The Florida attorney Willy Allen III warned this Friday that the United States government has hired 120 new immigration judges trained in just three to four weeks, with the explicit aim of denying asylum cases and facilitating deportations.
"If you look at the Courts, you will see that they have hired 120 new judges, trained for three or four weeks to deny cases," Allen stated in his weekly immigration segment with Tania Costa.
The lawyer did not speak merely from hearsay. As he explained, he has already had personal hearings before these judges and described what he found. "They do not have a strong understanding of the law. They only look for reasons to deny and deport," he stated.
His prognosis is bleak in this regard: "I imagine it will be something very similar to the border," he said.
Allen's warning coincides with a documented radical transformation of the immigration court system under the Trump Administration. More than 100 experienced judges were dismissed or forced to retire since 2025, and the Board of Immigration Appeals was reduced from 28 to just 15 members.
To fill the vacancies, the government recruited temporary judges, many of whom were military lawyers without experience in immigration law, and removed the requirement of ten years of experience in the field to qualify for the position.
Bloomberg Law reported in February 2026 that during training sessions, new judges were instructed to grant asylum "only in rare circumstances." The National Association of Immigration Judges confirmed that the training period was reduced from nearly five weeks to three.
The result has been a dramatic drop in the asylum approval rate: from 48% in February 2024 to less than 5% in February 2025.
For Cubans, the situation is particularly dire. Arrests by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have risen by 463% since October 2025, and approximately 42,000 Cubans have final deportation orders in U.S. territory.
This is not the first time that Allen III has denounced the trend among judges to deny asylum to Cubans. In 2018, his father, Willy Allen, raised concerns about judges downplaying the repression in Cuba, and in 2019 documented a case in Louisiana where a judge denied asylum claiming that Cuba had "changed" under Díaz-Canel.
During the same program, Allen III also addressed a query regarding the Cuban Adjustment with secondary evidence —entry by CBP-1, third box, without parole or Form I-94—. The lawyer noted that, although it is difficult, "there may be a legal argument to assert that even without the I-94, it constitutes a legal entry," depending on the specifics of each case.
What Allen III describes represents an unprecedented escalation of a trend that has been impacting the Cuban community for years.
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