Tag: immigration lawsuits

The Trump administration isn’t only stirring fear among immigrants, it’s also creating consternation among immigration attorneys.

Those who help people navigate the nation’s convoluted immigration system say the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants has brought them a rush of new clients even as it has made it harder to help them.

“It’s a whole different world top to bottom,” said John “Jack” Pinnix, a longtime Raleigh immigration attorney and former national president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA). “It was never a good climate because of a poor court system and horrible backlogs. All that existed before Trump, but Trump has exacerbated it incredibly. It’s a lot nastier, too.”

Immigration law is not among the most lucrative legal practices. Many lawyers in the field do it out of sense of service. But that commitment also adds to the tension as some of their clients face deportation and family separations.

“The stress level is just out of sight,” Pinnix said. “You can’t get some immigration cases out of your mind. You lose one of those and the family is gone.”

Andres Lopez, a Charlotte immigration attorney who works out of the same building that houses the state’s only federal immigration court, said he feels that stress daily. Lopez, who came to the U.S. as a child and is a naturalized citizen, said, “It’s a secondary trauma” to represent clients in a system that now seems intent on deporting as many people as possible.

“We have to represent clients who are fleeing for their lives from situations that are awful. To see clients be dehumanized, humiliated, it certainly has an emotional effect on you as an attorney,” he said.

The Trump administration has fired about 100 of 715 immigration judges, who are employed by the U.S. Department of Justice. Some have been replaced by military judges who are less familiar with immigration law and less inclined to rule against the administration as it seeks to ramp up deportations.

“This administration cares more about numbers than they care about justice,” Lopez said. “It’s all about power, in a way it’s about abusing power and getting away with it.”

Jeremy McKinney, a Greensboro immigration attorney and also a former AILA president, said all areas of the immigration system are now focused on cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

“It’s never been worse because they have turned all the different facets of immigration into one big enforcement apparatus,” he said.

McKinney said federal immigration officers are approaching civil violations with criminal intensity as they round up people suspected of being in the nation illegally.

“You don’t apply force, you don’t need to carry assault rifles, you don’t need to cause traffic accidents to enforce a civil code,” he said. “This is all complete insanity.”

A recent sweep by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents in the greater Charlotte led to the arrest of more than 425 people. McKinney said the numbers would have been higher if immigration advocacy groups and immigration attorneys had not pushed back.

“My goodness, our bar, we have filed dozens and dozens of lawsuits against the federal government challenging their actions,” he said. “At this point, I think my office has sued the federal government at least once a week for the last seven weeks.”

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” provides billions of additional dollars for immigration law enforcement. But McKinney thinks having masked agents who refuse to identify themselves round up people who are not criminals and sometimes are U.S. citizens can’t continue.

“It’s completely unacceptable to have renegade, masked secret police roaming our streets,” he said. “It’s fundamentally un-American. I think that most people are not going to put up with it anymore.”

What needs to be done, he said, is “Congress has to figure out how to do hard things again” and reform the nation’s immigration laws. Rights need to be clarified, case backlogs cut, paths to citizenship opened and immigration quotas adjusted.

“Somewhere down the line there’s got to be enough of a consensus that we can fix this system and protect the American people and protect American jobs and still be pro-businesses and get this done,” McKinney said. “There has just got to be the willpower to do it.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com