The Justice Department fired six immigration judges in April 2026, including Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, who had ruled in proceedings involving Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi.
The two named in subsequent reporting are Judge Roopal Patel, who served on the Boston immigration court and had been on the bench for months on probationary status, and Judge Nina Froes. Patel had ruled in January 2026 that the Department of Homeland Security had failed to meet its burden to remove Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University doctoral student whose F-1 visa was revoked after she co-authored an op-ed criticizing the university's handling of Israel-Palestine protests. Froes had dismissed deportation charges against Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student and Palestinian-American organizer arrested at a citizenship interview as part of the administration's wave of Palestine-protest detentions.
Since the start of Donald Trump's second term in January 2025, the National Association of Immigration Judges reports that more than 100 immigration judges have been dismissed — a pace and total without recent precedent.
Judge Patel, after her firing, told reporters the move reflects "a kind of political agenda to kind of reshape the immigration bench to reflect the policy agenda of the current administration to be one of mass deportations." She added that she did not believe a different ruling would have saved her job — the goal, she suggested, is the workforce restructure itself.
