Did you’ve got immigration lawyer watch record in your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? If that’s the case, congrats! However for everybody else, it’s one more unhappy slide into federal management to be taught that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted what seems to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys buried by itself web site.
The record was found by lawyer Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the record whereas interacting with ICE’s web site and located her personal title on it. The record 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 Data Act request demanding to know who created the record, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys within the first place.
Amarante observed one thing else concerning the record 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 record had been folks of shade.”
Which pushes this from bureaucratic weirdness into civil liberties nightmare gasoline.
Amarante continued:
“Why does the record exist? Whether or not it’s an harmless incursion or one thing that’s extra intentional or nefarious, we have to unravel 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 assist to a shopper is the hurt in itself and the names on the record kind of appears to assist that.”
Let’s not neglect, this administration has not been refined about its hostility towards attorneys basically and immigration attorneys particularly. In March 2025, the White Home issued a memo titled “Stopping Abuses of the Authorized System and the Federal Courtroom,” which attacked the act of lawyering, accused immigration attorneys of “unscrupulous” conduct, and directed the Lawyer Basic to take motion towards attorneys 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 overtly escalating its assaults on immigrant advocates.”
Andrew Fels, a workers lawyer at Al Otro Lado, put it bluntly, “There isn’t a apparent reputable motive for ICE to be compiling what seems to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys. We’re giving ICE a possibility to publicly clarify the watch record’s objective. Publishing the underlying insurance policies governing the watch record’s creation and inclusion standards will conclusively resolve this problem.”
Cassandra Lopez, Al Otro Lado’s authorized director, framed the scenario as a warning to all attorneys. “Historical past could also be repeating itself. As soon as once more, our workers and colleagues seem on a authorities watch record 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 attorneys and the very rule of regulation. This watch record seems to be the subsequent disturbing step, with the federal government treating adversarial authorized illustration as suspect conduct. That could be a direct inversion of how the authorized system is meant to perform.
The existence of the record suggests a bureaucratic tradition that views immigration attorneys 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 regulation will depend on attorneys 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 very best, so please join along with her. Be at liberty to e-mail her with any ideas, questions, or feedback and observe her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].
