Immigration Judge Ashley Tabaddor, President of the National Association of Immigration Judges .

The U.S. Department of Justice's recent decision to remove a Philadelphia immigration judge from a high-profile case and bring in a judge from Washington, D.C., sent a chill through the legal community and pushed the judge's union to file a grievance against the DOJ.

The president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, which filed that grievance, is set to speak to the National Press Club on Friday afternoon.

Law.com has obtained audio recordings of the controversial hearings that formed the basis for the grievance NAIJ filed in August. The recordings, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, include the May hearing before Judge Steven Morley, a Philadelphia immigration judge, and the July hearing before Judge Deepali Nadkarni, who was brought in from the Executive Office for Immigration Review in Washington, D.C., to handle the case.

Listen to the May hearing here:

Listen to the July hearing here:

The hearings occurred in the case of Reynaldo Castro-Tum, a Guatemalan man who came to the country as an unaccompanied minor.

Before he was removed, Morley delayed ruling in the case over concerns the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to properly notify Castro-Tum about the proceedings. Morley never got to rule on the case since he was replaced by Nadkarni, who ordered Castro-Tum removed from the country in absentia.

Immigration attorney Matthew Archambeault, who appeared during the proceedings as a friend of the court, said during the July 26 hearing that the decision to reassign the case to a judge from the head office in Washington, D.C., “sent a chilling message to the independence of immigration judges that they cannot be trusted to handle the cases that have been set before them.”

The DOJ contends that Morley's ruling violated procedure.