Roopal Patel and Nina Froes Fired: The Judges Who Dared to Say No to Trump

The email arrived in Nina Froes’ inbox on a Friday afternoon while she was in the middle of an asylum hearing. She silently signed off after pausing the virtual session and telling the attorneys on both sides that she needed to leave. The hearing had concluded. Her career as an immigration judge was equally successful. In what is quickly turning into one of the more depressing episodes of the second Trump administration, she was fired along with five other colleagues, including Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

Along with four other judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes were fired on Friday. They had been in charge of the government’s high-profile cases against international students Mohsen Mahdawi and Rumeysa Ozturk, who had been detained by ICE due to their support for Palestine. Anyone observing the development of Trump’s immigration courts would not be surprised by the quick firings. They were still startling, though. They weren’t bad actors. They were judges who made decisions based on the evidence that was presented to them.

Immigration Judge Roopal Patel declared in January 2026 that Ozturk could not be deported and halted any additional actions against her. When the firings occurred, Patel and Froes, who had both been appointed by the Biden administration in 2024, were nearing the conclusion of their initial two-year probationary terms. Patel’s past reveals a compelling tale.

Harvard University awarded her a Bachelor of Arts degree, and New York University School of Law awarded her a Juris Doctor. She worked on immigration cases for more than ten years as a senior staff attorney at Manhattan Legal Services from 2014 to 2024. She worked as a staff lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice before that. To put it another way, she had worked in the legal trenches for over ten years, defending those with very little authority. Subsequently, she assumed the role of the person seated above them, determining their destiny.

From 2013 until 2024, Nina Froes operated her own independent immigration practice in New Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Before that, she worked as a clinical fellow at the UMass Dartmouth Immigration Law Clinic and as the legal director of Catholic Social Services’ Immigrant Victims Representation Project. Froes wasn’t a radical. By all accounts, she was a meticulous immigration lawyer who spent years defending the most vulnerable, including victims of domestic abuse, survivors of human trafficking, and those escaping persecution. The kind of attorney who, because she recognized the true stakes in these courtrooms, went on to become a judge.

Froes found that the federal government had not taken the necessary actions to establish the validity of the Rubio memo and dismissed the Mahdawi immigration case on technical grounds. Sitting with that for a while is worthwhile. This judge did not create legal philosophy out of thin air. She discovered that the government had not adhered to its own formalities. Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University who participated in campus demonstrations, had his case dismissed on evidentiary grounds rather than out of political sympathy. She continued to lose her job.

Concerned civil liberties activists described the administration’s strategy as using the immigration system as a weapon to silence people who had voiced support for Palestinian causes. However, in the current immigration environment, alarm has become something of a background hum; it is constantly present but rarely enough to bring about any change. Ozturk’s immigration attorney publicly denounced what she described as the manipulation of immigration laws to target important members of society and expressed optimism that other judges would take Patel’s lead and refuse to support the administration’s deportation agenda. As it happened, few people were willing to pay the price for that hope.

This episode is especially unsettling because of what Froes said when asked if she could have kept her job by making a different decision. “I don’t know what’s in the minds of other people,” she replied. “But I can’t imagine it was helpful.” That kind of well-crafted understatement is powerful. No one was being accused by her. She was simply being truthful about the current state of the math in the immigration courts of the United States. You risk losing your job if you rule against the administration. The policy is not in writing. It is not required to be.

Patel, on the other hand, was just as pointed but equally measured. “It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” she remarked following her termination. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.” The quiet dignity of someone who knows she did the right thing and is now accepting the consequences of her actions is evident in that statement, which she made after losing her job.

People outside of immigration law circles should be concerned about the bigger picture. Terminations of immigration judges were uncommon before Trump’s return to office. Over 100 of them have since been fired by his administration. More than 140 permanent and temporary judges have been appointed in addition to the firings; these individuals are thought to be more in line with the administration’s immigration enforcement priorities. The court system is not undergoing reform. That is a court system that is being replaced, staffed by individuals who, it is assumed, have learned the lesson that Patel and Froes seemingly refused to learn.

Observing all of this, it seems as though Americans are unaware of what is being dismantled until it is gone. Immigration courts are not glamorous establishments. They are not covered by the Supreme Court. Their proceedings take place in small courtrooms, frequently via video link, and frequently without the kind of attorneys that the general public takes for granted. Unlike federal judges who sit in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges are employed by the Justice Department and are hired and fired by the attorney general. This structural vulnerability has always been a flaw that goes unnoticed. These days, that design flaw is being taken advantage of quite blatantly.

Whether Patel and Froes will take up additional legal challenges is still unknown. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has already heard cases from other fired immigration judges after the Merit Systems Protection Board determined that their terminations were lawful. Reinstatement seems to have few options. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security declared that it had appealed the dismissal of Ozturk’s deportation case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which has undergone as much change under this administration as the lower trial courts.

There is more to the story of Roopal Patel and Nina Froes than just two judges losing their jobs. It tells the tale of what kind of legal system a nation is willing to accept and whether its citizens are still able to choose between the law and their jobs. At least two of them did for the time being. They lost everything they had built as a result.