On April 10, 2025, Nina Fróes was presiding over an asylum case at the Chelmsford Immigration Court when an email notification appeared on her screen that she said indicated her judicial term was ending. She told The New Bedford Light that the title said “NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION,” and she said she suspended the hearing for the day without reading the email, leaving with the help of an office manager. Fróes had driven more than 100 miles daily between the court and her Mattapoisett home for two years, and she said she emptied her office and had little to take when the termination came.
Fróes said she had long suspected that she would face the same fate as the first immigration judge terminated by the Executive Office for Immigration Review in February 2025. She described the process at Chelmsford as sudden and administrative, but she also argued that it reflected a broader shift inside EOIR, a Justice Department agency that oversees immigration courts. Fróes said the terminations were rare under earlier administrations and began to look like part of a new approach.
A former immigration judge in Boston, Sarah Cade, said she resigned in May 2025 after what she described as rapid changes in how immigration law was being applied. Cade, who previously worked as a prosecutor in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, said the statutes and regulations remained the same but that “the changes that are happening to immigration law are so quick and so beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.” Cade said she worried about the direction of the agency, including how it would affect her ability to go home and be confident in the work’s fairness.
Cade said she received more explicit directions to ignore precedent, including in cases involving special immigrant juveniles, and she described changes that she said limited the ability to close cases through administrative procedures. “Now, you don’t have an administrative closure,” she said, adding that she believed judges instead had to keep requesting continuances and that recent Board of Immigration Appeals decisions did not consider those continuances sufficient. Cade also said her supervisor at the Boston Immigration Court told judges to grant more stipulated removal requests—where a detained person elects to stop fighting a removal order—and she recalled being told, “Headquarters has said the moment you get that order or that request … You get it out.”
At Chelmsford, Fróes said the court environment deteriorated quickly after it opened April 8, 2024, as part of a Biden-era effort to tackle a backlog by establishing courts in “high-volume areas.” She said staff and judges were hopeful at first, but that the situation “took a turn for the worst,” describing the Chelmsford Immigration Court as “just a bad social experiment.” She said she believed the second Trump administration made major changes to the immigration court system early, including what she characterized as leadership pressure on how cases were handled.
Fróes said she viewed the policy shift as extending beyond individual terminations, pointing to an early January 2025 memorandum issued by then-Acting EOIR Director Sirce Owen. The memorandum, she said, set expectations for how EOIR should preserve integrity and follow the law, and it warned against a willingness to ignore law to reach preferred outcomes. Critics, Fróes and Cade said, viewed the memo as challenging a long tradition of judicial independence at EOIR.
Fróes also said she saw signs that the agency tracked outcomes and sought to prevent judges from deviating from leadership priorities. She said she was told there were directives emphasizing retention if judges followed the administration’s goals, and she said the agency’s approach created a toxic work environment that contributed to judges and staff quitting. She said she did not believe leadership directly ordered judges to raise asylum denials, but she said the overall objectives were “clear” and that the system pressured judges on case handling.
The changes have heightened concerns about how the system will manage the removal proceeding backlog of millions of cases. Fróes said terminations left too few judges for too many cases, describing her work environment as going from 19 judges to five at Chelmsford while caseloads remained the same. She said the backlog nationally was reduced from 3.7 million cases in fiscal 2024 to 3.34 million by the time of reporting, but she said individual judges could still face caseloads of up to 6,000, including a 60,000 case backlog at Chelmsford.
Fróes and others also pointed to changes affecting asylum outcomes at the appellate level. The article said immigration courts granted asylum to 2,753 asylum-seekers in March 2025 and that the number fell to 700 by March 2026, a 75% drop, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse Immigration. It attributed one factor to how the Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest immigration court, issued precedent-setting decisions narrowing avenues to relief. The article said the BIA issued 91 precedent-setting decisions in four years under the Biden administration and 118 in just 15 months under Trump.
Fróes said that the expanding volume of Board decisions limited what immigration judges needed from directives, describing it as effectively “micromanaging” every possible decision. She discussed a specific BIA ruling, “In the Matter of Yajure-Hurtado,” which the reporting said supported an ICE policy that people who enter without inspection do not have a right to a bond hearing and face mandatory detention. She said that after federal judges began ordering bond hearings through habeas filings, immigration judges sometimes received directives to deny bond hearings anyway, and she said she followed the directive while reading it into the record for later inclusion in a Massachusetts federal court docket.
In Massachusetts, the policy and workforce changes have also become the subject of litigation. George Pappas, a Chelmsford judge who was fired in July, filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department May 14 in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts. The article said Pappas accused the government of wrongfully terminating him, including due to his past “association with immigrant rights organizations” before he became a judge, and he alleged patterns of wrongful termination tied to factors such as age, national origin, gender, race, and political affiliation.
Asked about the due process concerns, one critic of the Justice Department’s approach, Andrew Arthur of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said policy changes are typical when a new administration takes over and argued that appellate decisions can provide needed clarity. Arthur said it was disheartening to see due process restrictions, and he argued that courts still have opportunities to appeal to the Board and seek federal review. António Massa Viana, an immigration attorney, criticized that view, saying hiring more judges is what would help process the backlog and that the combination of policy changes and judge terminations suggests an administration that does not believe in due process.
After her termination, Fróes said she had been filing paperwork for unemployment benefits and consulting with attorneys since April 10. She said she was still involved with immigration work and that low morale and what she described as institutional loss of knowledge persist among those she still speaks with at EOIR. Fróes also said the system’s changes could have longer-term consequences in local communities, and she cited New Bedford in Massachusetts when describing economic ripple effects she said few people seemed to anticipate.