The Email That Arrived Over the Fourth of July

The notice came by email. Jennifer Peyton was on a Fourth of July vacation with her family in 2025 when she learned her career on the federal bench was over. After nearly nine years as an immigration judge in Chicago, the last several as Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, she was terminated on July 3 with no reason given.

For someone who had built an entire professional identity around public service, the brevity carried its own message. "I loved having a job title that included the word justice," she says. The Department of Justice had been her employer, and she carried that, in her words, as weight and responsibility. "I didn't take it lightly."

She had not planned to leave. By her own account she was good at the work and proud of it, with outstanding performance reviews, awards, and years spent training and mentoring other judges. What makes her story worth telling is not the firing itself, but where she chose to go next. To understand that, you have to start at a beginning that gave no hint she would ever become a judge at all.

From Russian Literature Major to Reluctant Law Student

"I'm the first to say I'm a child of privilege," Peyton says. She grew up in Southern California, the daughter of a cardiologist, attended an exclusive private high school, studied abroad, and learned Spanish along the way. Her undergraduate major at Trinity College was Russian language and literature, not a traditional pipeline into law. She knew she wanted an advanced degree but was not sure which one. The only lawyers she had encountered growing up, she notes wryly, were the ones who sued her father for malpractice "which he never committed."

She applied broadly, unsure who would want a Russian major as a law student, and landed at Case Western Reserve University School of Law in Cleveland. Her first semester brought a wave of what she now recognizes as imposter syndrome. Classmates seemed to arrive with economics, philosophy, or public policy degrees, and she felt behind from the very first introductory days.

The turning point was small and specific. In a first-semester contracts class, Professor Arthur Austin called on her, and she got the answer right. "Maybe I'm supposed to be here for a reason," she remembers thinking. She stayed.

Finding Immigration Law Almost by Accident

Immigration was not a calling at first. It was a connection. After graduating in 1998 and moving between civil defense, domestic relations, and employment law jobs that never quite stuck, she landed an immigration interview through an unlikely channel: her husband's part-time computer professor, who happened to handle IT for an immigration firm. She started in immigration in February 2002.

Within a couple of years she had opened her own practice in Cleveland, Jennifer I. Peyton, Attorney at Law, LLC. Over roughly 15 years she built a busy firm with hundreds of cases and an associate, while teaching on the side, volunteering in detention facilities, leading volunteer teams, and grabbing as much courtroom time as she could. Court, it turned out, was where she felt most alive, and that instinct is what eventually pulled her toward the bench. When an immigration judge posting circulated, the court administrator in Cleveland emailed her the link and told her she should apply.

A Career Built Around the Word "Justice"

She applied in September 2014 and, almost exactly two years later, was sworn in at the Chicago Immigration Court in September 2016, appointed by then Attorney General Loretta Lynch. In 2022 she was promoted to Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, supervising the Chicago court through a relocation and helping stand up the new Indianapolis Immigration Court.

By every measure she offers, she thrived. "I was a really good judge," she says, without hedging. She points to the recognition she earned, including a Director's Award for her work on the pro bono steering committee, and to the parts of the job she loved most: traveling to law schools to expand pro bono representation in the courts, widening access for vulnerable cases, and mentoring the judges she supervised. What held all of it together was the word itself. Justice was not an abstraction to her. It was the job description.

When the Ground Shifted

Peyton's account of what changed is direct, and it is hers to tell. In her telling, the shift began almost immediately after the change in administration in early 2025. She describes what she sees as a top-down effort to push out long-tenured Department of Justice employees through transfers, forced early retirements, and outright terminations.

She names colleagues and friends she says were fired without cause, some pulled from the bench mid-hearing, others let go in groups by Friday-afternoon email. She points to appellate rulings she believes eroded asylum case law built over decades, and to policy memos whose tone she found belittling. The cumulative effect, she says, turned an institution she revered into something she no longer recognized. "It just became a bastardized perception of what I had seen as justice," she says.

Ask her where the system is heading and she does not soften it. In her view, the goal is to reduce immigration of nearly every kind while expanding detention sharply, with the detained population, by her estimate, climbing into the range of 60,000 to 70,000 people. Her line about the economics behind it is blunt: "The only thing that makes more money for the government than detention is war."

Advice for Immigrants: Do Not Navigate This Alone

For immigrants caught in the middle, Peyton's counsel is practical. The system, she says, has grown slower and more adversarial across the board. Adjustment of status applications face delays. Family-based I-130 petitions face delays. Recent guidance on consular processing and a new visa ban have layered on fresh uncertainty. "Everything is a fight, everything is an extra push," she says. "Nothing is taken for granted anymore."

Her recommendation follows directly from that reality: secure qualified immigration counsel early. Many employment-based applicants are highly educated and can weigh risks and benefits well on their own, she acknowledges, but the current rules are genuinely hard to navigate alone. The value of a good lawyer right now, in her framing, is having someone to walk each step with you and make sure your application is in the strongest possible position.

Advice for Practitioners: Find Your Lane, Then Push Yourself

To fellow immigration attorneys, many of them worn down, she offers something closer to a rallying cry. The change she once helped drive from the top, she says, now has to come from the ground. "We have to gather together shoulder by shoulder and work from the bottom up," she says. The objective is concrete: every client represented zealously, every client's due process protected. Due process, she warns, is precisely what she believes the current approach is willing to "kick in the teeth."

Her formula for staying in the fight is memorable. "Find your lane," she says, "and then push yourself. Get uncomfortable." She practices it herself. By her own description she has a deliberately narrow specialty in removal, family, and consular work, with employment-based petitions handled but never beloved. So when she joined her new firm, she pushed into territory she had never touched before, learning federal court practice and filing habeas corpus and mandamus actions for the first time in her career.

Back in the Arena

Today Peyton is a Partner at Kriezelman Burton & Associates in Chicago, a 14-attorney firm that handles everything from I-9 compliance and employment visas to consular processing, family cases, removal defense, and federal litigation. She started on September 8, 2025, a date she marks with grim symmetry, the same day a major immigration enforcement surge began in the city.

She is candid about what she is and is not built for. "I don't want to be your mom, I don't want to be your accountant," she says of her clients. "All I want to do is be in court." She has taken on detained clients and others released after successful habeas petitions, and she would rather be litigating than doing anything else. The courtroom, she says, is "my second home. Maybe it's my first home."

The Future of Immigration, in Her Words

Pressed on where all of this is going, Peyton, who has practiced immigration law for the better part of three decades, admits she does not know, and she worries that some of the damage may prove lasting. Her prescription is radical in its simplicity. The current laws, she argues, are not working, from the bars that lock people out for years to a quota system she calls ridiculous to an employment process she finds too long and too restrictive. "The only thing that can be done is to completely push reset," she says, "and to start from zero."

She sees the human cost every day. More clients with valid cases, worn down by detention and delay, are choosing to give up. "I'm seeing people who are like, I want to give up," she says, describing a rise in voluntary departures, including people who choose a third country over returning to the homeland they fear.

And yet she keeps showing up, one case at a time, which may be the truest expression of what justice has always meant to her. She is, after all, still doing the only thing she ever really wanted to do. She is back in court.

This profile is part of LegalBridge Magazine's series featuring leaders in immigration and global mobility.