The Justice Department terminated New York immigration court judge Vivienne Gordon-Uruakpa back in September, ending the tenure of a jurist who ruled in favor of asylum claimants 97 percent of the time. The firing happened without public notice. Gordon-Uruakpa no longer appears on the website of the downtown Manhattan courthouse where she used to serve.

A government official indicated the termination was tied to her prolific record of asylum rulings. The Justice Department declined to comment on the specific reason she was fired. When asked about her absence from the court's website, the DOJ said only that the site "is up to date."

That's one way to confirm it.

A Record That Speaks for Itself

Gordon-Uruakpa, 66, granted asylum 97 percent of the time when cases came before her. She was featured in a story last week about how migrants effectively roll the dice when making immigration claims, with outcomes shifting dramatically depending on which judge hears the case. Her background is in legal aid and criminal defense. She attended Fordham University in the Bronx and Howard University School of Law.

According to the New York Post, None of that background is disqualifying on its own. Plenty of competent judges come from defense-side careers. But a 97 percent grant rate isn't judicial temperament. It's a rubber stamp. Immigration judges exist to weigh evidence, assess credibility, and apply the law. When virtually every claimant who appears before a single judge walks away with asylum, the process has stopped functioning as adjudication and started functioning as an assembly line.

Nearly 80 percent of migrants seeking asylum were deported in the last quarter. That figure represents the system working as designed: hearing claims, evaluating them against legal standards, and removing those who don't qualify. A judge granting relief at a rate that inverts the national trend isn't showing compassion. She's showing that she had no intention of enforcing the law as written.

More Than 100 Judges and Counting

Gordon-Uruakpa's firing is not an isolated personnel decision. Trump has fired more than 100 immigration judges during his term. Attorney General Pam Bondi holds the authority to hire and fire immigration court judges, and the administration has used that authority aggressively to reshape a system that for years operated as a de facto asylum approval machine in certain jurisdictions.

The immigration court system sits under the DOJ, not the judiciary. That's a distinction the left conveniently forgets when it frames these firings as attacks on judicial independence. Immigration judges are DOJ employees. They serve at the pleasure of the Attorney General. When an administration committed to enforcing immigration law discovers that judges on its own payroll are functionally nullifying that law from the bench, the corrective isn't controversial. It's overdue.

Meanwhile, the toughest New York judge on asylum, John Burns, was named Acting Assistant Chief Judge in January. The contrast could not be cleaner. Judges who apply the law get promoted. Judges who ignore it get shown the door.

The Quiet Part

What's striking about this story is the silence. Gordon-Uruakpa was terminated in September. No announcement. No press conference. No protest from the usual coalition of immigration advocacy groups that typically treats any enforcement action like a constitutional crisis. It took months and a related story about judge-shopping in immigration courts for anyone to notice she was gone.

That silence tells you something. When the facts are this clean, even the loudest critics struggle to mount a defense. Arguing that a judge who granted asylum 97 percent of the time was exercising careful, case-by-case judgment is a hard sell. The number does the work. It reveals a judge who had made up her mind before the cases were called.

For years, the immigration system's dysfunction was treated as an inevitability, something too complex to fix, too politically sensitive to touch. Illegal immigrants learned to exploit it. Advocacy lawyers learned to game it. And certain judges made sure the game always paid out.

The DOJ didn't make a spectacle of firing Vivienne Gordon-Uruakpa. It just updated the website.