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  "path": "/post/209009/donald-trump-fires-judges-blocked-deportations-pro-palestine-students",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-13T20:38:01.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Immigration",
    "Deportation",
    "Mass Deportations",
    "Immigration Court",
    "judge",
    "student protest",
    "Palestine",
    "Rumeysa Ozturk",
    "Tufts University",
    "Mohsen Mahdawi",
    "Columbia University",
    "The Boston Globe",
    "massively reshifted its resources",
    "The New York Times",
    "ruled against",
    "potentially undermine"
  ],
  "textContent": "The Trump administration is continuing to punish immigration judges who impede its deportation agenda.\n\nJudge Roopal Patel ruled in January that the administration did not have sufficient evidence to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student studying at Tufts University on an F-1 student visa. On Friday, Patel received a pink slip, formally pushing her out of the federal judiciary.\n\nPatel told The Boston Globe that she was not sure if her ruling in Öztürk’s case had affected her tenure.\n\nThe White House has made it all too clear that immigration is a top priority for Donald Trump’s second term legacy. Under ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Justice Department massively reshifted its resources towards arresting and prosecuting non-criminal immigrants, dropping tens of thousands of criminal probes in the process.\n\nImmigration court is the final step of that process before the Trump administration can legally thrust the people out of the country, though the admin has not seemed to understand the limitations of the law. Instead, the DOJ has attempted to ram cases through the system in an attempt to meet the White House’s demands, placing an enormous and unusual burden on America’s judges.\n\n“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” Patel told The New York Times. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”\n\nBut Patel was not the only judge suddenly ousted from their job on Friday. Six federal judges were fired at the end of last week, a U.S. official confirmed to the _Times_. Four of those were probationary discharges, according to the official.\n\nOne of the other immigration judges dismissed on Friday was Nina Froes, a Massachusetts judge who oversaw the government’s case against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student leader at Columbia University and green card holder that protested against Israel’s war on Gaza.\n\nFroes ultimately ruled against Mahdawi’s deportation last April, despite an aggressive pressure campaign fronted by State Secretary Marco Rubio to push the West Bank refugee out of the country. Rubio at one point argued that Mahdawi’s presence in the U.S. could “potentially undermine” U.S. foreign policy.\n\nFroes was similarly unsure if her ruling in the Mahdawi case had affected her job stability.\n\n“I don’t know what’s in the minds of other people,” she told the _Times_. “But I can’t imagine it was helpful.”",
  "title": "Trump Fires Judges Who Blocked Deportations of Pro-Palestine Students"
}