Did you may have immigration lawyer watch listing in your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? In that case, congrats! However for everybody else, it’s one more unhappy slide into federal management to study that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted what seems to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys buried by itself web site.
The listing was found by legal professional Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the listing whereas interacting with ICE’s web site and located her personal title on it. The listing has since been pulled from the web site, which is often what companies do when a paperwork is completely regular. Now Al Otro Lado, an immigration advocacy group, has filed a Freedom of Info Act request demanding to know who created the listing, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys within the first place.
Amarante observed one thing else in regards to the listing that raised much more considerations, as she instructed WGNO, “One of many troubling patterns I suppose that I acknowledged, was that numerous these practitioners on the listing have been folks of coloration.”
Which pushes this from bureaucratic weirdness into civil liberties nightmare gasoline.
Amarante continued:
“Why does the listing exist? Whether or not it’s an harmless incursion or one thing that’s extra intentional or nefarious, we have to resolve it. It’s troubling as a result of there’s a sample of threats by the administration — the implication by the federal government is that providing help to a consumer is the hurt in itself and the names on the listing type of appears to help that.”
Let’s not neglect, this administration has not been delicate about its hostility towards legal professionals typically and immigration legal professionals particularly. In March 2025, the White Home issued a memo titled “Stopping Abuses of the Authorized System and the Federal Court docket,” which attacked the act of lawyering, accused immigration attorneys of “unscrupulous” conduct, and directed the Lawyer Normal to take motion in opposition to legal professionals and corporations that cross the Trump Administration.
Al Otro Lado didn’t mince phrases, alleging that the database raises “grave considerations of political concentrating on {and professional} intimidation at a time when the administration is brazenly escalating its assaults on immigrant advocates.”
Andrew Fels, a workers legal professional at Al Otro Lado, put it bluntly, “There is no such thing as a apparent authentic purpose for ICE to be compiling what seems to be a covert roster of immigration legal professionals. We’re giving ICE a possibility to publicly clarify the watch listing’s objective. Publishing the underlying insurance policies governing the watch listing’s creation and inclusion standards will conclusively resolve this difficulty.”
Cassandra Lopez, Al Otro Lado’s authorized director, framed the scenario as a warning to all legal professionals. “Historical past could also be repeating itself. As soon as once more, our workers and colleagues seem on a authorities watch listing merely for doing our jobs—defending the constitutional proper to hunt asylum and holding the federal government accountable in court docket. The sample is unmistakable and deeply alarming.”
Lopez’s warning is especially poignant. For the reason that begin of his second time period, Donald Trump has been aggressively attacking legal professionals and the very rule of legislation. This watch listing seems to be the following disturbing step, with the federal government treating adversarial authorized illustration as suspect conduct. That may be a direct inversion of how the authorized system is meant to perform.
The existence of the listing suggests a bureaucratic tradition that views immigration legal professionals not as officers of the court docket, however as obstacles to be monitored. And it ought to concern anybody who nonetheless believes the rule of legislation is dependent upon legal professionals with the ability to do their jobs with out being cataloged (or worse) by the very companies they’re tasked with difficult.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Regulation, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Pondering Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the perfect, so please join together with her. Be happy to e-mail her with any suggestions, questions, or feedback and comply with her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].
