Christine Flowers: First, kill all the lawyers?

Last night, as I was watching another Dateline episode about a husband killing a wife and feeling so happy to be a single immigration lawyer instead of a married real estate agent, Donald Trump was issuing a hit on me.

At approximately 10:15 pm, the White House issued a memo that directed the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to go after my colleagues in the immigration bar. Entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and of Federal Court,” it is couched as an attempt to curtail significant fraud in the asylum field.

But it’s absolutely no surprise why this memo, likely authored by the notorious author of the child separation policy Stephen Miller, targets asylum and refugee law. That’s because this field is almost uniquely covered by international treaty and prohibits in most cases the “refoulement” or return of individuals who fear persecution in their home countries. And that makes it less susceptible to Executive Order than other areas of immigration law.

President Trump likes to exercise unitary authority over many things, including and especially immigration. With asylum, he can’t do that. And Stephen Miller knows it. So do immigration lawyers.

And that’s why we’re dangerous these days. We may appear to be gumming up the works for Trump’s efforts to deport criminals and terrorists, but most of us are simply following the laws and increasingly complicated regulations to provide our clients with the best legal counsel possible.

If that means, as I recently did, spending five hours in a windowless courtroom trying to get a judge to agree that being buried in a vertical grave and exposed to equatorial heat for eight hours by your captors is torture, I’ll do it. If that means trying to convince a judge that gay men in Pakistan are being killed because they’re gay, I’ll do it (I’ve done it.) If that means begging a judge to grant asylum to a woman whose Salvadoran grandfather repeatedly raped her while adult women in the family looked away, I’ll do it (I’ve done it.)

The fact is, most asylum cases are legitimate. You will of course find applicants who lie, and people who are economic refugees. The former are easily detected given the stringent corroboration requirements of the Real ID Act, while the latter-albeit suffering, are not eligible for relief.

Yes, there are bad lawyers. There are, in fact, very bad lawyers who make up stories for their clients who, for the most part, are completely oblivious to the chicanery. The true victims of these cheaters and frauds are the immigrants themselves who usually end up getting deported or caught up, against their will or intention, in removal proceedings.

And yes, there are some bad people who should not be granted relief. But they are an infinitesimally small number of applicants, while the vast majority are either worthy of asylum or, in many cases, denied because they come before incredulous judges. I have appeared before judges who deny 95% of the cases brought before them. That means there are people with legitimate claims who are being denied their right to refuge.

Just one example of the random injustice of the system. Twenty years ago, I had the case of two siblings, a brother and sister from Kenya. They were politically active and had been persecuted by the government. Their cases, almost identical except for the gender element, were heard before two different judges in Philadelphia. The woman was granted asylum. The man was denied. We filed an appeal, and while it was pending the brother got tired and went home, essentially self-deporting. A week later, he was murdered by the government agents he said were threatening him. I will never forget what he told me before he left: “I’m tired of trying to convince them I’m telling the truth.” I’m haunted by that.

So the idea that President Trump is pointing a finger at me and my colleagues as being inherently fraudulent makes my blood boil, particularly since the immigration bar is one of the most active in trying to keep the bad practitioners from preying on the innocent. We are the ones fighting against the fake lawyers, the lying lawyers and the notarios. We don’t need people like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and Donald Trump singling us out for punishment.

Shakespeare was being facetious when he wrote that iconic line. It’s sad that the White House is taking him literally.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. @flowerlady61