Did you have immigration lawyer watch list on your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? If so, congrats! But for everyone else, it’s yet another sad slide into federal control to learn that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted what appears to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys buried on its own website.
The list was discovered by attorney Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the list while interacting with ICE’s website and found her own name on it. The list has since been pulled from the website, which is usually what agencies do when a documents is totally normal. Now Al Otro Lado, an immigration advocacy group, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who created the list, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys in the first place.
I’d go with incompetent. This isn’t too many steps removed from how insecure the no fly list was (iirc, Maia Arson Crimew didn’t have to run any actual exploits to grab that and it was just an insecure jenkins)