The investigation into Lay’s complaint is ongoing, so it’s still not clear whether there were ulterior motives behind the withdrawal of her offer. But the case speaks to how DOJ can pick and choose who fills roles and, in doing so, influence who’s at the helm of deciding immigration cases.

This isn’t unique to the current administration. The Justice Department has considerable leeway when appointing immigration judges—the immigration courts are part of its direct purview. The attorney general therefore has unique authority to overrule decisions and hire immigration judges. To that end, Sessions appears to be shaping the court by, at the very least, hiring former law-enforcement officials as immigration judges.

Read: The end of civil rights

“The more you bring people from the same background, the same set of experiences, the same perspective, the more you expose the court to criticism,” said Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. “Those decisions will be more open to being questioned.”

Of the 128 judges hired since Donald Trump’s inauguration, more than half have past prosecutorial experience or some other government experience. The pace of hiring has also stepped up: In fiscal year 2017, the Justice Department hired 64 immigration judges, compared with 81 in fiscal year 2018—bringing the total of immigration judges to 395, according to data released by the EOIR. Sessions’s hiring spree is not unusual. It’s also not unwarranted: His predecessors brought on new immigration judges, and the immigration-court backlog continues to creep up, with the latest figure at more than 760, 000 pending cases. Of the newly hired immigration judges, at least half had received conditional offers during the Obama administration, said Kathryn Mattingly, assistant press secretary at the EOIR, in an email.

It’s not just how many immigration judges are being brought on but where they’re being located. The EOIR has hired immigration judges for two adjudication centers—in Falls Church, Virginia, and Fort Worth, Texas—where cases from around the country will be heard through video teleconferencing. Judges will be located at the centers, while attorneys and respondents will be in separate locations. According to Rob Barnes, a regional public-information officer for the EOIR, immigration judges at these centers will be evaluated like others. It’s likely, then, that thousands of immigration cases will be heard with respondents never seeing a judge face-to-face.

Across the board, there appears to be a preference for people who come from an enforcement background, according to biographies of newly hired immigration judges posted by the Justice Department. Of the 23 judges announced in August, more than half previously worked with the Department of Homeland Security, and of those remaining, most came from a law-enforcement background. In September, the EOIR announced 46 new immigration judges, two of whom will serve in a supervisory role: 19 previously worked for ICE, 10 had served at DOJ or as a former local prosecutor, and seven had a background in the military (one of whom previously served in Guantánamo). It’s not yet known how these judges will rule once they’re on the bench and whether their enforcement background will inform their decisions. But experts, attorneys, and current and former immigration judges have warned about hiring too many people from government before.