Masked law enforcement officers in tactical gear throwing civilians to the ground. In some cases — like Renee Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero — officers shoot civilians dead. Others disappear into detention before being deported to countries where they may have no family or connections.
Critics argue that the great country President Donald Trump envisions could be taken right out of a dystopian novel. A version of this society has existed since 1977 in the comic book world of Judge Dredd, a British series set in the year 2099 AD that depicts an authoritarian police state in the eastern United States.
And Judge Dredd is the image the Trump administration has chosen to assist with recruiting new immigration judges.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has posted social media images of the masked, gun-carrying Judge Dredd, a character known for his emotionless, brutal brand of law enforcement in service of an oppressive government. One post from December 2025, reads: “Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens. Become a deportation judge. Save your country.”
Since then, the administration has been on a hiring spree for new immigration judges and recently onboarded its largest class in history, according to the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, dozens of judges hired during previous administrations have been fired, including three women immigration judges who are suing the federal government, alleging that they lost their jobs because of racial and gender discrimination.
The use of Judge Dredd against the backdrop of a historic expansion of immigration enforcement foreshadows what the administration appears to value in government and the qualities it expects judges to embody.
The irony, comic book experts told The 19th, is that Judge Dredd was never meant to be an aspirational figure. The character’s creators — Pat Mills, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra — aimed to present an over-the-top dark-comedy critique of authoritarianism, police brutality and the stoic alpha male. The creators took inspiration from “Dirty Harry” and “every nasty hero or villain I’d ever seen who caught my fancy,” Wagner said in one interview, describing Judge Dredd as a “judge, jury and executioner” in another.
“That people should come out of that thinking that he’s the good guy surprises me,” Wagner said in 2022.
In the world of Judge Dredd, social disorder, environmental crises, overpopulation and nuclear war have led to the collapse of democracy. Most people live in sprawling urban areas like Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, which occupies much of the U.S. and Canadian east coasts. The justice system is condensed so that armed officers, referred to as judges, patrol the streets and serve as police, prosecutors and jurors who lord over the populace with unchecked power.
The judges of Mega-City One strive to enforce the law, and they often hand down severe punishments that do not match the alleged offense, said Andy Oliver, editor-in-chief of the UK-based online magazine Broken Frontier, which analyzes the comic book industry.
One example Oliver shared from the comics is the story of a candy manufacturer who creates treats so delicious that people begin rioting outside his store to get access to them. The judges decide the solution is to exile the manufacturer to life on a spacecraft and tell the public that he has died.
“Dredd’s motivation is just to uphold the law,” he told The 19th. “Whoever it hurts, it doesn’t matter. There’s no gray areas for him. So, if innocence gets caught up in the system, that’s very unfortunate, but that’s the way it goes.”
It is unclear whether the Trump administration’s use of Judge Dredd’s image to advertise job openings for immigration judges is a misunderstanding or an intentional reinterpretation of the character’s intent. Either way, it is not the first time law enforcement agencies have repackaged a fictional character, said Staci Strobl, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Shenandoah University and co-author of the book “Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice and the American Way.”
Police departments and U.S. military units have used the skull symbol of “The Punisher,” an anti-hero vigilante developed by Marvel Comics, to signal power or a hardline stance against crime. One of the co-creators of “The Punisher” has criticized this misrepresentation of the comic’s images, telling one magazine that “the vigilante anti-hero is fundamentally a critique of the justice system.”
Strobl and her co-author, criminologist Nickie Phillips, have studied what’s known as hegemonic inversion, in which institutions of power adopt and then change the meaning of media or ideas that were originally intended to be critical.
This alternate narrative in the Trump administration’s case, Strobl and Phillips said, is repurposing Judge Dredd to send a message about the qualities of the people it intends to hire.
“Judge Drudge is a very masculine comic. Most of the main characters are male, and it’s a very patriarchal and violent, dystopian world,” she said.
The broader context of what is happening in the United States under Trump also matters, Strobl added, citing actions to limit diverse hiring while seeking out individuals for roles in the federal government who will be loyal to the president’s political agenda.
In the first week of the president’s second term, he signed executive orders to terminate federal programs aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). He also ordered departments to submit reports on the ways they have furthered DEI practices, including in their hiring. In many cases, DEI hiring simply meant employing people who were not White men.
This June, Trump also signed an order that expands the administration’s power to remove federal employees. It opens with the statement, “The President relies on subordinates in the executive branch to help him faithfully execute the laws and advance the priorities for which he was elected by the American people.”
These broader pressures appear to be felt by some immigration judges, who have raised concerns about growing executive control and a shift in how the administration approaches their positions.
The Trump administration has hired 192 immigration judges so far in fiscal year 2026, beginning October 2025 and lasting until September 2026, according to figures from the Department of Justice. The administration’s hiring spree in fiscal year 2026 has matched the number of judges hired in fiscal years 2023, 2024 and 2025 combined. Meanwhile, since the start of Trump’s second term, at least 200 immigration judges have been fired or chosen to resign or retire, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges.
“Every time a judge is fired, resigns or retires, that’s 700 cases that get redistributed to other judges,” Holly D’Andrea, a sitting immigration judge and current president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said during a panel discussion hosted by Speak Up for Justice, a group formed in April 2025 to advocate for judicial independence and security.
“We’ve lost over 200 judges in the last year, so that’s approximately somewhere between 120,000 to 140,000 cases, case reassignments in a year,” she continued. “Hiring hasn’t kept pace, and hiring standards have been lowered. Training for the new hires has been seen by many judges as being inadequate to fully prepare the new judges, especially those with less direct immigration experience.”
One of the judges who voluntarily retired last year is Mimi Tsankov, who was first appointed as an immigration judge in 2006 after working as an immigration lawyer for the federal government. She went on to serve as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges from 2021 to 2025.
Tsankov told The 19th that she loved being an immigration judge and would have stayed on the bench longer, but at the start of Trump’s second term, she felt it was time to step away after nearly two decades. At first, the administration affirmed that judicial independence was alive and well in the immigration courts, Tsankov said. But then immigration judges started to experience what Tsankov describes as “soft pressure,” including a growing number of cases to manage and difficult deadlines to meet. “Then the firings started,” she said.
Among those fired are former immigration judges Carla Espinoza, Kyra Lilien and Florence Chamberlin — all women who are suing the administration over their terminations last year. Each of their legal complaints notes the administration’s effort to penalize any hiring within the federal government perceived to be part of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, particularly those “based on race or sex.”
“Together, the memoranda laid bare management’s hostility to hiring individuals with immigrants’ rights backgrounds, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and others who may be considered ‘DEI’ hires,” stated the legal complaint from Chamberlin, who is described as a Hispanic woman of Cuban heritage.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice, which oversees the hiring of immigration judges, declined The 19th’s request for comment on these lawsuits. Members of the Trump administration also have not publicly commented on the race or gender of immigration judges who have been terminated.
Tsankov said she does not know the details of any gender-related claims by immigration judges against the administration. But DHS linking the hiring of new judges with the Judge Dredd comics “undermines the seriousness of the work that immigration judges are doing each and every day,” she said.
“It is embarrassing, it’s dismaying and is the type of reason why I left my role,” Tsankov added. “I don’t want to be a part of something that isn’t fair and doesn’t treat the people who appear before me with respect.”
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