The new boss of the immigration office at the Justice Department issued a stern message to the staff this week: Credible reports suggested that some employees had engaged in “abhorrent” misconduct that was “contrary to law.”
The tongue-lashing from Sirce E. Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, was issued on Monday. To many of the recipients, it signaled that the dismissals and reassignments that began hours after President Trump took office last week were all but certain to continue.
At the Justice Department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, lawyers who specialize in issues ranging from national security to the environment to criminal work described the alarm and uncertainty that have rippled across the agency. For some, the dizzying pace of change has raised concerns about the department’s tradition of independence and its commitment to the rule of law given how rapidly Mr. Trump has moved to fire those he views as disloyal.
Career prosecutors responsible for investigating the president were abruptly fired. Top officials have been reassigned, including the senior-most career official who often acted as a critical — and neutral — arbiter of ethical matters. Others still have been relegated to areas outside their expertise.
“Whatever you’re going to ask, the answer is I have no idea,” one Justice Department veteran said on Tuesday, expressing amazement at the pace of change and speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
The written broadside that the agency’s top immigration official leveled against her own employees underscored the shift underway. Even as her memos described deportation casework handled by immigration judges, the language echoed criticism Mr. Trump and his aides have directed at the department under the Biden administration, accusing it of being weaponized.
The office, Ms. Owen wrote, “has faced multiple allegations of inequitable treatment of its employees over the past four years, including excessively favorable treatment for so-called elites, wildly disparate treatment of components unrelated to each component’s size or operations and — perhaps most distressingly — widely varying disciplinary or corrective measures for similar alleged misconduct.”
“These practices, which are antithetical to E.O.I.R.’s values and undermine its effectiveness as an agency, are to cease immediately,” she added.
Another memo, which pledged to recommit to the office’s “core values and the rule of law,” chastised the staff not to “read policies obtusely or ridiculously.” All policies, she wrote, “should be read with a modicum of common sense.”
To add to her litany of grievances, she complained that some immigration judges “were pressured, targeted and tacitly threatened” by managers and the deputy attorney general’s office because they did not immediately agree to reopen cases in which a deportation decision had already been made. “Such a practice is abhorrent, contrary to law, and erodes E.O.I.R.’s integrity and the decisional independence of its adjudicators.”
On Mr. Trump’s first day in office alone, four senior officials in the immigration office were fired, portending how drastically the administration may refashion some parts of the department to try to carry out the president’s broader immigration crackdown. Other senior Justice Department officials, some with decades of expertise in complex areas like extradition, public corruption and antitrust enforcement, were told they were being reassigned to a new task force on sanctuary cities, meaning local jurisdictions that the administration says do not cooperate enough with deportation efforts.
Scores of senior department employees are hiring or considering hiring employment lawyers to defend themselves against what may be violations of civil service laws meant to ensure the professionalism of government workers.
Legal experts say the prosecutors fired because of their work for the special counsel Jack Smith may have the strongest legal claim against the government, particularly given that the reason cited by the acting attorney general, James McHenry, was a lack of trust.
To many lawyers, the rationale offered by Mr. McHenry, that the president has authority under Article II of the Constitution, was flimsy, and the actions violated both the letter and the spirit of longstanding law.
At the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, where some of the fired prosecutors had worked until Monday, the acting chief, Ed Martin, offered a glimpse of what a department under Mr. Trump could look like.
In an email on Tuesday reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Martin bemoaned leaks about a recent directive informing staff members that he would open an internal investigation into the use of an obstruction statute used to charge hundreds of rioters who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“Wow, what a disappointment to have my email yesterday to you all was leaked almost immediately,” wrote Mr. Martin, a conservative activist who has parroted Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. “Again, personally insulting and professionally unacceptable.”
Mr. Martin, in his message, told his employees that he expected a preliminary report by Friday. To some current and former Justice Department officials, that raised the possibility that more firings may soon follow.
Mr. Martin insisted that staff members should quickly comply and turn over documents and other related records. If they do not have anything to provide, he asked employees to relay that, adding, “Failure to do so strikes me as insubordinate.”
Good government advocates worried that Monday’s firing of prosecutors may lead to an erosion of confidence in the legal system, both inside and outside the department.
“Our system of justice depends on prosecutors doing their job ‘without fear or favor,’” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit that works to promote best practices in the federal government. “Summarily firing federal prosecutors undermines these systems, the rule of law and public trust in our government.”
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