The email hit like a silent explosion. Six judges vanished from the bench in a single morning, leaving 6,000 human beings suspended in terror and uncertainty. No scandal. No hearings. No explanation. Just erasures. Careers, families, asylum claims—wiped into administrative fog, all orbiting one dangerous, unspoken belie… Continues…
What happened to those six judges is not a glitch in the system; it is the system revealing itself. They were removed not because they failed, but because they granted refuge too often in a climate obsessed with deterrence and deportation statistics. When judicial independence is quietly punished, every future decision is shadowed by fear: rule according to conscience, and you could be next. In that silence, the law itself begins to bend.
Their replacements signal the new design: a bench increasingly stocked with former prosecutors and military lawyers, people steeped in adversarial roles, now asked to appear neutral while operating under political expectations. Some will resist the pressure; many will adapt. But once a government learns it can curate outcomes by curating judges, the practice rarely stays confined to immigrants. Today, it’s asylum seekers. Tomorrow, it’s protestors, journalists, you. Judicial engineering never stops where it starts.
