The Judge Who Said No to Trump Administration: The Rise and Abrupt Dismissal of Roopal Patel

She was in the middle of an asylum hearing, on a brief break between proceedings, when the email arrived. Roopal Patel, an immigration judge at Boston’s federal immigration court, read the message and understood immediately what it meant.

“I received an email stating that they weren’t going to convert my position, and it was my last day,” Patel said in a interview conducted two days after her termination.

With that terse bureaucratic phrase — “not going to convert my position” — a judge who had spent her career representing some of the most vulnerable people in the American legal system found herself on the other side of institutional power: fired by the Trump administration, stripped of her courtroom, and thrust into the center of one of the most consequential debates in American civic life about the independence of immigration courts, the scope of free speech protections, and the boundaries of executive power.

From Harvard Yard to Legal Aid Work

Before she became a judge, Roopal Patel built a legal career firmly rooted in public interest law and the representation of people who could not otherwise afford it.

She graduated from Harvard University in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, according to TRAC Reports, the immigration data project at Syracuse University that tracks immigration court decisions. Eight years later, in 2011, she earned her Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law — one of the country’s most prominent training grounds for civil rights and public interest attorneys.

Her first position after law school was at the Brennan Center for Justice, the nonpartisan law and policy institute based at NYU that focuses on democracy, criminal justice reform, and civil liberties. She served as a staff attorney there from 2011 to 2013, according to TRAC Reports.

In 2014, she moved to Manhattan Legal Services, where she would spend the next decade as a senior staff attorney. The organization provides free civil legal services to low-income New Yorkers, and Patel worked there on a broad range of cases that included immigration matters. She remained at Manhattan Legal Services until 2024, when President Joe Biden’s administration appointed her to the federal immigration bench in Boston, where she began hearing cases in May 2024.

Her appointment put her within the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the arm of the Department of Justice that employs and oversees the nation’s immigration judges. As WBUR reported, immigration judges are employees of the executive branch — not independent Article III federal judges — meaning they serve at the pleasure of the attorney general and can be removed by a presidential administration.

The Case That Would Define Her Tenure

Among the hundreds of cases Patel handled in less than two years on the bench, one would come to define — and arguably end — her judicial career: the case of Rümeysa Öztürk.

Öztürk, a Turkish national, had been pursuing a doctoral degree at Tufts University when she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper urging the university to take a stronger position in support of Palestinian students who had passed a set of pro-Palestinian resolutions. The article criticized the university’s response to the campus movement rather than advocating violence, but it brought her to the attention of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who revoked her student visa, according to The Boston Globe.

What happened next was captured on video and spread widely. In March 2025, plainclothes immigration officers surrounded Öztürk on a Somerville sidewalk outside her apartment and detained her. She was quickly transferred from Massachusetts to Vermont, then flown to a detention facility in Louisiana, where she was held for more than six weeks. Federal courts intervened along the way, with a Boston federal judge ruling that targeting noncitizens for their speech was unconstitutional, as NBC Boston reported.

The characterization of Patel as a reflexive opponent of the government’s immigration enforcement priorities does not hold up to scrutiny of her record on the bench.

Öztürk’s immigration case — her removal proceedings — came before Patel. The judge told The Boston Globe that she had seen news reports about the case and was aware of its public profile, but that this awareness did not shape how she approached it. “It was very important to me to treat her case with the same level of importance that I treat every other case,” Patel said in her Globe interview. “It is just about deciding the case in front of you fairly.”

On January 29, 2026, Patel issued her ruling. She found that the Department of Homeland Security had not met its legal burden of proving that Öztürk was removable from the United States, according to court documents cited by The Boston Globe. The removal proceedings were terminated.

A Record That Defied Simple Characterization

The characterization of Patel as a reflexive opponent of the government’s immigration enforcement priorities does not hold up to scrutiny of her record on the bench.

According to TRAC Reports, which analyzed her decisions over the period spanning fiscal years 2020 through the first eleven months of 2025, Patel ruled on 503 asylum claims on their merits. She denied 271 of them — a denial rate of 53.9 percent — while granting relief in 232 cases. That denial rate was slightly below the national average of 58.9 percent for immigration court judges across the country during the same period, and slightly above the 50.2 percent denial rate for judges at the Boston immigration court where she served.

In other words, she denied asylum in a majority of the cases she decided on the merits — a record that sits close to the middle of the national spectrum, not at its outer edges.

The Firing: Abrupt, Expected, and Still Shocking

Patel was nearing the end of her two-year probationary period when she received her termination notice on Friday, April 11, 2026, as The Boston Globe reported. Judges appointed in recent years serve an initial probationary period, during which they can be dismissed without the procedural protections that apply to more tenured judges. As WBUR noted, the attorney general has authority to terminate immigration judges, and the Trump administration has exercised that authority aggressively since returning to office.

She was fired alongside Judge Nina Froes of the Chelmsford immigration court — who had in February dismissed removal proceedings against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green card holder and Columbia University student who had been detained in Vermont after participating in pro-Palestinian campus activism — and four other immigration judges, according to Democracy Now!

The scale of the broader purge was significant. According to the National Association of Immigration Judges, at least 113 of the roughly 750 immigration judges in the United States had been fired by the Trump administration since January 2025. Approximately 100 more had resigned or retired in the same period, leaving courts across the country short-staffed. Massachusetts alone had at least 148,000 pending immigration cases, according to TRAC data cited by GBH News.

Patel told GBH News that the notification came while she was in the middle of a hearing. “Even though I was expecting it, it was still sort of shocking,” she told The Boston Globe separately. “The consequences are immediate.”

A Measured Defense of Judicial Independence

In media interviews, Patel was careful not to claim certainty about the reasons for her dismissal. She acknowledged that she had been aware the firing might come, and she declined to say definitively that the Öztürk ruling was the cause.

“I think I could have ruled either way in that case and probably would have still ended up fired, just given the patterns of the firings,” she told GBH News.

The New York Times, in a broader report on the judge dismissals, noted that Patel and other terminated judges said the Trump administration had made it clear that it expected immigration judges to order more deportations. Patel told the Times that this was a pressure she had actively tried to resist. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process,” she said, “and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”

What she was clearer about was the broader effect of the administration’s approach on immigration courts nationwide. “It’s creating this climate of fear where judges are worried that if they misstep and do something that’s out of line with what the administration wants, they’re more subject to firing,” she told The Boston Globe. “That can erode judicial independence, it can erode due process, and it can make people more likely to be ordered removed from this country.”

As of the days following her dismissal, both Patel and Froes told GBH News they had not decided whether to pursue legal action against the government.