Trump administration fires immigration judges amid deportation push

The Trump administration fired two immigration judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, after they had ruled against deporting pro-Palestinian students, escalating a fight that now looks less like a personnel shuffle than a test of due process inside the immigration system. Patel and Froes were terminated on Friday along with four colleagues, after decisions that stopped the government from removing Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk and Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi.

Patel, an immigration judge in Boston, ruled in January 2026 that there were no grounds to deport Öztürk. Froes later ended Mahdawi’s deportation case after a procedural problem with government evidence. In both matters, the administration argued the students posed a foreign-policy threat, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said their continued presence in the United States could undermine foreign policy. Their attorneys said the cases targeted constitutionally protected speech. The firings gave the dispute a sharper edge: they followed decisions that cut against the government in politically charged cases, and they landed in a court system where judges work for the Justice Department and can be hired and fired by the attorney general.

That institutional structure has long made immigration judges more exposed to executive-branch pressure than Article III judges. Immigration courts are quasi-judicial, not independent federal courts, and the removal of judges after politically sensitive rulings has fueled criticism from advocates and lawmakers who say the system is drifting away from neutral adjudication and toward enforcement goals. The concern is not abstract. If judges believe their jobs depend on outcomes that satisfy the administration, the risk is that hard cases will be decided with an eye toward political consequence, not only the record in front of them.

The dismissals were also part of a broader campaign to reshape immigration courts. Reports have said the administration has dismissed dozens of immigration judges while judges are ordering deportations at a record pace and granting asylum at the lowest rate since at least 2009. The Executive Office for Immigration Review issued an interim final rule on February 6, 2026, effective March 9, making Board of Immigration Appeals merits review discretionary, a change the government said would speed adjudications and reduce the backlog.

The backlog remains enormous. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2023 that EOIR had nearly 2.2 million pending cases as of July 2023, even after the number of immigration judges rose from 338 in fiscal 2017 to 659 by July 2023. The agency also said EOIR still lacked a strategic workforce plan. Against that backdrop, firing judges who have ruled against deportation sends a message far beyond Boston or Vermont: in a system already strained by volume, the independence of the people deciding who stays and who leaves may be shrinking just as the stakes keep rising.