DOJ fires Massachusetts immigration judges who ruled against deporting Öztürk and Mahdawi

On Friday, April 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice terminated Boston immigration judge Roopal Patel and Chelmsford immigration judge Nina Froes by email, ordering them to surrender government property and leave immediately, days before the close of their two-year probationary periods. On January 29, Patel had ruled that the Department of Homeland Security failed to prove its case for deporting Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who had co-written an op-ed criticizing the war in Gaza. In February, Froes ruled that the government failed to authenticate documents alleging that Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a "foreign policy risk," and dismissed his removal proceedings.

A third Massachusetts judge, Erin Gover, was fired in the same Friday round. The National Association of Immigration Judges counted roughly six judges removed that weekend, part of a cohort of more than 100 immigration judges fired since the start of the second Trump term — an estimated 22% reduction in the immigration-judge corps, with Chelmsford's bench cut from 19 to seven. The administration's parallel hiring has skewed sharply toward enforcement backgrounds: a March 2026 class of 42 new judges reportedly included none who had practiced as immigration lawyers.

Immigration judges are administrative DOJ employees rather than Article III judges, and in March 2026 the Merit Systems Protection Board held that the attorney general may constitutionally remove them as appointees. That legal pathway does not resolve the institutional concern: removing adjudicators in close temporal proximity to specific rulings against the government's deportation priorities mirrors the pressuring of judges over their decisions. Patel said publicly that she believes she would have been fired regardless of her ruling in the Öztürk case, given her prior immigrant-defense practice. The Executive Office for Immigration Review's only on-record response was that it is "obligated to take action" when a judge demonstrates "systematic bias," without addressing the Friday firings specifically.