Judge Chadwick Dotson works out of the Charlotte Immigration Court, where he was appointed this past March. For a person to accept an appointment to the immigration court system—from the Trump administration, in the post-Minneapolis world—they have to be the person that you are imagining right now. In most ways, Dotson is exactly that. Prior to accepting this appointment—to a powerful position in one of the cruelest arms of the most blatantly criminal federal government in American history—Dotson was being sued as director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, where he was appointed by former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Before that, he was chairman of the Virginia Parole Board, also under Youngkin, where he ran an ostentatiously blunt and unyielding parole operation. All along, when he isn’t doling out excessive punishment or denying asylum seekers, this immigration judge is something of a regular sports blogger.
Dotson writes columns about the Cincinnati Reds, his favorite baseball team, for Cincinnati Magazine, under the byline Chad Dotson. On Oct. 6, a little over a week after the Reds wrapped up a disappointing 75-87 campaign, Dotson pondered whether it was time for fans to step away from the team. It was the 15th article that Dotson published for the magazine that season. He has co-written a book about the MLB team, and also has a Substack newsletter called The Riverfront, where he covers the Reds and other Cincinnati sports teams. (The Riverfront occasionally dabbles in movie coverage; in his year-end list for 2023, Dotson listed Killers of the Flower Moon and The Zone of Interest among his favorite films.) On April 22, Dotson was enjoying a surprising start from the Reds, who at the time were 16–8 and riding high atop the NL Central. “There is still room for improvement in this lineup. This team could get even better,” he wrote. “In the meantime, I’m having fun.”
You can predict some of Dotson’s performance as an immigration judge through his performance in his previous professional roles. When he is given the choice between more or less punishment, he opts for more. As director of the Virginia Department of Corrections, Dotson acted on an advisory opinion written by then-Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who argued that the state could expand exclusions from sentence credits, beyond the written law, to prisoners who would otherwise benefit from those credits. That decision delayed the release of approximately 8,000 prisoners; Prison Legal News estimated that 560 of those prisoners had already been told that they were within a month of release. When the Virginia Supreme Court subsequently shot down Miyares’s advisory opinion, Dotson’s Department of Corrections delayed releasing the prisoners for another three months. A group of 53 state prisoners eventually filed a class-action lawsuit against Dotson and his predecessor, and won $1.6 million in a 2025 settlement. From the PLN article: