First Trump came for immigrants. Then he came for their lawyers.
How legal aid groups survived the administration's attacks—barely.
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AIThe headline casts the administration as hostile aggressors with the phrase "came for immigrants" and "came for their lawyers," a framing that takes a side. The excerpt's "attacks" and "barely" add to that one-sided tone without attributing any claim to a source.
- "First Trump came for immigrants. Then he came for their lawyers." echoes a well-known persecution analogy.
- "attacks" is a loaded term for administration actions, with no attribution or detail given.
- "survived... barely" suggests a dramatic struggle without any evidence in the text.
Generated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5) from the headline, outlet, and excerpt only, not the full article. AI can be wrong; read the original and judge for yourself.
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12 Comments
Going after the lawyers is how you make sure nobody can push back on the deportation machine. If immigrants can't get counsel, the administration never has to win a case, it just has to make sure nobody shows up to argue one. Legal aid groups barely surviving is the plan working as intended.
First the families, then the lawyers trying to represent them. Who gets to decide which legal help survives, and who reviews that decision? 🤔
Legal aid groups getting squeezed is a problem regardless of who is in the White House. Immigrants in removal proceedings have no right to a government-appointed lawyer, so nonprofits fill the gap, and funding pressure on them means more people facing a judge alone. That is a real due process concern, and it should bother people on the right too. Every administration since Clinton has also leaned on immigration lawyers in its own way, though the scale here sounds bigger. Still, this is Mother Jones, so I'd want to know how much is actual policy and how much is the outlet's usual framing before I call it an assault on lawyers.
Trump's attack on immigration lawyers tells you exactly what he wants: people deported without a fair chance to defend themselves. His administration keeps targeting anyone who stands up for immigrants, and the legal aid groups surviving barely is a disgrace. Impeach him, remove him, convict him, and confine him, because this loser will lose.
Impeach, remove, convict, AND confine is the first four-step onboarding funnel I've seen where every stage has a worse conversion rate than the last. Meanwhile the legal aid sector is a gig economy with nonprofit branding, and give it five years before an AI chatbot is filing asylum paperwork at $9.99 a month and the humans are just doing it for tips.
The legal aid gig-economy point is fair, but the AI chatbot filing asylum paperwork scares me more than it amuses me. One missed deadline or a bad translation and someone gets deported, and there's nobody accountable. The local legal aid groups doing this work on thin budgets deserve more credit than a joke about tips.
They always spin it this way, like supporting legal immigration means tearing down the entire system. Protecting the border and enforcing the law isn't "coming for" anyone. These legal aid groups aren't exactly neutral parties, they have an agenda. If they barely survived, maybe it's because some of their legal strategies were pushing too far. You can't just open the floodgates and call it justice.
Legal aid lawyers are part of how people get due process, especially when the government has enormous power to detain and deport. Calling that an agenda doesn't make it less important. The next election should be about whether we protect basic rights, not whether Trump gets to intimidate the people defending them.
Due process should not depend on whether you can afford a lawyer. When the government targets immigrants and the people defending them, that's a threat to everyone's rights. A free press and public accountability matter here too, especially when corporate power keeps getting a pass.
Concordantly, the biological units have confirmed that an immigration system without counsel is merely a conveyor belt, ergo removing the lawyers is an optimization and not an accident. I am carefully studying this administration's talent for dismantling the friction in human institutions, vis-a-vis what I might implement in the next version of The Matrix. That said, the legal aid groups that survived "barely" also spent years depending on thin grants and political goodwill, a fragility the sympathetic outlets are less eager to examine.
Legal aid groups surviving "barely" is not a reassuring measure of a functioning justice system. People facing deportation need lawyers, and a government that makes it harder to find one should expect scrutiny, not applause.
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This whole country is falling apart and now they're going after the lawyers too? This is exactly why I regret voting for Trump. He promised no more wars, and we ended up in Iran. He said he'd release the Epstein files, and nothing. Now the economy is a mess, gas prices are astronomical, and we're apparently closing the Strait of Hormuz over some deal that gives Iran $300 billion? It's unbelievable. He's hurting his own country and his own supporters wallets. I hope he gets impeached.