The Trump administration is firing immigration judges in the middle of asylum hearings.
On April 10, Judge Nina Fróes sat on the bench at Chelmsford Immigration Court, hearing a straightforward asylum case. At 3:01 p.m., a notification appeared on her screen: NOTICE OF NON-CONVERSION. She suspended the hearing without explanation and walked to her office, which she found already emptied. She had driven over a hundred miles a day for the work. She is one of the 178 probationary judges the Executive Office for Immigration Review has terminated since February 2025. The email was not an anomaly. It is the operating procedure. You are firing the judges who hear the cases of the stranger. You are firing them while they sit on the bench. You are doing it by email, without warning, in the middle of proceedings that may mean life or death for the person standing before the court.
The stranger, in Scripture, is the one the God of Israel commands his people to love. “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” The command appears more than thirty times in the Torah. It is the memory of having been strangers that binds the community to the stranger’s protection. And Jesus, in the final judgment of the nations, makes the welcome of the stranger the very criterion of salvation: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.”
You are ensuring there is no one to hear the stranger’s plea.
The immigration court is the only room in this country where a frightened person can stand before a neutral arbiter and say I am in danger. By stripping the courts of judges who take those words seriously, you ensure the room will eventually fall silent. With fewer judges, case backlogs stretch past the point where credible-fear claims expire, turning the court into a rubber stamp that defaults to deportation orders without a hearing. The immigration courts are already, by design, agency tribunals whose judges serve at the pleasure of the Attorney General — not Article III judges insulated from political pressure. Now you are using that structural vulnerability to purge judges who might rule against you, and doing it in ways that humiliate them and terrify the people whose fates hang on their decisions.
The prophet Malachi warned that God would be a swift witness against those who thrust aside the alien. Isaiah commanded the courts to correct oppression, not accelerate it. “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” You are not merely cutting staff. You are dismantling the only barrier between a terrified family and the machinery of expulsion.
This machinery is not confined to one state. The same logic that shuts down the asylum pipeline in Massachusetts has closed courts and left cases in limbo across the west. The pattern is accelerating, as former judges have warned publicly. When a government purges the arbiters who hear asylum claims, it is building a conveyor belt for cruelty. Adam Goodman documented this deportation machine across a century — a machine that runs on fear and administrative coercion, that has devoured millions of lives. What you are doing is not efficient government. It is not border security. It is the dismantling of due process for the sake of sending a message: no one will stand between the state and the foreigner. No one will ask whether the fear of persecution is credible. No one will slow the machinery.
We who have watched the immigration courts from a distance bear some of this. We allowed the system to be built this way. We permitted you to turn a legal process into a performance of cruelty. The Torah’s command to have one law for the native and for the stranger rests on the knowledge that corruption of the court perverts justice for everyone — not just the outsider. When we allowed the courts to become the paperwork office for the deportation machine, we abandoned the stranger. And what we did to the stranger, we did to Christ.
Yet the door remains open. You can reverse the terminations. You can restore the judges to their benches — a single EOIR memo away. You can halt the non-conversion process and let the courts hear the cases. The magistrate who reads the law honestly, the attorney who files the claim, the guard who offers a word of grace — these are the cracks where mercy still enters.
In Chelmsford, Judge Fróes walked out of the courtroom and left behind an empty bench, an unread email, and an asylum seeker whose hearing will now be delayed for months or years — or never held at all. That empty chair is what you have made of the law. You can let the room breathe again.