The Trump administration terminated two immigration judges on Friday who had separately ruled against the government's efforts to deport international students arrested for pro-Palestinian advocacy, part of a broader sweep that removed six judges from the bench in a single day.

Roopal Patel, an immigration judge in Boston, and Nina Froes, who served at the immigration court in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, were among those dismissed. Both had been appointed during the Biden administration in 2024 and were nearing the end of initial two-year probationary terms when the firings came, the New York Times reported.

Their departures are tied to two of the most politically charged immigration cases in recent memory, the deportation proceedings against Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish-born Tufts University student, and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University and green card holder. Both were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents last year after drawing national attention for their involvement in pro-Palestinian campus activism.

The cases that put the judges on the map

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Ozturk's student visa after she wrote an article in a student newspaper criticizing university leadership's stances on Palestinian causes. The government then filed a deportation case in immigration court. In January, Patel ruled there were no grounds to deport Ozturk, effectively ending the government's case at the trial level.

Froes reached a similar conclusion in Mahdawi's case. Rubio had stated that Mahdawi's continued presence in the country could "potentially undermine" U.S. foreign policy. The Department of Homeland Security said it appealed the termination of Ozturk's deportation case to the Board of Immigration Appeals, though it did not say whether it had appealed the decision in Mahdawi's case. DHS added that it would continue to fight for Mahdawi's "removal from the United States."

For the administration, these were not obscure docket entries. They were high-profile test cases in the broader effort to use immigration enforcement against foreign nationals engaged in campus protest activity. Judges who blocked that effort were, at a minimum, going to attract attention.

A broader pattern of judicial reshaping

The Friday firings did not happen in isolation. The administration has now dismissed more than 100 immigration judges since taking office. In their place, it has hired more than 140 permanent and temporary judges described as more aligned with the president's immigration enforcement priorities. The administration has also moved to reshape the Board of Immigration Appeals, which sits within the Justice Department and hears appeals of trial-level immigration rulings.

Immigration judges work for the Justice Department and serve at the pleasure of the attorney general, a structural arrangement that has long made them more vulnerable to political pressure than their counterparts in the federal judiciary. The administration's willingness to use that lever aggressively marks a continuation of a pattern seen in other recent judicial removals, where judges with high asylum-grant rates have been shown the door.

An unnamed U.S. official confirmed that six judges were fired on Friday and said four of them were probationary. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Asylum grant rates tell part of the story

A New York Times analysis of immigration court data found that Patel granted asylum in 41.5 percent of cases under the Trump administration. Froes granted asylum in 33 percent of cases. The overall rate among immigration judges stood at 18 percent, meaning both fired judges were granting asylum at roughly double the national average, or higher.

That gap matters. The immigration court system has struggled for years under a massive case backlog that soared during the Biden presidency. Judges who grant asylum at significantly elevated rates inevitably draw scrutiny, particularly in an administration that has made deportation enforcement a central policy commitment.

The data goes back to 2009, described as the first year for which reliable asylum-rate figures are available. Whether those grant rates reflect lenient judging, a particular caseload mix, or something else entirely is a question the numbers alone cannot answer. But for an administration under pressure to move cases and enforce removals, the rates were plainly out of step.

The judges speak

Both Patel and Froes spoke after their terminations. Patel said the Trump administration had made clear it wanted more immigrants ordered deported, and that she had tried to push back against that expectation.

Patel told the New York Times:

"It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist."

She added that immigration judges need greater independence from the political appointees who control their employment. The structural problem is real, and it cuts both ways. Under the Biden administration, judges appointed with a more permissive outlook faced no such pressure. The question of whether immigration judges should be insulated from executive authority, as the Supreme Court has weighed in recent asylum-related rulings, remains unresolved.

Patel also stated:

"All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly."

Froes, meanwhile, described the moment she learned of her firing. She was conducting a virtual asylum hearing on Friday afternoon when she received an email telling her she had been dismissed. She told the lawyers on both sides that she needed to halt the case and signed out of the hearing.

Froes said she was not surprised. "I fully expected it," she told the Times. She acknowledged that her ruling in Mahdawi's case likely drew attention but insisted she had no idea at the time how high-profile the case was.

"You have so many people coming before you. You don't go Google people's names. That's not how it works. You look at the record."

When asked whether the Mahdawi ruling contributed to her dismissal, Froes was careful. "I don't know what's in the minds of other people," she said. "But I can't imagine it was helpful."

The real tension beneath the firings

The administration's critics will frame these dismissals as retaliation, punishment for judges who followed the law rather than political orders. That framing conveniently ignores the structural reality. Immigration judges are executive-branch employees. They serve the attorney general. When their rulings consistently diverge from the enforcement priorities of the elected president, the tension is built into the system, not manufactured by one side.

The broader clash between the Trump administration and the judiciary, both immigration courts and the federal bench, has become a defining feature of this term. Federal judges across the country have moved to challenge administration detention authority, and the administration has responded aggressively, including in cases where DHS has pushed back against Biden-appointed judges' injunctions over facility conditions and enforcement operations.

But in the immigration court system specifically, the administration holds a structural advantage that does not exist in Article III courts. It can hire and fire judges. It can reshape the appeals board. And it has done both at a pace that dwarfs any prior administration, more than 100 judges removed, more than 140 replacements brought on.

The Ozturk and Mahdawi cases sit at the intersection of immigration enforcement and campus speech politics, which makes them unusually combustible. Reasonable people can disagree about whether students who advocate for Palestinians on campus should face visa consequences. But once the government files a deportation case, the judge's job is to apply the law to the facts in the record. If the government's case lacks legal grounds, as Patel and Froes both concluded, a judge who rules accordingly is doing the job, not defying the president.

The harder question is whether the administration fired these judges because of those specific rulings, because of their overall asylum-grant rates, because they were probationary Biden appointees, or some combination of all three. The administration has not said. The Justice Department has not responded.

That silence leaves the worst interpretation available to critics, and gives the administration no credit for what may be a defensible housecleaning of judges whose records were genuinely out of step with the law as the current administration reads it.

What comes next

DHS has appealed Ozturk's case to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Whether it has done the same in Mahdawi's case remains unanswered. The Board itself is being reshaped by the same administration that fired the trial judges, which raises obvious questions about the independence of any appellate review.

The names of the other four judges fired on Friday have not been disclosed. Whether they, too, had cases or grant rates that drew the administration's attention is unknown.

For the administration, the message is clear enough: immigration judges who treat their role as a check on enforcement rather than a mechanism of enforcement will not last long. Whether that message strengthens the rule of law or weakens it depends entirely on whether the replacement judges are better at applying the law, or just better at following orders.

Accountability in immigration courts is long overdue. But accountability imposed by firing judges who rule the wrong way, without explaining why, looks less like reform and more like leverage. The administration would do itself a favor by making the case in public, not just in termination emails.