A former Justice Department attorney said Monday that he left the agency over President Trump Donald John TrumpSteele Dossier sub-source was subject of FBI counterintelligence probe Pelosi slams Trump executive order on pre-existing conditions: It 'isn't worth the paper it's signed on' Trump 'no longer angry' at Romney because of Supreme Court stance MORE’s policies and rhetoric toward immigration judges.

In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Gianfranco De Girolamo described several policies and incidents that he characterized as a “mean-spirited and unscrupulous campaign” against immigration judges by Trump.

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After less than two years on the job, De Girolamo resigned in July after the implementation of policies such as the Justice Department’s decision to impose individual quotas of 700 cases per year on judges who handle immigration cases.

De Girolamo listed the quotas as one action among “a series of demoralizing attacks on immigration judges this year” from the Trump administration.

He also cited limits placed on immigration judges’ abilities to delay deportation orders and the removal of a judge in Philadelphia from an immigration case.

De Girolamo wrote that the actions, supplemented by “a barrage of disparaging comments” by Trump about immigration judges, sunk morale among judges to “an all-time low.”

“I’ve long admired the independence and legitimacy that the judiciary enjoys in the United States, so I found the attacks on judges deeply disturbing and troubling,” De Girolamo wrote.

Unlike federal district and circuit courts that are part of the federal judiciary branch, immigration courts fall under the control of the Justice Department. Immigration judges are Justice Department employees and do not serve lifetime appointments like federal district and circuit court judges.

De Girolamo, who is from southern Italy and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2015, compared Trump to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, someone who “spent most of his tenure as Italy’s prime minister fighting off lawsuits by delegitimizing and attacking the judiciary,” according to De Girolamo.

The former attorney said he had “hoped to serve this country for the long haul.”

“I couldn’t stand by, or be complicit in, a mean-spirited and unscrupulous campaign to undermine the everyday work of the Justice Department and the judges who serve in our immigration courts — a campaign that hurts many of my fellow immigrants in the process,” he wrote.