Sponsors (5)
This bill creates a standalone, better-resourced Immigration Courts system that aims to standardize procedures, protect due process, and improve oversight and operations, but it shifts authority and resources away from existing executive structures in ways that raise oversight, fiscal, privacy, transition, and access-to-justice risks.
Immigrants, judges, and attorneys: Establishes a statutory, standalone Immigration Courts system with clearer authority and venue rules, which should standardize procedures and reduce ambiguity in removal adjudications.
People with pending cases and current immigration judges: Preserves continuity by converting existing EOIR judges to interim trial judges with full authority, transferring staff/records, and protecting ongoing proceedings and many existing precedents.
Detained noncitizens in removal proceedings: Strengthens procedural protections (clearer notice, access to counsel, inspection of evidence), improving due process for respondents in custody.
Immigrants and respondents: Centralizing adjudicative rules and shifting authorities from the Attorney General to a new court structure could limit procedural flexibility, concentrate administrative control, and reduce existing executive-branch oversight of immigration adjudications.
Respondents with limited access or technology and remote communities: Restricting some proceedings to in-person or video conference and pressuring faster completion for certain cases risks reducing meaningful participation and thorough fact-finding for people in remote areas or with limited tech access.
Federal workforce transparency and fairness: Expanding excepted (noncompetitive) hiring and exempting pay-setting from standard chapter 51/53 rules may reduce transparency, weaken merit-based hiring safeguards, and create perceptions of unfairness across the federal workforce.
Based on analysis of 16 sections of legislative text.
Establishes an independent United States Immigration Courts system, transfers EOIR functions and staff, gives courts budget and staffing authority, and revises immigration procedures and reporting.
Introduced March 5, 2026 by Zoe Lofgren · Last progress March 5, 2026
Creates a new, stand-alone United States Immigration Courts system that takes most adjudicative functions, personnel, assets, and funding authority away from the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). The new courts will control their own budget, set many staffing and pay rules, receive transferred EOIR records and cases, and operate under a multi-year transition plan that preserves current judges’ service and benefits. Makes procedural and statutory edits across the immigration code to shift decisionmaking and case-management duties from the Attorney General/EOIR to the new Immigration Courts and immigration judges, requires annual public workload and demographic reporting, requires periodic Judicial Conference reviews, and establishes special appointment, pay, and hiring flexibilities for court staff and judges during and after a four-year transition period that begins on a specified "application date."