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On April 10, in the middle of an asylum hearing, an email landed on immigration judge Nina Fróes’s screen. Its subject line: “NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION.” She did not open it. She knew what it meant.
“I just said: ‘I need to suspend the hearing for today,’” Fróes told The Associated Press. She excused herself, walked to her chambers, and collected the last few personal items she had kept in an office she’d already largely emptied. The federal agency that oversees immigration courts had been terminating probationary judges for more than a year, and Fróes had long suspected she would be next.
Fróes and another recently terminated Massachusetts judge, Sarah Cade, are now speaking publicly, describing a system they say is being remade by political pressure, internal performance quotas, and a fear-driven workplace that punishes judges who do not meet case-processing targets. Their accounts add to a growing body of evidence that the Trump administration’s drive to shrink the immigration-court backlog is reshaping the courts in ways that former judges warn will erode due process.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, or EOIR, removed the first group of probationary judges in February 2025. By May 2026, 30 judges had been fired outright and an additional 63 had retired or resigned from the roughly 700-judge corps, according to the AP’s review of court records and interviews. The departures, combined with policy memos that now govern how judges conduct hearings, have left the remaining bench under what former judges call unprecedented scrutiny.
A March 2025 memorandum titled “Non-Conversion Reporting Requirement” ordered judges to file a written explanation any time they changed a tentative decision. A follow-up policy in January 2026, the “Conversion Rate Policy,” established a 90% expectation—meaning judges should convert nine out of every ten tentative orders into final ones—and said performance evaluations would reflect compliance.
“The message was clear: your job depends on hitting a number, not on getting the case right,” Cade said. “We had seen the writing on the wall.”
George Pappas, a former immigration judge who served for more than a decade before retiring, said the changes amount to a dismantling of judicial independence. “The Trump administration is waging a multi-front war against the independence of the justice system,” Pappas said. “Immigration courts were created to be independent adjudicators, not part of an enforcement machine.”
The administration and its allies reject that characterization. Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration levels, said the backlog reduction—from 3.7 million pending cases in March 2025 to 3.1 million in April 2026—proves the policies are working.
“The Biden administration was unwilling to do the things necessary to actually have efficient immigration courts,” Arthur said. “What we’re seeing now is long-overdue accountability.”
The dispute reflects a central tension in America’s immigration system: whether speed and efficiency can coexist with the individualized, evidence-intensive hearings that asylum and deportation cases demand. For the former Massachusetts judges, the answer is no.
“You can’t hold life-or-death hearings at a conveyor-belt pace and pretend justice is being served,” Fróes said. “But that’s exactly what’s happening.”