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:
[Leslie] Puryear, who served 11 years in prison for armed robbery, was held another 16 months by DOC after his scheduled July 2022 release because Miyares said—wrongly—that his attempted murder conviction was just as disqualifying for sentence credits as a murder conviction was. “I knew, waking up every day, I shouldn’t be here,” Puryear recalled of his extra time in prison, which caused him to miss his son’s high school graduation and a grandson’s birth.
Before taking over at the Department of Corrections, Dotson was appointed to lead the Virginia Parole Board in January 2022, the same month that Youngkin took office as governor. Under Youngkin and Dotson, the board may as well have been replaced by a stone wall. Parole grant rates vary widely year to year and state to state, but the Prison Policy Initiative posts data from 2019 to 2022 showing that it is not uncommon for a state board to grant discretionary parole in half or more of its decisions. For example, North Dakota granted parole in 3,614 of 4,564 cases over the four-year sample, at a rate of 79 percent. In a criticism of current Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, Nick Minock of the Sinclair affiliate WJLA reported that under Youngkin, "inmates being granted parole was virtually non-existent," and boasted that Youngkin's board granted discretionary parole in approximately 1 percent of cases.
You wouldn't know any of this from Dotson's author profile on Cincinnati Magazine, which notes only that he writes about the Reds for their publication and "covers all Cincinnati sports in his popular newsletter." There is also no mention of Dotson's day job on the "About" page of his newsletter (topped with creepy AI art featuring a "CIMCIMNATI" jersey), nor under the "About" tab on the weekly Reds podcast he co-hosts. Searching his name in a browser would get you somewhere: Back in 2023, when Dotson was still a lowly prison chief, he was profiled with an excruciatingly light touch by Dwayne Yancey of Cardinal News, an otherwise valuable newspaper for southwest Virginia. Dotson seems generally to prefer keeping his blogger work separate from the work he does ruining the lives of asylum seekers on behalf of the Trump administration.
According to data from Trac Immigration, Dotson has denied asylum in 86 percent of the claims presented in his court, topping the national average by more than 20 points. Another data tracker says that the national rate for granting asylum on the merits is 29.9 percent, and that Dotson's personal rate is just 8.8 percent, in the bottom 22 percent of all immigration judges. Perhaps Dotson prefers to keep this from the public eye in part because the excesses of Trump's immigration campaign are broadly unpopular in the hometown of Dotson's favorite baseball team: Back in March, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement triggered on-site "wellness checks" at three Cincinnati public schools, led by police officers from Dayton and targeting immigrant students, Cincinnati's mayor called the action "disgusting on so many levels."
Defector emailed and messaged Dotson Thursday morning and provided a short list of questions about his Virginia appointments and his tenure as an immigration judge, but has not received any reply or acknowledgment.
How does Dotson perform as a blogger? There, he is closer to average. He likes telling Reds fans why they should watch the team, and he loves to remind his readers, as often as possible, that he has been watching the Reds for decades. His takes are mild but, unlike his career choices, mostly defensible. While working to describe why the Milwaukee Brewers are the best team in baseball while the Reds are putrid bullshit, Dotson identified a lack of a coherent plan in Cincinnati, and praised Milwaukee's ability to evaluate talent, especially when it came to relief pitchers.
Sometimes Dotson gets out over his skis with the whole "don't look away yet" routine. On July 14, he laid out reasons why fans should be excited about the 2026 Reds at the break. Two weeks later, he laid out reasons for why the Reds should "wave the white flag" on the 2026 season.
On July 1, Dotson preached that Reds fans should not allow their disgust with the franchise, the front office, and terrible owner Phil Castellini to disturb their enjoyment of the baseball being played down there on the field.
I’m going to tell you a secret, something that’s made me a happier Reds fan than I have any right to be given the evidence of the last three decades: I have resolved never to let this organization bum me out. The Cincinnati Reds—and here I’m talking about the players, the games, the history, the men, and the moments—can absolutely bum me out, at least in the moment. I admit it. But the organization? The ownership group? The front office? I stopped handing them that kind of power over my emotional life years ago. It was the best decision I ever made as a fan.
This was obviously bullshit. In that season-ending column mentioned earlier, Dotson wrote that a labor stoppage which consumes the 2027 MLB season might be the best thing for Reds fans, not for anything it might do to baseball's competitive balance, but because it is just too painful to be a fan of so dysfunctional an organization:
[T]he simple fact is we ain’t the Brewers. And that’s not going to change as long as the current ownership and front office continue occupying their suites at 100 Joe Nuxhall Way.
And thus there is no reason to believe that the 2027 Reds will be successful since they’re running it back with the same group.
[...]
Take the year off, my friends. Our mental health could use it. Of course, we’ll probably be back at some point. We always are. That’s the whole problem, and Phil Castellini knows it.
Dotson does like Elly De La Cruz, of course. "The kid is special," he wrote in early September, "and only getting better." In the same column, Dotson advised Reds fans to look for signs of breakout in the performances of prospects like Carlos Jorge, Juan Brito, and Héctor Rodríguez. He considers Eugenio Suárez to have been a reasonable signing, amid an organizational propensity for self-harm. He was excited to watch a full season of an actualized Noelvi Marte.
Beyond being employed by the Reds, one thing those players have in common is that they immigrated to the United States for work. De La Cruz, Jorge, Brito, Rodríguez, and Marte moved here from the Dominican Republic; Suárez, who passed his U.S. naturalization test in September, moved here from Venezuela. But Dotson likes having them around, because they wear the jersey of his favorite baseball team.
Even with Dotson's exasperation with how the Reds' 2026 campaign ended, I suspect he'll always come back for more. As bad as the results may get, he maintains hope that the system will work as intended, and doesn't seem too concerned with his own role in it. "Sure, I wish the Reds would convert [their shortstops] to center fielders before they make it to the big leagues, but that’s not the way Nick Krall and his crew does business," he wrote in July. "We’re Reds fans; if we get too worked up about these details, we’ll never be able to sleep at night."
H/t Fawn Moscato
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