Trump Declares War on Immigration Attorneys
In one of his most dangerous orders so far, Trump instructed the DHS and the DOJ to use "professional ethics" as a mechanism for silencing lawyers who challenge him in court or represent immigrants.
When authoritarian regimes come to power, one of their first moves is often to weaken the legal system by attacking the attorneys and judges who stand in their way. This week, Trump escalated his campaign against the legal profession with a new directive that poses a direct threat to immigration attorneys, and more broadly to the independence of legal advocacy in the United States. The message is clear: lawyers who oppose this administration’s policies could be targeted as enemies of the state.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers".
— From Henry VI by William Shakespeare
The presidential memorandum,1 titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” directs the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to take sweeping disciplinary action against attorneys who challenge the administration—particularly in immigration cases. Framed as an effort to enforce professional ethics, the memo authorizes federal agencies to identify lawyers engaged in so-called “frivolous” litigation, block them from interacting with the government, and open investigations that could lead to sanctions, contract terminations, or even criminal referrals.
While this directive casts a wide net—potentially targeting any attorney who challenges the administration in court—it singles out immigration attorneys by name, accusing them of coaching clients to lie and manipulating the asylum process. This focus makes clear that the immigrant rights field is a primary target. What’s at stake is not just individual lawyers, but the broader ability of immigrants to access legal representation at all. To understand the full impact, we need to look at how this order might be enforced, what it could mean for the future of immigration lawyering, and how it fits into Trump’s broader effort to dismantle legal institutions that check executive power.
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Trump’s Attack on Legal Institutions
Trump’s hostility toward the legal system—judges, courts, and the idea of accountability itself—is nothing new. But there are growing signs that his rhetoric is evolving into a direct campaign to dismantle the independence of the legal profession using the full powers of the presidency.
This week, Trump crossed a new line when he called for the impeachment of a federal judge overseeing a case involving his use of the Alien Enemies Act and the administration’s covert migrant flights to El Salvador. The threat was serious enough that Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke, condemning Trump’s attempt to misuse the impeachment process as a tool of personal retaliation.
Even if Congress doesn’t move forward with the impeachment, the warning shot has already been fired. Federal attorneys representing the Trump administration have repeatedly refused to comply with the judge’s orders to turn over documents related to the flights. This defiance exposes a critical vulnerability in the judicial system: courts depend on voluntary compliance with the rule of law. They have no army to enforce their rulings. If the executive branch simply refuses to cooperate, it’s unclear what the courts could do.
Trump has already shown his willingness to use executive power to go after legal opponents. In a recent episode of The Daily, reporters detailed how he issued an executive order targeting Perkins Coie, a law firm associated with Democratic legal work. The order barred the firm from working with the federal government, revoked its access to federal buildings, and ordered agencies to cancel existing contracts and security clearances.
In practice, this meant the firm could no longer represent clients who needed to interface with the federal government—effectively cutting it off from a wide swath of legal work. The message was clear: oppose the administration, and risk being shut out entirely. For law firms across the country, it’s a stark warning that legal advocacy may come with serious consequences.
“Dirty Immigration Attorneys”: Myth v Reality
Trump’s latest action lays the groundwork for a much broader campaign—not just against specific law firms, but against the entire legal profession, with immigration attorneys squarely in the crosshairs. These are the attorneys who represent clients in immigration court, federal court, and across the various agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security.
The order accuses immigration lawyers, along with pro bono lawyers at major firms, of coaching clients to lie—specifically, of helping asylum seekers conceal their past or fabricate their stories in order to win protection. Here's the key excerpt:
“[T]he immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices, frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims, all in an attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief. Gathering the necessary information to refute these fraudulent claims imposes an enormous burden on the Federal Government. And this fraud in turn undermines the integrity of our immigration laws and the legal profession more broadly — to say nothing of the undeniable, tragic consequences of the resulting mass illegal immigration, whether in terms of heinous crimes against innocent victims like Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, or Rachel Morin, or the enormous drain on taxpayer resources intended for Americans.”
The memo continues by linking this alleged fraud to crimes committed by migrants and to the supposed burden on federal resources, creating a causal chain designed to provoke fear, outrage, and suspicion.
Like so many of Trump’s claims about immigration, this is not grounded in evidence. It’s a recycled myth that has long circulated in anti-immigrant circles—that attorneys are pulling strings behind the scenes to help migrants “game” the system. In fact, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions made nearly identical accusations in 2017, saying, “We also have dirty immigration lawyers who are encouraging their otherwise unlawfully present clients to make false claims of asylum, providing them with the magic words needed to trigger the credible fear process.”
But the reality of immigration lawyering is far more complex. Like all attorneys, immigration lawyers are tasked with preparing their clients for legal proceedings. That means explaining the process, gathering evidence, and helping clients tell their stories in a way that meets the legal criteria set by Congress and interpreted by the courts. This is not deception—it is legal representation, something Trump himself has relied on more than most public figures in modern history.
Research consistently shows that access to legal counsel is one of the most important factors in the outcome of an immigration case. The system is incredibly complex, and most immigrants navigating it are doing so without the financial, social, or linguistic resources that U.S. citizens might take for granted. Having a lawyer can mean the difference between being granted protection or being deported to danger. There’s nothing suspicious about that—any more than we would question why someone with a serious illness might have better outcomes if they see a doctor. Asylum law is counterintuitive, and most immigrants, like most Americans, have little idea which facts or details will make or break an asylum case.
Of course, problems in the system do exist. Immigrants have been exploited by bad actors, including unqualified attorneys, fraudulent notarios, and even other migrants who pass on counterproductive advice. Sometimes people are encouraged to tell a simplified or partial version of their story, not out of malice, but out of fear or confusion. But in nearly all of these cases, immigration attorneys are the ones most likely to identify the problem, correct it, and help clients meet the legal requirements honestly.
Immigration lawyers regularly collaborate with government agencies to report fraudulent actors, conduct community education on how to find qualified legal help, and work with clients to present truthful, consistent testimony. These are not acts of subversion. They are acts of integrity, often performed under enormous pressure in an underfunded, overburdened system.
Even with good legal representation, many asylum seekers are denied protection for reasons that have nothing to do with credibility, including the predisposition of a particular judge or harmful policies like “Remain in Mexico,” which make legal access almost impossible.
I say all of this as someone who has spent my career studying this system closely through courtroom observation, interviews, archival research and case analysis. I’ve interviewed dozens of immigration attorneys over the years and I’ve seen how immigration firms function from the inside. I’ve watched attorneys turn away potential clients because the facts didn’t support a claim, even when the clients are sympathetic.
Immigration attorneys are up against an unequal and unjust system. ICE attorneys regularly need to do little more than show up as a warm body in court to win their cases. Simple paperwork mistakes beyond the control of the immigrant can result in deportation. And in the current political climate, even people like Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder not even accused of breaking any laws, can be targeted for deportation based on nothing more than the whims of the current administration.
As I wrote last week, projects like the CARA Pro Bono project at the family detention center in Dilley, Texas, sought to compensate for these systemic inequalities by supporting asylum seeking moms and kids. The US government should have been doing this themselves, but instead, faith-based groups and other non-profit organizations absorbed the labor and the cost of providing basic legal support services.
If I’m being honest, I believe immigration attorneys are often too deferential to the system. Many are rule followers to a fault: reluctant to take risks and sometimes limiting the horizon of what we can imagine true justice might look like. The idea that radical immigration attorneys are undermining the asylum system is farcical on its face, when the opposite is true: Democrats and Republicans, as well as the immigration agencies themselves, have done far more to undermine the legitimacy of the asylum system than attorneys.
What Trump is offering the public is not a real account of who these attorneys are or what they do. It’s a caricature meant to delegitimize legal advocacy and pave the way for an even greater accumulation of power in the executive.
How Immigration Attorneys Could Be Shut Out
If Trump applies the same strategies he’s used against high-profile legal opponents to the immigration bar, the consequences could be devastating. Immigration attorneys need access to detention centers, to immigration courtrooms, to the offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to ICE field offices, to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and to federal courts. Every part of the job requires physical and procedural access to government institutions.
Even under normal conditions, that access is far from guaranteed. Just getting into a detention center to meet with a client is often a logistical nightmare. Private prison contractors and enforcement agencies regularly create arbitrary delays, deny entry without explanation, or make it difficult for lawyers to have confidential meetings. These barriers aren’t due to bad lawyering or bad clients—they’re built into the system itself.
Trump’s order could make the system even more inaccessible. If DHS or DOJ start rejecting the forms attorneys are required to file—such as G-28s or E-28s, which officially notify the government that an attorney represents a client—those attorneys could be locked out of the system entirely. And it likely won’t be random. The attorneys who are most effective, most critical of the administration, or most active in holding the government accountable could be the first to be targeted.
This would also be a direct hit to pro bono programs, like those operating in Texas and other high-need regions, where nonprofit attorneys and volunteers provide free legal help to immigrants in detention. If those lawyers can’t gain access, the programs can’t function. That means thousands of immigrants—many of them asylum seekers—would be left to represent themselves in a system that is already stacked against them.
Law school immigration clinics could also come under threat. These clinics offer students hands-on legal experience under the guidance of faculty attorneys, often taking on cases that private firms won’t touch. If faculty become targets themselves, or if universities fear federal retaliation, funding cuts, or political blowback, schools may scale back or shutter these programs. That would choke off a key training ground for the next generation of immigration attorneys.
The threat is even more serious because immigration courts are not part of an independent judiciary. They are administrative tribunals housed within the Department of Justice, meaning that the Attorney General—who is a political appointee—has broad authority over how the courts operate. Immigration judges are DOJ employees. Their decisions can be overruled, their dockets reshuffled, and their discretion constrained based on shifting political priorities.
This lack of independence is not new, but it becomes far more dangerous in the hands of an administration determined to bend the legal system to its will. In 2022, Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced H.R. 6577, a bill to create an Article I immigration court system, which would function more like the tax or bankruptcy courts—still specialized, but independent from the executive branch. That bill failed, so the courts are still not independent.
Like his executive orders and other memos, the proof of what this order means will be determined by how it gets carried out and what, if anything, the courts do (or can do) to prevent retaliatory actions against attorneys that challenge Trump. But because immigration attorneys work in a system that is not independent and that is almost wholly dependent upon the cooperation of federal agencies, in my mind, this order represents the single greatest threat to the practice of immigration law that I am personally aware of—ever.
Living in Dangerous Times
At the risk of understatement, I am growing increasingly concerned about the similarities between the actions of this administration and past authoritarian governments. I did not say the same thing during the first administration. Although Trump implemented a huge variety of policies that attacked immigrants, he did not attack and undermine the fundamental legal institutions and the legal profession itself in nearly the same way he is right now. And we’re barely two months into the administration.
I was following the reactions of various well-known attorneys today to this order. I can’t remember who said it, but one attorney said that, basically, the entire legal profession needs to come together to protect the profession’s independence. I couldn’t agree more. I realize that individual law firms like Perkins Coie are probably in a tough position and feel like they need to navigate things wisely and in their own self-interest. But if federal judges, law firms, and attorneys keep rolling over for Trump, and if cowardly clients are willing to dump firms at the first sign of trouble, just know that you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Let’s not overlook the obvious here. No one has filed more frivolous and unsubstantiated lawsuits in recent history than Donald Trump has. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump sent attorneys into courts across the country, some 60 lawsuits in total, to attempt to overturn the election. Those lawsuits were entirely rhetorical, not based in evidence, and they accomplished nothing other than to give the false impression that Trump was being cheated out of the White House.
Moreover, U.S. attorneys right now are making absurd, absolutely unethical legal claims in court on behalf of the Trump administration and refusing to comply with the orders of federal judges. If anyone should be professionally disciplined, it is those attorneys who are facilitating the erosion of trust in our legal institutions and paving the way for further undemocratic and illegal actions. Shame on you.
What do you think?
As always, if you have more information you would like to share, would like to suggest a correction, or wish to share your views or experiences related to this post, please feel free to participate in the comments below.
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The initial version of this post referred to this as an executive order. It is a presidential memorandum, not an order. I have correct this throughout by referring it as an “order”, “directive”, “action” or “memo”, but removing the phrase “executive order” or “EO.” Thanks to Dan Kowalski for the correction.
I’ll try to move this into the main body of the post later, but here’s an update from the American Immigration Lawyers Assocation who just released the statement about this today.
https://www.aila.org/library/aila-rejects-administration-s-dangerous-restrictions-on-immigration-attorneys
Thanks for writing this, Austin. After the first half I was more scared of this regime than I ever have been, but by the end I am more determined than ever to fight back by continuing to volunteer at my local immigration clinic. If you’re reading this you should too!