Immigration Judge Who Granted Bond for High-Profile Detainee Fired in Ongoing Trump Purge

A respected judge in Denver’s immigration court was fired in June after months of criticism from Justice Department officials following her decision to grant bond hearings for detained immigrants, including high-profile former detainee Jeanette Vizguerra.

In her first interview since being dismissed, former Judge Brea Burgie said that throughout her nearly seven-year career in immigration court she tried to follow the law as written and as interpreted by other courts.

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Burgie was fired in June. She was the first non-probationary immigration judge in Colorado to lose her job without cause, but her firing is part of a continuing wave of national dismissals from immigration courts that began with the DOGE effort to reduce federal expenses early in Donald Trump’s second term last year.

Immigration court is unlike U.S. District Court, where judges have lifetime tenure, and the Constitutional protections conferred by being part of an independent branch of government.

Instead, the Department of Justice controls immigration courts. That means they’re subject to directives that almost always change with presidential administrations. Burgie said in most cases, work continues consistently regardless of who is in the White House.

Not so with Trump in his second term.

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But for Burgie, the complaints that likely cost her her job began in January, after she read a U.S. District Court declaratory judgment from a California judge saying that detained immigrants who entered the country without inspection had a statutory right to have a bond hearing.

The California decision came in late December, and she read it as a directive to start granting bond hearings. She said the vast majority of other Denver immigration judges interpreted it the same way.

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A few weeks later, the Justice Department issued a memo saying they didn’t agree with the California judge’s decision and that judges were, again, supposed to halt bond considerations.

Burgie read her boss’s email and vehemently disagreed with it. She returned to her courtroom and said into the microphone that she was going to continue granting bond consideration hearings.

A couple of days later, on a Saturday, all of her pending cases with detained individuals were reassigned to other judges and, in many of those cases, the new judges reversed decisions she had made.

She also received a disciplinary action for defying the DOJ memo about granting bond consideration hearings.

This was a few weeks after Burgie had granted bond to Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who has been living in Colorado since 1997 while pursuing asylum claims. Vizguerra was picked up during her lunch break from a Target store two months into the second Trump administration, and had been fighting to be released from detention while her asylum case continued.

Vizguerra had been granted a habeas release from a federal judge. She then appeared before Burgie who granted bond on Dec. 21 after hearing arguments from Vizguerra’s attorney and the Department of Homeland Security.

Burgie suspected that decision could bring scrutiny from Washington.

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It may have been the beginning of the end for Burgie, she now says, and something she never could have anticipated after she was hired during the first Trump administration.

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Between 2020 and 2025, court records show Burgie decided 813 asylum claims on their merits and of these, she granted asylum for 422 and denied relief to 380 people. She granted 11 other types of relief in those five years, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Overall, Burgie denied 46.7 percent of asylum claims compared to the national average of 58.9 percent during the same five-year period. {snip}

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Burgie said there was communication among judges with high asylum grant rates that they could be in trouble — some were overtly fired early in Trump’s new term.

Administration officials wiped out the entire San Francisco immigration court because they had high asylum grant rates.

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