Trump’s New Deportation Chief Is a “F*cking Dope,” Ex-Colleagues Say

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task. Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast. Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast. “Such a fucking dope,” another person said. “Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast. Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office. Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.