Judges fired after blocking deportation of pro-Palestinian students | US immigration
Two immigration judges who ruled against the Trump administration in cases deporting pro-Palestinian college students have been dismissed by the Justice Department.
New York Times Over the weekend, the justice department said it had terminated six judges, including Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, who oversaw deportations against Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi, two students arrested last year as part of Trump’s campaign against the Gaza protest movement.
In an interview with the Guardian, Patel said he did not view his dismissal as “direct retaliation” for any litigation. He said this fits into a broader pattern of the administration removing judges near the end of their probationary terms, especially those who have experience representing immigrants in court.
“I think there is a broader agenda to reshape the immigration bench to better reflect the administration’s political agenda,” Patel said.
Biden administration appointed Both Patel and Froes took the stand in May 2024, and both had previously worked in immigration defense. A new NPR analysis to create The Trump administration appears to be targeting immigration judges who previously represented immigrants.
Earlier this year, Patel rejected the administration’s efforts to expel Ozturk, then a doctoral student at Tufts University who wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to Israeli attacks on Palestinians. Patel ended the case against him after finding that the government had no grounds to deport him, his lawyers said.
In February, Froes blocked the Trump administration from firing Mahdawi, a Columbia student and pro-Palestinian activist who was arrested during her U.S. citizenship interview last year.
Patel said he enjoyed serving as an immigration judge, but that it was difficult given the “extraordinary consequences” of his decisions on people’s lives, and that pressures increased as the administration accelerated its deportation agenda.
He was conducting a hearing Friday afternoon and had taken a break when he received an email informing him that this would be his last day because the department would not convert him to permanent status and his employment would be terminated.
Knowing that other fired government employees were being quickly escorted out, Patel grabbed his belongings, informed a superior that there were people in the courtroom who needed to be fired, and left.
In response to a question about the recent firings, the justice department said in a statement that the Executive Office for Immigration Review “continuously evaluates all immigration judges, regardless of their background, on factors such as conduct, impartiality/bias, adherence to the law, productivity/performance, and professionalism.”
“All judges have a legal, ethical and professional obligation to be impartial and impartial when deciding cases,” the statement said. “If a judge violates this obligation by exhibiting a systematic bias for or against one of the parties, EOIR is obligated to take action to preserve the integrity of its system.”
Patel expressed concern about the direction of the courts and the impact of having fewer people with experience representing immigrants.
“When you lose experienced and trained people, you increase the likelihood that people will make mistakes, and then you combine that with increasing pressures to solve more cases faster and faster, and that just creates less room for due process and more room for mistakes,” he said.
“It is important for us to have an immigration delegation that is sensitive to the law, the constitution and due process, and it is concerning to see this being actively eroded.”
