Fired by Trump, this immigration judge set off on the migrant trail

Five months after he was fired as a U.S. immigration judge, Jeremiah Johnson found himself rumbling into the highlands of Guatemala on a crowded bus, a bouquet of flowers in hand. His unusual, if poetic, mission: to visit relatives of an indigenous family who fled their village for the United States and won asylum in his courtroom. Johnson, 52, served nearly a decade as an immigration judge in San Francisco, in a famously liberal circuit, hearing hundreds of asylum cases. Day in, day out, he heard stories of political and religious persecution, torture, violence, rape. He granted asylum 89% of…