green cards for bribes, have been letting criminal syndicates come in willy-nilly, are part of the sinister cabal that Great Replacement Theorists have tried to warn us about. I’m sadly not qualified, but who doesn’t want to have an immigration court system that has honor and integrity?

But wait: a “Deportation Judge”? Is that different from an immigration judge? Do you have one set of judges at the entrance and another at the exit?

When you click through (the site seems to be experiencing a high volume of visitors since the news broke, which I hope is more curious dissenters like me than legal professionals eager to take up the gavel), the job is indeed listed as immigration judge. So, like “hangin’ judge,” I guess the new title is more of a nickname.

On the landing page it makes a secondary pitch, a different encouragement than restoring integrity and honor. As a deportation judge, the page says in multi-colored all caps, you can “DEFINE AMERICA FOR GENERATIONS.”

Ah, here we go.

Certain white Americans, notably Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, are very worried about 2045. That is the year that the United States is projected to lose its white majority, as the population of Americans who identify as European dips for the first time below fifty percent. I guess that’s a bad thing.

Immigration along with low birth rates is a significant part of the changing demographic picture. If your goal is to keep America white, curtailing immigration is the most obvious step (but note that they are also trying – and will fail – to raise birth rates, too). And recasting the role as “deportation judge” for the purpose of recruitment is a good way to skew the hiring pool your way.

The role of defining America gets a further clarification: the web page says “Make decisions with generational consequences; ensure that only aliens with legally meritorious claims are allowed to remain…. Combat fraud and ensure those seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in our immigration system are not successful.”

The combination seems aimed at a clear audience. The government is seeking to hire nativists who will set the presumption against immigrants as deportation judges, in order to define what America is for generations.

But we have already defined what America is, over centuries of admitting and absorbing immigrants from around the world. That definition reads something like this:

We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people – our strength – from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. — Ronald Reagan, January 19, 1989

Our future is not white. But it is an American identity that we can all partake of, if we do not choose to wall ourselves off and let history pass us by.