Did you will have immigration lawyer watch checklist in your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? If that’s the case, congrats! However for everybody else, it’s yet 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 checklist was found by legal professional Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the checklist whereas interacting with ICE’s web site and located her personal title on it. The checklist has since been pulled from the web site, which is normally what businesses 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 checklist, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys within the first place.
Amarante seen one thing else concerning the checklist that raised much more issues, as she told WGNO, “One of many troubling patterns I suppose that I acknowledged, was that numerous these practitioners on the checklist had been individuals of colour.”
Which pushes this from bureaucratic weirdness into civil liberties nightmare gasoline.
Amarante continued:
“Why does the checklist 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 consumer is the hurt in itself and the names on the checklist kind of appears to assist that.”
Let’s not neglect, this administration has not been delicate about its hostility towards legal professionals on the whole and immigration legal professionals particularly. In March 2025, the White Home issued a memo titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” which attacked the act of lawyering, accused immigration attorneys of “unscrupulous” conduct, and directed the Legal professional Normal to take motion towards legal professionals and corporations that cross the Trump Administration.
Al Otro Lado didn’t mince phrases, alleging that the database raises “grave issues of political concentrating on {and professional} intimidation at a time when the administration is brazenly escalating its assaults on immigrant advocates.”
Andrew Fels, a employees legal professional at Al Otro Lado, put it bluntly, “There isn’t any apparent professional 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 checklist’s function. Publishing the underlying insurance policies governing the watch checklist’s creation and inclusion standards will conclusively resolve this subject.”
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 employees and colleagues seem on a authorities watch checklist 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. Because the begin of his second time period, Donald Trump has been aggressively attacking legal professionals and the very rule of regulation. This watch checklist 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 operate.
The existence of the checklist 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 regulation is determined by legal professionals with the ability to do their jobs with out being cataloged (or worse) by the very businesses they’re tasked with difficult.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Legislation, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the most effective, so please join together with her. Be at liberty to electronic mail her with any suggestions, questions, or feedback and comply with her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].
