# Executive Office for Immigration Review **Status: stub — expand.** The **Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)** is the [[Department of Justice]] component that runs the nation's immigration courts and the [[Board of Immigration Appeals]]. It is not a court system in the Article III sense: immigration judges are DOJ attorneys "whom the Attorney General appoints as an administrative judge" (8 U.S.C. § 1101(b)(4)), and the Attorney General can remove them, set their performance metrics, and overrule the Board that reviews them by certifying a case to himself (8 C.F.R. § 1003.1(h)). The other party in every case, DHS, is a fellow executive department. That structure is the organizing fact of the [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]]. EOIR's three adjudicating components are the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge (the ~700 immigration judges and their courts), the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer (employer-sanctions and document-fraud cases). **2025–26.** More than 100 immigration judges were terminated after January 2025 (the UN special rapporteurs counted 135 including 13 assistant chief judges and 9 appellate judges; NPR counted 202 departures including resignations by February 2026). The Secretary of Defense authorized up to 600 military JAG officers as six-month temporary immigration judges on August 27, 2025; the May 2026 investiture of 77 judges and 55 temporary judges returned the corps to roughly 700. The Board was cut from 28 to 15 members by an April 14, 2025 interim rule, and a February 6, 2026 interim rule made Board merits review discretionary. Daren K. Margolin, appointed Director in October 2025, resigned effective July 18, 2026; [[Sirce Owen]], who had been acting director through most of 2025, returned to acting leadership. ## See also - [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]] — the process map this office sits at the center of - [[Board of Immigration Appeals]] · [[Department of Justice]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] - [[Sirce Owen]] — acting director - [[US Immigration Timeline]]