The Portland Immigration Court has been remade in less than a year. All four judges on its bench have taken their seats within that span, leaving the court with an entirely new lineup that was largely out of public view until records were reviewed this spring.

That matters now because immigrants with cases in Portland are being heard by a bench that did not exist a year ago. Two of the judges were appointed in April and May, and two are former government lawyers with little prior experience as immigration judges. One of them, Ryan J. Clark, was named a temporary judge in April even though he had never worked as an immigration judge or immigration lawyer before.

Clark’s background shows how fast the hiring pipeline has moved. EOIR said he had worked at the Social Security Administration in Montana since 2015 and became a judge advocate in the Montana National Guard in 2024. Matthew Andrasko was appointed as a permanent judge on May 21, part of a sweep in which EOIR announced 77 permanent appointments and five temporary ones at once. By early June, Portland’s court was back to four judges, with three permanent judges and one temporary judge.

The turnover did not happen in a vacuum. WW reviewed the court’s records after National Public Radio reported in February that Portland had lost three of its four judges under the Trump administration’s mass firings of immigration judges nationwide. In total, 202 judges who were working in February 2025 were no longer in place by February 2026, including at least 100 who were fired and dozens more who retired or resigned under pressure to deport more people. Portland’s bench was rebuilt after that loss, not before it.

That shift also fits a broader hiring campaign that began in November 2025, when the Department of Justice started recruiting what it called deportation judges and dropped the requirement that immigration judges have years of adjudicatory, litigation or immigration experience. Between late October 2025 and late May 2026, EOIR announced 151 permanent immigration judges and 74 temporary ones. The department says reducing the backlog remains one of its highest priorities and that it is restoring integrity by hearing cases fairly, expeditiously and uniformly under the law.

Legal advocates hear something else in that push. Stephen Manning said immigration courts are supposed to be fair places for immigrants to have their cases heard, and that judges need to be qualified, capable, independent and fair. The question in Portland is whether a court turned over so completely can deliver that kind of stability quickly, especially when two of the four judges have only limited prior immigration-judge experience and one has never served in the role before.

For now, the biggest unanswered question is not whether Portland’s court has changed. It has. It is whether the next appointments, if there are any, will keep coming fast enough to satisfy the administration’s backlog push without widening the concerns already raised about who is being placed in the courtroom.