\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>ne morning last June in an immigration courtroom in New York City, a lawyer named Estefani Rodriguez looked as if she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was a prosecuting attorney for the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Her job was to present immigration judges with motions to kick non-citizens out of the United States \u2013 to switch on the deportation machine.<\/p>\n Rodriguez is in her late 30s, with long hair and full cheeks. According to the website of the Dominican Bar Association, her parents are immigrants from the Dominican Republic. In online photos, she sports a wide smile. But on this day, as she covered one of some 60 immigration courtrooms housed in labyrinthine federal buildings in lower Manhattan, she seemed to churn with angst. Repeatedly she touched her hands to her mouth, then under her glasses, then back to her mouth, and then she rubbed and rubbed her eyes.<\/p>\n Rodriguez and I were calling into court via Webex, a platform for virtual appearances that resembles Zoom and is used by immigration courts nationally. Inside the physical courtroom near Broadway Street sat eight immigrants, all from Latin American countries. Some were minors, teenagers, including a 10th-grade girl the immigration judge addressed as \u201cma\u2019am\u201d. None had lawyers. The presence of two volunteer court watchers, at the ready to accompany them to the street, suggested that masked ICE agents lurked in the hallway. When the judge called a 10-minute break for everyone to use the bathroom, the immigrants stayed glued to their seats.<\/p>\n <\/span>Masked federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K Javits federal building on 4 February in New York City.<\/span> Photograph: Michael M Santiago\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Some had crossed into the country from Mexico many months earlier without prior approval from US immigration authorities, then applied for asylum. Though traditionally considered legal under international and US immigration law, the Trump administration had announced that most people who entered this way in the past two years could no longer get asylum and could be arrested in courthouses. The move shocked, confused and angered advocates for immigrants\u2019 rights. It gave the agents license to grab even more people, and to send them to detention and deportation. By late June, when I saw Rodriguez, this was happening routinely.<\/p>\n The judge asked Rodriguez if two of the immigrants who had made the Mexico-to-US crossing were now banned from further pursuing their asylum claims. \u201cIt appears that they are,\u201d Rodriguez said in a flat voice.<\/p>\n In August, Rodriguez quit. \u201cAfter nearly nine years in the federal government, I resigned from my position at DHS,\u201d she wrote on her LinkedIn page, adding that her decision had been \u201cdifficult but necessary\u201d. Soon, she started reposting materials that suggested a reason. One such post, from the National Immigration Project, offered a training for lawyers on \u201ccurrent trends and strategies to confront ICE\u2019s expanding reach and unlawful practices\u201d.<\/p>\n Nationwide, ICE employs about 1,700 attorneys. Their work is vital to the Trump administration\u2019s goal of deporting 1 million people a year. And in courtrooms nationally, that work is intensifying. According to a Mobile Pathways, a California non-profit that publishes immigration data, in 2025 asylum was granted in only 11% of cases \u2013 a decline compared with the Biden years \u2013 while 43% of applicants were denied asylum. Under Biden, 14% of asylum applications had been abandoned, leading to automatic orders of deportation. But in 2025 a third were, probably due to immigrants not daring to attend their hearings as courthouse arrests jumped. In July I saw a Spanish speaker run from the courthouse and attempt to attend his hearing from the safety of Webex on his mobile phone. \u201cI\u2019m scared!\u201d he told the judge. An ICE agent in a cherry-red balaclava was visible on the screen, lurking by the courtroom door. When the man did not return to the courtroom as ordered, the judge threw out his asylum case as \u201cabandoned\u201d.<\/p>\n While the media are filled with coverage about fired immigration judges and the ICE agents who stalk the system, ICE attorneys go largely unnoticed.<\/p>\n Chart showing the monthly percent of asylum cases that were granted or abandoned\/withdrawn\/denied. <\/p>\n From June 2025 into early 2026, I attended hearings with more than 40 ICE attorneys in Manhattan, watching as they helped turn the immigration court system into an increasingly perverse parody of due process. The strategies they have used to curtail asylum since the beginning of Donald Trump\u2019s second term \u2013 some of which I saw play out in courtrooms \u2013 are newly fashioned and tawdry, according to court watchers, a former ICE attorney, and fired immigration judges.<\/p>\n Like Rodriguez, not all of the attorneys looked happy with the work. Last summer an ICE lawyer in Washington DC, Adam Boyd, quit, telling the Atlantic he had made \u201ca moral decision\u201d after watching ICE lawyering turn into \u201ca contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December\u201d.<\/p>\n As summer turned to fall and winter, I identified four New York City attorneys who have left ICE since Trump\u2019s inauguration, including Rodriguez. However, repeated attempts to contact them were met with silence.<\/p>\n They are staying mum, said a retired civil attorney who volunteers as a New York City court watcher, because lawyers should never speak negatively about their former clients \u2013 even if the client is the federal government. George Pappas, a former immigration judge, suggested a different reason: \u201cThey\u2019re scared shitless of what the press will say about them.\u201d When they look for other jobs, he said, \u201cthey\u2019re afraid they\u2019re going to get blacklisted\u201d.<\/p>\n US immigration courts are not courts as most Americans understand the term. They are not part of the judiciary, instead housed in the Department of Justice, which is controlled by the executive. The court system\u2019s judges are meant to act independently but are hired \u2013 and fired \u2013 by the justice department. Its prosecuting attorneys work for ICE, also part of the executive. Further, unlike in the criminal justice system, people charged for violating immigration law have no right to a no-cost lawyer, even when they are detained. Critics including the American Civil Liberties Union have long denounced immigration adjudications as \u201ckangaroo courts\u201d.<\/p>\n Still, some ICE lawyers saw humanitarian elements in the work.<\/p>\n Asylum is dead nowGeorge Pappas<\/p>\n When a person was detained by ICE or border patrol agents and charged with being in the US without authorization, they could claim to have a reason to remain \u2013 that they were seeking asylum, for instance. This claim landed them in the immigration court system, facing off against an ICE lawyer whose job it was to find reasons to deport them. Or, as was sometimes the case during the Biden administration, reasons for letting them stay. For those immigrants who were not national security or public safety threats, or had years of residence in the US or US-born children, ICE lawyers were allowed, even encouraged, to make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. The government reasoned that prosecutorial discretion cleared crowded court dockets and opened up space in detention centers for immigrants it considered dangerous.<\/p>\n An immigration judge who was fired after Trump\u2019s second inauguration, and who asked for anonymity, recalled how, during the Biden administration, ICE lawyers frequently dispensed with rebuttals and closing arguments and would instead \u201cdefer to the court\u201d or \u201crest on the record\u201d, which tended to encourage rulings more sympathetic to immigrants\u2019 asylum claims.<\/p>\n All of this changed when Trump\u2019s second term began and ICE lawyers were pressured to not agree to any decision by an immigration judge considered adverse to the government\u2019s intent to deport.<\/p>\n <\/span> Composite: Rita Liu\/The Guardian\/Getty Images<\/p>\n George Pappas served as an immigration judge in Massachusetts courts from 2023 to last summer, when he, too, was fired without cause. Under Trump, about 100 of 735 judges nationwide have been fired, even some who had low asylum grant rates. The justice department is now advertising for replacements, and making clear that conscientious adjudication of asylum claims is no longer the point. \u201cHelp write the next chapter of America,\u201d the department\u2019s online recruiting graphic reads. \u201cApply today to become a deportation judge.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAsylum is dead now,\u201d Pappas said.<\/p>\n So far, no news has emerged about ICE lawyers being fired.<\/p>\n On social media profiles, some New York City ICE lawyers omit their occupation and conceal their full names. Cosette Shachnow uses only \u201cS\u201d on her LinkedIn page, and there is no mention she works for ICE. This past summer, in a Manhattan court, an immigration judge refused to utter Shachnow\u2019s name on the record. When a defense attorney protested against this, saying it was a due process violation, the judge said she needed to protect Shachnow\u2019s safety. She did not specify what the safety concern was.<\/p>\n ICE does not publicly release names of ICE lawyers. But even judges who avoid using them often utter them once or twice as hearings grind on. Of the 44 lawyers I saw working in Manhattan, whose names I confirmed via the official state attorney site, I found public emails for 23 of them; none but one responded to interview requests. But with everyone\u2019s full name I was able to look up information about them in databases, social media profiles and online publications. Something of a character profile emerged.<\/p>\n The group is split about equally between white people and people of color from a range of ethnic backgrounds. According to New York and New Jersey voter registration records, 37 are on the rolls, and over half of these \u2013 21 \u2013 are Democrats. Three attorneys, all white, are registered Republicans; the rest did not specify a political party. Many have backgrounds as assistant prosecutors in district attorneys\u2019 offices. Many have also done defense work, including with non-profits that advance immigrant and human rights.<\/p>\n One such lawyer is 34-year-old Amit Noor. His family is from Bangladesh, and as a student at Yeshiva University\u2019s Cardozo law school, he joined a human rights and atrocity prevention clinic that won asylum for a Chinese woman who had been jailed in China for engaging with Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned by the Chinese communist party. As an undergraduate, Noor wrote admiringly in a student newspaper about an ageing immigration attorney\u2019s tireless efforts to help immigrants gain asylum. On the morning in late June when I saw him working, he remained silent until an immigrant who lived in Queens and had no lawyer appeared for his hearing on Webex. Noor perked up. \u201cWhy is he not here in person?\u201d he asked the judge.<\/p>\n Online, Noor and many of the other ICE attorneys seem like typical, upwardly mobile New York City professionals. One loves exploring interesting dining spots in Brooklyn, and she was accepted as a member in the Park Slope food co-op. Another does jiujitsu. One posts on Facebook about romantic weekends with his partner in the Hudson valley. Most have attended law schools in the New York City area including Columbia, Yeshiva, NYU and Fordham.<\/p>\n In courthouses, they seldom get noticed. The women dress in understated suit jackets, pencil skirts and little heels; the men sport menswear analogs. Stepping into the chaos in the halls, they are tasteful ghosts. Inside courtrooms they speak in deferential, almost old-fashioned voices \u2013 \u201cYes, your honor. No, your honor\u201d \u2013 as they make their cases for deportation.<\/p>\n In July I watched on Webex as ICE attorney Ira Okyne, a 44-year-old Brooklynite, told the judge that the government wished to \u201cdismiss\u201d the cases of several immigrants in the room. To justify each dismissal, he offered the same boilerplate motion: \u201cCircumstances have changed,\u201d and continuing the case was no longer \u201cin the government\u2019s interest\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Protesters at Rise and Resist\u2019s weekly anti-ICE vigil outside the immigration court at the Jacob K Javits building on 5 February.<\/span> Photograph: Gina M Randazzo\/Zuma Press Wire\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n To immigrants, \u201cdismissal\u201d may have sounded wonderful, as though the government was no longer interested in deporting them. In fact, the exact opposite was true. Getting a dismissal generally meant that by the time the immigrants exited the courtroom, they had lost their status as people in the US who had some kind of paperwork to be here. This made them subject to immediate arrest by waiting agents. <\/strong>According to the New York Times, in May the justice department had distributed a memo instructing ICE attorneys to work with ICE agents by passing them immigrants\u2019 exact court dates and locations.<\/p>\n One immigrant whose case Okyne was handling was a Black man who spoke French. Hearing the motion, he became distraught. \u201cPlease!\u201d he begged the judge through an interpreter, as Okyne watched, impassive. \u201cPlease, don\u2019t dismiss my case!\u201d Terrified of what awaited him outside the courtroom, the man resisted leaving. He was ordered to, anyway. Later, I learned that he had been seized in the hallway by masked ICE agents.<\/p>\n Okyne was the only ICE attorney to respond to my request for an interview, directing me to ICE\u2019s office of public affairs. ICE did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n No one wants to hire you because you work for ICEVeronica Cardenas<\/p>\n Veronica Cardenas used to be an ICE prosecutor in New York City, but she quit in 2023. Her parents had come to the US from Colombia and Peru before she was born. Only years later did she learn that her mother was undocumented when she first arrived.<\/p>\n Cardenas was recruited to ICE work via a justice department honors program for law students, which hires them even before they pass their bar exam. She said that when she started working for ICE, she thought she was protecting the country by deporting dangerous criminals. There were also times when she declined to argue against asylum cases. But the denials piled up. \u201cI saw so many immigrants who were just like my mother.\u201d She tried to apply for other jobs, but she did not get responses. \u201cSomeone said: \u2018No one wants to hire you because you work for ICE.\u2019\u201d She now has a solo immigration defense practice in New Jersey.<\/p>\n Since Trump began his second term, Cardenas has counseled ICE attorneys who have told her they want to leave, but few have gone through with resignations. Like her, they come from immigrant families. But, she said, many feel that they have no choice but to remain with ICE. \u201cA lot are new lawyers,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have mortgages. They\u2019re helping their own parents financially. They\u2019ve got student loans.\u201d<\/p>\n ICE attorneys in New York City earn more than $100,000 a year after they begin working. They enjoy generous health and vacation benefits typical of federal government jobs, as well as retirement pensions. They can have their student loans forgiven. Some aspire to more prestigious prosecutor positions in the justice department; they see ICE lawyering as their gateway. Some want to be immigration judges.<\/p>\n Sociologist Dylan Farrell-Bryan, formerly of the University of Pennsylvania, interviewed dozens of ICE attorneys during Trump\u2019s first term, when his administration began introducing anti-immigration procedural changes into the courts, and into Biden\u2019s tenure. She published her findings in 2024. White, male attorneys frequently told her that they did ICE lawyering out of a sense of patriotism and desire to keep America safe from criminals and asylum fraudsters. Female lawyers, however, described deportation litigation as a neutral process that they followed as conscientious civil servants. \u201cSometimes the law doesn\u2019t let us do what the public would view as the right thing,\u201d said one. \u201cYou go home. You sleep at night,\u201d said someone else. Another said that her job was to \u201cdo what I\u2019m told\u201d.<\/p>\n Farrell-Bryant called these rationales \u201can unthinking internalization of duty\u201d, and she contextualized them through the work of Hannah Arendt. A German Jewish philosopher and Holocaust refugee, Arendt studied the behavior of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany as they carried out Hitler\u2019s genocide. She coined the concept \u201cbanality of evil\u201d.<\/p>\n In recent months, the strategy of dismissals seemed to give way to something unheard of in immigration courts. On orders from the justice department, ICE lawyers are, as a matter of course, making oral motions for what in immigration-law language is called \u201cpretermission\u201d. The term means to summarily cancel an asylum application before a final hearing, usually because the paperwork purportedly lacks enough information to justify granting the petition. Immigrants used to have the due process right to come back to court with a more detailed application, and to personally stand before the judge and defend it. Now, not only are many judges cancelling asylum cases after ICE lawyers propose pretermission, but ICE lawyers are now moving to send pretermitted immigrants to foreign countries they have never been to.<\/p>\n In April 2025, amid thousands of cases in immigration courts nationwide, ICE lawyers made only 133 pretermission motions. By November the monthly tally had increased 40-fold, then more than doubled in the next month. Few pretermissions so far have been enacted; their legality is being challenged in various federal courts. Nevertheless by December they had crashed over Manhattan\u2019s courtrooms like a tsunami.<\/p>\n In January I watched an ICE lawyer move for pretermission of a Mauritanian man to Uganda. The judge, F James Loprest, gave the man\u2019s attorney a month to submit a response. Meanwhile, he suggested that the Mauritanian simply quit the US before the pretermission decision came down by exercising an option called \u201cvoluntary departure\u201d. The term means leaving the US on one\u2019s own and abandoning an asylum claim. \u201cWe\u2019re always open to that,\u201d Loprest told the man.<\/p>\n Amid the roil of pretermission motions, I found the public resignation post of an ICE attorney in New York City \u2013 to my knowledge, the fourth who had quit. \u201cI stand with my people,\u201d Andy Viera-Rivera wrote in December on his LinkedIn page. \u201cMy Latinos. Mi gente. Their stories, their sacrifices, their resilience, and their dreams of safety, dignity and belonging are not abstract to me. They are my family. They are my history.\u201d On the site for his new immigration defense law firm he writes that he left ICE because \u201cit was time to take a stand\u201d.<\/p>\n Rodriguez, the attorney who was so visibly suffering when I saw her in court, now works at the law school of New Jersey\u2019s Seton Hall University. In a 180-degree occupational turn, she helps students there do pro-bono defense work for immigrants facing detention and deportation.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, she reposted an invitation to immigration legal advocates in New York for a group therapy to process emotional trauma wreaked by working under Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown. The sessions would be led by a psychotherapist and a \u201cdeath doula\u201d who helps people process grief. Of the fired judges, former ICE lawyers and exhausted immigration defense attorneys I spoke with, no one could explain why more ICE lawyers have not quit the chaos and cruelty of the immigration courts, nor publicly denounced what they must do there to keep their jobs. No one could say whether the courts would get better soon. Or worse.<\/p>\n Rodriguez herself has written that as a former prosecutor of immigrants for ICE, she still struggles with \u201chow to be someone\u2019s champion. To not see the holes in the case, but to try to look at the best way to present the case. Most importantly, how to care deeply about the outcome again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One morning last June in an immigration courtroom in New York City, a lawyer named Estefani Rodriguez looked as if she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was a prosecuting attorney for the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Her job was to present immigration judges with motions<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[4768,13303,5256,5081,2466,2081,779,7291,2315,514],"class_list":{"0":"post-44291","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-attorney","9":"tag-customs","10":"tag-destructive","11":"tag-enforcement","12":"tag-ice","13":"tag-immigration","14":"tag-job","15":"tag-secretive","16":"tag-told","17":"tag-work"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Democrats, children of immigrants and patriots<\/h2>\n
The attorneys who quit<\/h2>\n