Ex-judges sound alarm about feds ‘micromanaging’ immigration courts

It was April 10 and Nina Fróes sat on the bench at Chelmsford Immigration Court, presiding over a straightforward asylum case. In the middle of the proceedings, at 3:01 p.m., an email notification appeared on her screen that cut the hearing short. Its title read: NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION.

“I didn’t even open or read my email because the title said it all,” she said. “I was conscious of the fact that I was not going to change my expression at all. I just said: ‘I need to suspend the hearing for today.’”

Fróes, who drove over 100 miles daily between the court and her Mattapoisett home for two years, excused herself without explanation and made for her office. She’d already emptied it out months before and had few items left to take. The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the federal agency in charge of immigration courts, had terminated the first of 178 immigration judges in February 2025, and she long suspected she would face the same fate at the end of her two-year probationary period.

“I got back and the office manager is sitting in my office waiting to escort me out,” Fróes told The Light in an interview. “One or two of the other immigration judges were there.”

“So the office manager felt the need to tell people, which I thought was not professional,” she said. “I had not one single personal effect. Not a photo, not nothing. Not a pair of shoes. I had my toothbrush. That was it.”

The terminations, which almost never happened under previous administrations, are part of massive cultural, institutional, and political change at the EOIR, a branch of the Justice Department.

“The statutes are still the same. The regulations are still the same,” said Sarah Cade, an immigration judge at the Boston Immigration Court from November 2021 until her resignation in May 2025. “What’s different really is … the changes that are happening to immigration law are so quick and so beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

Cade, who previously worked as a prosecutor in U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, said the changes upset her profoundly.

“I was worried about the direction the agency was being taken in,” she said. “I have two teenage daughters, and I needed to be able to go home and look them in the eye.”

‘A bad social experiment’

Fróes, who grew up on Cape Cod with immigrant parents from Brazil, had been an immigration attorney for almost a decade when she took her seat on the bench in April 2024.

“I was always extremely justice-minded,” she said. “Although it was extremely difficult … I was able to do more good than harm as an immigration judge because I was interpreting the law, I think, fairly.

“I feel like when people came before me, they at least got a fair shot,” she said.

When the Chelmsford Immigration Court opened on April 8, 2024, EOIR touted it as part of a Biden-era initiative to tackle a backlog of almost 4 million cases by establishing immigration courts in “high-volume areas.”

Staff and judges were excited, Fróes said.

“They opened this court and everybody was so hopeful about it,” she said. “It’s all nice inside and big courtrooms and beautiful wood. Then … it just took a turn for the worst.

“The Chelmsford Immigration Court is just a bad social experiment,” she said.

Fróes said the second Trump administration made huge changes in the immigration court system almost immediately.

On Jan. 27, 2025, then-Acting EOIR Director Sirce Owen issued a memorandum that set the tenor for the next year.

Owen wrote that decisions from EOIR courts posed a threat to the agency’s “integrity,” “impartiality,” “independence,” and commitment to the law.

“A willingness to ignore the law in order to reach a preferred policy outcome, to avoid having to make a hard decision or risking an appeal,” it said, “or in a misguided belief that such behavior is ‘victimless’ …. are all repugnant to EOIR’s core values and deeply damage the integrity of its proceedings.”

The memorandum — the first of a record-setting 52 in 15 months — challenged the agency’s tradition of judicial independence, critics say. As an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, the EOIR could theoretically follow orders from the Attorney General with no wiggle room.

“It might be the prerogative of the executive branch to set policy, but it’s really not their role to set limitations on rights,” Cade said. “And that’s what we’ve seen happening with the immigration court system.”

Fróes said the new policies created a toxic work environment and led some immigration judges and much of the Chelmsford staff to quit.

But the agency’s terminations of newer judges at the end of their two-year probation did not seem to follow a pattern, Fróes said.

“It didn’t matter what your political affiliation or gender,” she said. “They just cleared the decks at Chelmsford, pretty much.”

She said leadership never ordered judges directly to increase asylum denials. (She denied almost 51% of asylum cases before her through September 2025.) But their goals were clear.

“We had gotten a lot of directives saying: ‘If you fulfill the agenda, if you do what the administration is asking of you to do, if you do your job properly, if you follow the law and you get your numbers, you should be retained,’” she said.

George Pappas, a Chelmsford Immigration Court judge fired in July, filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department May 14 in U.S. District Court Massachusetts. He accused the agency of wrongfully terminating him, in part due to his past “association with immigrant rights organizations” before he became a judge. He alleged a pattern of wrongful terminations due to age, national origin, gender, race, and political affiliations.

Reached by The Light May 18, Pappas declined comment due to the pending litigation.

Earlier, in an October interview with The Light, Pappas said the Justice Department dismissed three Chelmsford judges who reached the end of their probationary period in April 2025. Only one, a former attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, was retained.

“The three that were fired had private practice experience or advocating for immigrants,” Pappas said. “The judges were fired not based on what they did on the bench but what they did before they were there.”

Pappas also said in October that the Justice Department “has chosen to attack the immigration judges and the immigration courts and it has undermined fair hearings and due process.” He said the new policy decisions pressured and intimidated judges. “I was told to grant the motions to dismiss if granted by (Homeland Security),” Pappas said.

Removal backlog

The firings have sparked concern that it will become impossible to address the removal proceeding backlog of millions of cases.

Fróes said the firings made her job more difficult.

“Going from 19 (immigration judges) to five people with the same number of cases and just this overwhelming caseload,” she said, “I could not work only eight hours a day and get my work done.”

The backlog was reduced from 3.7 million cases in fiscal 2024 to 3.34 million today, though the firings often mean individual immigration judges have caseloads of up to 6,000 cases. (There is a 60,000 case backlog at Chelmsford alone.) The administration has also announced the planned closure of the San Francisco Immigration Court — with a 117,000 case backlog — on Sept. 14.

Board of Immigration Appeals

The policy and workforce changes have had an undeniable impact on the system. In March 2025, immigration courts granted asylum to 2,753 asylum-seekers, according to Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse Immigration, an immigration data analysis firm. By March 2026, that number shrank to 700 — a 75% drop.

One reason is that the Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest immigration court, has issued a remarkable number of precedent-setting decisions narrowing immigrants’ pathways to relief.

The BIA can publicly announce a ruling when it sets precedent. It issued 91 precedent-setting decisions in four years under the Biden administration. In just 15 months under Trump, it issued 118.

“There wasn’t any specific directive saying, ‘don’t grant asylum or deny more cases,’” Fróes said. “With (the BIA’s) decisions, we don’t need any directives. The BIA has issued so many decisions in the last year that micromanage every possible decision an immigration judge can make.”

“One thing that really bothers me is that the administration seems to want to only have one result in these individual cases,” Fróes said. “They want them to be denied.”

In the Matter of Yajure-Hurtado, the court supported a policy memo from ICE that declared that people who enter the U.S. without inspection have no right to a bond hearing and are subject to mandatory detention. That led to detentions of tens of thousands of people — ranging from days to months or even years — until a final ruling in their removal proceedings.

Lawyers for detained immigrants responded with a massive uptick in habeas corpus filings in federal courts challenging the legitimacy of an arrest. Often, federal judges then order bond hearings.

“The District Court was saying these people have a right to a bond hearing through their habeas petitions,” Fróes said.

Fróes said the moves led to an uneasy feeling among immigration judges about having to reject bond hearings under the BIA’s ruling, but leadership made it clear they were watching. At one point, an option for granting bond hearings due to a habeas order appeared on the documents immigration judges fill out upon adjudication.

“Every case where a person is granted a hearing, there are metrics and ways that they track them,” she said. “That’s a way to make sure to keep a grip on the judges. To make sure that nobody’s going rogue.”

The federal appeals court overseeing Massachusetts is considering a challenge to the BIA’s Yajure-Hurtado decision. In the meantime, a federal judge in Massachusetts has ruled that the Yajure-Hurtado decision shouldn’t be enforced here. But Fróes said a directive from EOIR ordered her to deny bond hearings anyway — putting her in a bind. When she did, she made sure to read the directive into the record that was later included in a docket at U.S. District Court Massachusetts.

Cade’s departure

Cade said she received more explicit directions to ignore precedent, particularly when it came to special immigrant juveniles — “unaccompanied alien minors” who can prove abandonment, neglect, or abuse by parents in their home country. She also said changes in how a case can be closed precluded many immigrants, such as special immigrant juveniles and those seeking spousal waivers, from some forms of relief.

“Now, you don’t have an administrative closure,” she said. “They need to keep requesting a series of continuances. And recently, the BIA has come down with a decision, saying that this isn’t a good enough reason to continue a case.’

Cade said she quit after her supervisor at the Boston Immigration Court informed judges that they were expected to grant more stipulated removal requests — where a detained person elects to stop fighting a removal order. Cade recalled wanting to bring immigrants before her to ensure they weren’t pressured into the decision.

“And I was told: ‘Judge Cade, I understand your concern. I understand you want to do right by due process. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible,’” she recalled being told. ‘Headquarters has said the moment you get that order or that request … You get it out.’”

Blame for the backlog

To many on the right, like Andrew Arthur, resident fellow for law and policy at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, the Justice Department’s moves are simply part of what happens when a new presidential administration takes the reins.

“Be it Merrick Garland or Pam Bondi or Todd Blanche — you’re going to see policy changes,” said Arthur, a former immigration prosecutor and immigration judge.

Arthur said the BIA’s decisions offer needed clarity.

“They’ve been making it hard because they don’t believe people deserve due process. As an American, it’s incredibly disheartening to see.”

“One of the biggest issues I had when I was an immigration judge was that I didn’t really get a lot of bright-line rules out of the BIA,” he said.

Asked about critics’ concerns for due process, Arthur said federal courts had “not been shy” about calling out violations of constitutional rights.

“Immigration court is the first level; it’s not the last level,” he said. “There’s certainly an opportunity to appeal to the BIA.”

Arthur laid the blame for the removal proceeding backlog with the Biden administration, which paroled or released 5.8 million asylum seekers into the country.

“Part of the reason why you’re seeing so many memos was because there was this massive wave of cases,” Arthur said. “Then Trump II comes in and reverses all this.”

António Massa Viana, an immigration attorney, said Arthur’s arguments about the backlog don’t line up with his experience over the last 15 months in immigration courts.

“If you’re trying to get through the backlog, what you want to do is hire more judges,” Massa Viana said. The Justice Department’s combination of policies and judge terminations “only makes sense if you’re an administration that does not believe in due process,” he continued.

“They’ve been making it hard because they don’t believe people deserve due process,” Massa Viana said. “As an American, it’s incredibly disheartening to see.”

What’s next?

Cade, the former judge at Boston Immigration Court, now works as a legal consultant helping law firms craft arguments and strategy for cases in immigration and federal courts. She said those she still speaks to at EOIR report low morale and a cowed work force. And as far as immigration enforcement is concerned, she said the current system is shattered.

“I think there’s a real concern that we’re seeing the end of an era,” she said. “Structurally speaking, there’s just so much institutional loss of knowledge and the credibility of the agencies is gone internally.

“There’s really just going to be nothing left,” she continued. “The changes that have been implemented have been so extreme and so damaging to the credibility of the agencies that everyone who is saying ‘defund ICE’ might really have to get their wish.”

Since April 10, Fróes said, she has been filing paperwork for unemployment benefits and consulting with attorneys.

She mused about possible moves to Italy or Puerto Rico. She said she’s also been in touch with LUCE — the statewide network of ICE observers — to examine possible opportunities there. She is considering a return to law, though her recent experiences left her disheartened.

“I’m still involved with immigration,” she said. “I’ve been an immigration lawyer for about 18 years now. What else am I going to do?”

But the Trump administration has left its mark on immigrants and has her asking many questions of America’s, and New Bedford’s, future.

“It’s going to impact us economically, because in New Bedford, who is going to clean fish?” she said. “I just don’t know if anybody’s really thought about the long-term consequences.”

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This story was originally published by The New Bedford Light and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.