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.


Fucking cowards. You wanted to make a list, you wanted to publish it, but then when it gets public attention you want to bury the truth. Let’s talk about why you decided to use tax payer money to put that list together. Specifically, who gave the order to do it?
It’s extremely alarming. It’s also alarming that very few people seem to know their history and realize this is very much history repeating itself.
Long before Trump openly began disregarding the law, abuse of executive power and abuse of authority in general by agencies or individuals within those agencies has been more of a tangible threat to our freedom and democracy than any of the reasons they claim make it necessary for them to continue to erode our freedom for our safety.
Sometimes the people that are supposed to be upholding the law and protecting our freedom are actually our biggest threat. Calling those people out and demanding public accountability is not a crime. It’s how a democracy is supposed to work and it’s in the shared self interest of every American who values liberty and justice.