Ex-judges sound alarm about feds 'micromanaging' immigration courts
Source: AP
Updated 3:10 PM EDT, May 22, 2026
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.”
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/massachusetts-immigration-courts-policy-changes-judge-terminations-fa483635fd989118b3095f0c52ac6462