Barr was able to override the decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals because immigration courts fall under the DOJ. Administrations have done so to varying degrees: The Obama administration did it four times in eight years, The Washington Post reports, while the Bush administration did it 16 times. But, the Post writes, “Immigration lawyers and judges say the Trump administration is using the power with greater frequency ... to the point of abuse,” and specifically “as a check on immigration judges whose decisions don’t align with the administration’s immigration agenda, experts say.”

The administration’s agenda, of course, has been to rid immigration courts of any fairness and due process for immigrants and asylum-seekers, to the point where immigration judges and asylum officers have quit, some after years of service. “As more policies were issued,” Judge Ilyce Shugall wrote in the Los Angeles Times after resigning last year, “it became clear that this administration’s attack on immigrants and the independence and functioning of the immigration courts would only get worse.”

Doug Stephens, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer who resigned rather than help implement the inhumane Remain in Mexico policy, said last year that it was “clearly designed to make individuals fail and send everyone back without really giving them a fair shot.” He recalled one interview in which “it seemed clear that someone had a claim to being able to stay in the United States by showing that they would be harmed in Mexico based on their nationality or their status as a member in a particular social group.” But he said that when he checked with a superior “to see if we could use that to let them stay in the United States, and I was told, flat-out, ‘no.’”

Meanwhile, the new immigration judges being brought into the fold aren’t there to fairly oversee what are in many cases life-or-death situations for asylum-seekers and others, but instead to impose the impeached president’s radical anti-immigrant views, Senate Democrats criticized earlier this year. “Under the Trump administration, once hired, immigration judges receive limited training, and the training they do receive reportedly emphasizes that immigration courts are part of the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts, rather than an independent body,” they said.

There have been urgent calls for independent immigration courts, but that won’t be happening as long as this president—and attorney general—can help it. “Other critics said Barr’s move should concern everyone—not just those in immigration,” The Washington Post wrote, because changes being made in immigration courts “could produce ripple effects in the wider justice system.” Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said, “What’s happening now is that all the norms are breaking. All the wheels are coming off the car.”