ICE Accidentally Publishes A ‘Watch List’ Of Immigration Lawyers, Which Is Definitely A Normal Thing For The Government To Do

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.

Amarante noticed something else about the list that raised even more concerns, as she told WGNO, “One of the troubling patterns I suppose that I recognized, was that a large number of these practitioners on the list were people of color.”

Which pushes this from bureaucratic weirdness into civil liberties nightmare fuel.

Amarante continued:

“Why does the list exist? Whether it’s an innocent incursion or something that is more intentional or nefarious, we need to get to the bottom of it. It’s troubling because there’s a pattern of threats by the administration — the implication by the government is that offering support to a client is the harm in itself and the names on the list sort of seems to support that.”

Let’s not forget, this administration has not been subtle about its hostility toward lawyers in general and immigration lawyers in particular. In March 2025, the White House issued a memo titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” which attacked the act of lawyering, accused immigration attorneys of “unscrupulous” conduct, and directed the Attorney General to take action against lawyers and firms that cross the Trump Administration.

Al Otro Lado didn’t mince words, alleging that the database raises “grave concerns of political targeting and professional intimidation at a time when the administration is openly escalating its attacks on immigrant advocates.”

Andrew Fels, a staff attorney at Al Otro Lado, put it bluntly, “There is no obvious legitimate reason for ICE to be compiling what appears to be a covert roster of immigration lawyers. We are giving ICE an opportunity to publicly explain the watch list’s purpose. Publishing the underlying policies governing the watch list’s creation and inclusion criteria will conclusively resolve this issue.”

Cassandra Lopez, Al Otro Lado’s legal director, framed the situation as a warning to all lawyers. “History may be repeating itself. Once again, our staff and colleagues appear on a government watch list simply for doing our jobs—defending the constitutional right to seek asylum and holding the government accountable in court. The pattern is unmistakable and deeply alarming.”

Lopez’s warning is particularly poignant. Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has been aggressively attacking lawyers and the very rule of law. This watch list appears to be the next disturbing step, with the government treating adversarial legal representation as suspect conduct. That is a direct inversion of how the legal system is supposed to function.

The existence of the list suggests a bureaucratic culture that views immigration lawyers not as officers of the court, but as obstacles to be monitored. And it should concern anyone who still believes the rule of law depends on lawyers being able to do their jobs without being cataloged (or worse) by the very agencies they’re tasked with challenging.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].