Nina Fróes learned she would not continue on the bench during an asylum hearing at the Chelmsford Immigration Court, according to her account of events described in a report distributed through The Associated Press.
Fróes, who was an immigration judge in Massachusetts, said that on April 10 she received a computer notification at 3:01 p.m. that cut short her hearing. She said the email title read “NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION,” and that she did not open it because, as she described it, she already understood what it meant for her case work.
“I didn’t even open or read my email because the title said it all,” Fróes said. She added that she told the court staff to suspend the hearing for the day. Fróes said she then left the court and found the office manager waiting to escort her out, and she said she had few belongings to take because she had already cleared out her office months earlier.
Fróes said the federal agency that oversees immigration courts, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, had terminated the first of 178 immigration judges in February 2025. She said she had long suspected she would be removed at the end of her probationary period. She also said the changes were not confined to one group of judges and that terminations at Chelmsford appeared to affect people regardless of political affiliation or gender.
Separately, Sarah Cade, an immigration judge at the Boston Immigration Court from November 2021 until her resignation in May 2025, said the legal framework governing immigration cases remained the same while federal policy direction changed quickly. Cade said she was “worried about the direction the agency was being taken in” and said she felt she needed to “go home” to her family. She also said she believed she saw a shift affecting how cases could be closed and handled.
Cade said she received more explicit directions to disregard precedent, particularly when it came to special immigrant juveniles, a category she described using the term “unaccompanied alien minors.” She said changes in how cases could be closed precluded some immigrants, including special immigrant juveniles and people seeking spousal waivers, from certain forms of relief. She also said she quit after her supervisor at the Boston Immigration Court told judges they were expected to grant more stipulated removal requests, which she said are agreements by detained people to end their fight against removal orders.
In Fróes’s account, the pressure and the loss of experience also landed in day-to-day courtroom management. She said the Chelmsford court opened on April 8, 2024 and was touted as part of an effort to tackle a backlog of nearly 4 million cases by creating courts in “high-volume areas.” She said staff and judges were hopeful at first but later described the Chelmsford court as experiencing a downturn that led some judges and much of the staff to quit.
Fróes said the federal changes she described created “a toxic work environment” and said she saw terminations that, in her view, did not follow a consistent pattern tied to political affiliation, gender, or other factors. She said leadership never ordered her directly to increase denial rates, but she said she received “a lot of directives” that emphasized retention tied to fulfilling an administration agenda and “get[ting] your numbers.”
She also pointed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the agency’s highest immigration court, saying it issued a large number of precedent-setting decisions that, in her view, effectively narrowed what immigration judges could do. Fróes said the number of asylum grants fell from 2,753 asylum-seekers in March 2025 to 700 by March 2026, citing an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an immigration data firm.
In describing specific examples of how BIA decisions affected courtroom outcomes, Fróes referenced a BIA ruling in “the Matter of Yajure-Hurtado.” She said that ruling supported an ICE policy memo limiting the right to bond hearings for people who enter the United States without inspection and subjected them to mandatory detention, which she said led to detentions lasting from days to months or even years. She said federal courts later began ordering bond hearings via habeas corpus filings.
The account also described a mounting backlog challenge. Fróes said terminations made her job harder because the number of judges handling cases decreased, while caseloads increased. She said the removal proceeding backlog was reduced from 3.7 million cases in fiscal 2024 to 3.34 million, and said individual judges could still face caseloads of up to 6,000 cases, while Chelmsford had a backlog of 60,000 cases, according to the report.
Lawyers and former judges interviewed for the report offered different explanations for what was driving the changes. Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow for law and policy at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, said he saw the policy shifts as part of standard changes when administrations change and he said BIA decisions offered clarity. Antoine Massa Viana, an immigration attorney, said he disagreed that the backlog problem stemmed from prior policy alone and said a combination of policies and judge terminations made it harder to process cases.
Fróes said her own work after April 10 shifted toward filing paperwork for unemployment benefits and seeking legal counsel. Cade, now working as a legal consultant, said she continued to speak with people at EOIR and described low morale and a “shattered” immigration enforcement system.