ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court

Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month a judge took an exceedingly atypical step declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers We re not really doing names publicly reported Judge ShaSha Xu after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration s deportation regime As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants administration attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers identities was both novel and concerning I ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified commented Elissa Steglich a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin Part of the court s ethical obligation is transparency including clear identification of the parties Not identifying an attorney for the regime means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding the Department of Homeland Safety the individual cannot be held accountable And it makes the judge appear partial to the leadership Part of the court s ethical obligation is transparency including clear identification of the parties The concealment shocked two lawyers who were representing immigrants in Xu s courtroom Attorney Jeffrey Okun who was representing a client via video call characterized the move as bizarre Attorney Hugo Gonzalez Venegas called Xu s behavior a terrible lack of transparency on the part of officers of the court Immigration courts which are run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review part of the executive branch not the judiciary are far less transparent than the majority courts Their prosecutors work for ICE and DHS they have no obligation to provide defense lawyers and their judges are appointed and fired by the president Related ICE Agents Deserve No Privacy On a Tuesday morning in late June Xu was running through several brief preliminary hearings known as master calendars Nationwide these proceedings consistently start out the same way An immigrant will appear with their attorney if they have the good fortune to retain one often on Webex A judge presides at a big desk in an actual courtroom in this occurrence in lower Manhattan An ICE lawyer represents the authorities in its attempts to deport the immigrant As each incident commences the judge recites their own name followed by the immigrant s name the name of the immigrant s attorney if they have one and decisively the name of the ICE lawyer It s an on-the-record census that enables due process When Xu omitted the ICE lawyer s name Okun solicited her to identify who was arguing to deport his client She refused Xu attributed the change to privacy because things lately have changed Xu described Okun that he could use Webex s direct messaging function to send the ICE lawyer his email and the ICE lawyer would likely respond with her own name and address Okun accepted the arrangement When the next occurrence commenced minutes later Xu again refused to state the ICE lawyer s name and Gonzalez Venegas also on Webex argued that the legal record would be incomplete without it Xu again announced that the two attorneys could message each other confidentially The administration s mystery attorney who was prosecuting both Okun s and Gonzalez-Venegas s clients wore glasses and a navy blue suit her hair was pulled back primly from her face She spoke quietly with a tinge of vocal fry Her name according to Gonzalez Venegas was Cosette Shachnow Shachnow began working for ICE in shortly after she graduated from law school according to inhabitants records and her LinkedIn account The latter lists Civil Rights and Social Action among her favored causes Shachnow did not respond to an email from The Intercept seeking comment Neither did the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor which oversees ICE lawyers It is unclear how several immigration judges are failing to say ICE lawyers names but The Intercept has witnessed the practice twice On July Judge James McCarthy in lower Manhattan neglected to identify the leadership s attorney in several cases referring to the lawyer instead as Department Department are we done with pleadings McCarthy appealed The word stood in for ICE s parent agency the Department of Homeland Shield Several immigration defense attorneys were attending the hearings by video None objected Judge Shirley Lazare-Raphael who is also a New York City immigration judge communicated The Intercept that the new phenomenon of occluding ICE attorneys names has not been formalized via a directive or rule It s up to the judges whether or not they want to do it she stated This is a very new and very disturbing turn of events noted Daniel Kowalski a former longtime immigration attorney who now edits the legal journal Bender s Immigration Bulletin for LexisNexis Where does it stop requested Kowalski Are the immigration judges going to be unnamed Behind a screen Lazare-Raphael explained she had heard that selected ICE attorneys have disclosed they ascertained it dangerous to state their names publicly That reasoning echoes DHS s questionable claim that ICE agents need to mask up because of what the department described as an almost percent increase in assaults against agents nationally during the first six months of this year But as DHS revealed last week the raw number of assaults this year is compared to in the same period last year Given that ICE arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office and the agency s determination of what qualifies as an assault is often dubious this uptick likely sounds more dramatic than it is Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants Veronica Cardenas who was an ICE prosecutor for six years before quitting in reported The Intercept that she thinks the real threat these lawyers face is shame She commented that her mother came to the United States from Colombia without papers and was arrested at the southern edge and that while she was proud of her daughter when she started working for ICE Cardenas came to realize the people she was seeking to deport were a lot like her family Cardenas now works as an immigration defense attorney and counsels other ICE lawyers who want to leave their jobs multiple of whom she revealed have backgrounds similar to hers Adam Boyd a former ICE attorney who resigned last month according to a summary in The Atlantic revealed that multiple ICE lawyers feel frustrated about having to ask judges to dismiss cases so that ICE enforcement and removal officers can grab immigrants outside courtrooms and swell the Trump administration s deportation numbers Boyd explained he left after making what he called a moral decision The asylum system has suffered a stunning collapse under President Donald Trump s second term In the past six months judges denials of asylum have skyrocketed from rates of to percent and immigration enforcement statistics expert Austin Kocher predicts that the figure could soon top out at percent As the Trump administration orders ICE to ramp up its removal operations hundreds of immigrants to the United States are being arrested and beaten by people with their faces covered and no proof of who they are Now they may not know the names of the attorneys making the matter to deport them either The post ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court appeared first on The Intercept