So, around 4000 quit. It's great that they don't have anyone to win they're cases, but there isn't any pushback either. Not sure of what's better.
Yet that’s just the tip of the iceberg for the department’s staffing woes. There were an estimated 10,000 attorneys working across the Justice Department before Donald Trump returned to the White House. By September 2025, that number had been nearly halved: Justice Connection, an advocacy group that tracks DOJ departures, estimated that around 5,500 people (not all of them attorneys) had left the department, either by their own volition, by accepting the Trump administration’s buyout, or by being fired.
Just a fraction of those experienced employees have been replaced, causing a massive backlog of work. The immigration court system—which has been placed under tremendous pressure as a result of Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda—has been particularly hampered, experiencing a backlog of more than 3.3 million cases by the end of February 2026, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means that the lives of more than three million people are effectively on pause as they await legal decisions that determine whether their future will be spent inside or outside of the United States.