The courage to be decent
The Trump administration wants to make us too afraid to look out for one another. Don't let them.
One of the more pernicious effects of authoritarianism is to make the everyday participation in civic life we take for granted feel subversive. The goal isn’t to police all behavior at all times. It’s to make us fearful to the point that we police our own behavior.
Last month, Clay Jackson was at the gas station just up the street from his home in a Dallas suburb when one of the attendants asked if he might provide some legal advice to an immigrant family.
“There’s a guy in there who just shoots the shit with you when you come in to pay,” Jackson says. “He’d heard that I had previously given some pro bono legal help to a family who owned a barbecue restaurant. He said there was family in the area where the dad had been caught up in one of the ICE workplace raids and they’re really freaking out. The parents were undocumented, while one of the kids is DACA and the other is a U.S. citizen.”
The man asked Jackson if he would be willing to “just talk to them and make sure they know their rights and where they can some help. I said absolutely. I’m not an immigration lawyer, but they were scared to reach out to anyone, so I said I’d go there and try to just give them the basics.”
Later that afternoon, March 4, Jackson visited the family in their home. “It was a little difficult to communicate because everything had to be translated through the 10-year-old kid.” He met with them for less than an hour and told them their rights if they’re detained by ICE. “I said I’d help find them pro bono counsel who specialized in immigration.”
“A couple days later, on March 6, I was working from home at around 11:30 when I got a notice that my VPN had gone down,” he says. “I didn’t think much about it. It can cut out from time to time. About 10 minutes later, I got a knock at the door.”
Two men were outside Jackson’s door, dressed in slacks and polos. They were not wearing badges.
“I first thought they were going to try to sell me something. But as soon as I opened the door they said, ‘Are you Clayton Jackson?’ I think I shook my head or said ‘yeah,’ and then I heard, ‘We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.’”
Jackson says alarms went off in his head. “My first instinct was to want to know what this was about. That it must be a misunderstanding. So I started to tell them about how I’ve been involved in some pro bono work. Then this voice in my head kicked in and just said, you need to shut the fuck up — don’t say anything.”
The officers never identified themselves. They did ask if they could come inside.
“I said absolutely not,” Jackson says. “I asked for their names and badge numbers. They said they didn’t have to provide that information at this time. So I told them I’d be calling my lawyer and I shut the door behind me.”
Jackson says his mind started racing. “I needed to know who they were, what agency they were with. Then I remembered that I have the Ring camera. Maybe I could watch the video of the incident and figure out who they were from that.”
There was no video. “That’s when I learned why my VPN had gone down. It wasn’t the VPN. Someone had shut off my Wifi.”
About 15 minutes after the interaction at his front door, Jackson’s Wifi was up and running again.
“So there was about a 30-minute period where my Wifi was down, and it happened to be the period where these officers came to my door, which prevented my Ring camera from recording them,” he says. “I guess it could be a coincidence. But that’s a big coincidence.”
Jackson contacted AT&T to see if he could get some sort of documentation of how and why his Wifi went out. The company wasn’t much help.
“I have a buddy who’s former federal law enforcement and is now a lawyer. So I called him and asked him if federal agencies have the technological capability to shut someone’s Wifi down without them knowing, and if that’s something they do. And he said ‘Hell yes.’ He said they do it all the time when they want to have an informal interview with somebody and don’t want to be recorded.”
People I spoke to who have expertise in these matters said (a) it would not be difficult to shut down someone’s Wifi, and (b) doing so without a court order would be illegal.
Jackson isn’t an immigration attorney, but he occasionally represents undocumented people in non-immigration matters. He is using his real name, but he asked that I not name his employer or describe the type of law he practices.
“I thought, shit, now I’m going to have to get my employer involved. I’m going to have retain my own attorney. And now I have to worry about my clients. If they’re investigating me, are they going to start looking into my clients, too?”
As he thought about the incident, Jackson couldn’t help but put it in the context of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, as well as its ongoing campaign to intimidate the legal profession.
“I’m anti-MAGA and I’m worried about where this country is headed, but I’m pretty low key,” he says. “I’m not the type to, say, chain myself to a Tesla dealership. This is a very conservative area, but there’s a large and growing Latino population. I wanted to do some pro bono work outside the scope of my day-to-day job. So I agreed to help out the family who owns the barbecue place.”
“My guess is that this was just a couple officers’ dorky attempt to intimidate me,” Jackson tells me. “But if it’s happened to me, it’s probably happened to other attorneys. So I wanted to reach out to you to get the word out and see how often this is happening. Because it needs to stop.”
I’ve reached any to the law enforcement agencies who are presumably involved in immigration enforcement in Jackson’s county, including ICE, the local sheriff’s department, and the Texas National Guard. None returned my request for comment.
Intimidating lawyers has become a key component of the Trump administration’s overall strategy, and this is especially true with respect to mass deportations. Immigrants detained for lacking documentation are more than 10 times more likely to get a favorable outcome if they have an attorney than if they don’t.
Trump officials are certainly aware of this. During Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried “dirty immigration lawyers,” claiming they were encouraging their clients to “make false claims of asylum, providing them with the magic words needed” to get relief. There were also multiple incidents of DHS targeting immigration attorneys, advocates, and journalists with criminal investigations or by flagging their passports for extra scrutiny if they left and reentered the country.
But this time around, they’re ratcheting up the pressure.
Last month, Trump issued an executive order claiming — without evidence — that immigration attorneys commonly “coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims,” and that this practice “undermines the integrity of our immigration laws and the legal profession more broadly — to say nothing of the undeniable, tragic consequences of the resulting mass illegal immigration,” before mentioning the names of women allegedly killed by undocumented immigrants. The order directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate and seek possible sanctions against attorneys and firms who engage in such behavior.
There have now been at least two incidents in which Customs and Border Patrol agents have detained immigration attorneys at the border and attempted to search their cell phones. One was held for several hours.
One of the first prestigious law firms Trump targeted with an executive order was Paul Weiss, and though he appears to have targeted the firm due to its employment of former special counsel Robert Mueller, the firm also led the legal fight against Trump’s family separation policy during his first term. After Trump announced an agreement with the firm, it removed immigration related cases from the pro bono section of its website.
In multiple recent interviews, Trump “immigration czar” Tom Homan has repeatedly threatened Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with criminal prosecution for handing out “know your rights” information to her constituents and streaming similar webinars to social media.
The administration has barred organizations from conducting “know your rights” legal orientation programs in federal courthouses.
In a deranged Newsmax interview earlier this month, Trump “terrorism advisor” Sebastian Gorka declared that people merely “advocating” for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia are “advocating for a terrorist,” and could be charged with federal crimes against “aiding and abetting terrorism.” There is no credible evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist, or has committed any crime.
Keep in mind that Trump’s DOJ has already opened or promised criminal investigations grounded in equally asinine interpretations of the law. For example, Bondi recently vowed to open criminal investigations into nonprofits and private companies with DEI programs, on the theory that those programs violate federal anti-discrimination laws. Trump’s unhinged Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, “Insurrection Ed” Martin, opened a criminal investigation of nonprofit organizations who received federal grants related to climate change on the theory that climate change is a “hoax,” and that therefore accepting those grants was a form of fraud.
“There were multiple points in our conversation when I needed to reassure Jackson that he had done nothing wrong. He had given some legal advice to people who needed it. That is, always has been, and always should be legal.”
The goal here isn’t to get convictions, at least not yet. It’s to harass, intimidate, and incapacitate anyone with the power, money, or platform to thwart this administration’s aspiration for authoritarianism.
In a separate executive order, for example, Trump vowed to end student loan forgiveness for people who work for nonprofits that “engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose,” including “aiding or abetting violations of . . . [f]ederal immigration laws,” “the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States,” “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination,” “engaging in a pattern of violating State tort laws, including laws against trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism, and obstruction of highways.”*
(*Not the most important point here, but these are not “tort laws.”)
The clear aim is to make it extremely difficult for nonprofits who advocate for homeless people, trans rights, political protesters (though presumably not of the January 6 variety), and, of course, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants to recruit young talent. Without loan forgiveness, most recent graduates — and law school graduates in particular — can’t afford to work for these organizations.
Meanwhile, debt forgiveness will remain for those who work for nonprofits that support the president’s agenda. Not to mention the billion or so dollars in “pro bono” legal work Trump has managed to extort from Paul Weiss and several other big law firms. (That’s enough money to fund about nine Heritage Foundations — the think tank responsible for the “Project 2025” blueprint.)
Others have pointed out that Trump’s funding cuts across the federal government — particularly the threats and withholding of funds to colleges and universities — could either shut down legal clinics that provide aid to immigrants, or persuade law schools to shut those clinics down themselves. Make examples of a few; intimidate the rest into submission.
It seems to be working. On social media sites like BlueSky, journalists have observed that sources in fields currently in Trump’s crosshairs are now unwilling to speak on the record. I’ve noticed this too. For example, one indigent defense office whose attorneys were previously willing to talk to me on the record would only discuss their immigration work with me if I didn’t mention the name of the office or attorneys. (I don’t really blame them. The difference between them and, say, the capitulating law firms is that they are still doing the work.)
In fact many nonprofit advocacy groups are now self-censoring to avoid attracting the administration’s ire, and Trump’s more recent threat to revoke Harvard University’s nonprofit status has only fueled the panic. Here’s one particularly tragic example:
Last week, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was ordered by the Department of Justice to remove transgender children and other LGBTQ+ youth from its public-facing materials or lose its significant federal funding. As first reported by independent journalist Marisa Kabas, and later confirmed by NBC News, leadership at NCMEC complied, directing staff to erase LGBTQ+ children from its website and publications.
The first time I spoke with Clay Jackson, he was reeling. Jackson is a white guy with a well-paying job, centrist politics, and plenty of connections in the legal community. He’s a smart guy who clerked for a federal judge.
And yet there were multiple points in our conversation when I felt like I needed to reassure him that he had done nothing wrong. He had given some legal advice to people who needed it. That is, always has been, and always should be legal.
It isn’t that Jackson regrets what he did. But the visit from those two officers made him feel as if he should — as if he’d brought the visit from the police upon himself.
When I reminded him of this, he replied, “Thanks for saying that. It’s something I have to keep reminding myself. Helping people out pro bono is part of my professional obligation as a lawyer. I did nothing wrong.
He then paused for a moment. “But can I just be honest with you? I’m fucking scared to be in Texas right now.”
Not long ago I’d have thought such a statement to be a little paranoid. I’m not so sure now. As the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained in an interview here at The Watch, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been out-Trumping Trump on this issue for years:
He has really led the charge in using his power as Texas Attorney General to go after migrant rights nonprofits. He has attempted to shut down or strip nonprofit status from multiple organizations that provide direct support, including several faith-based organizations that work along the U.S.-Mexico border. He attempted to shut down a nonprofit in Houston that supports migrants on the claim that it was violating its 501(c)(3) status by opposing some Texas laws, even while he simultaneously and happily accepted the support of conservative nonprofits that are very clearly electioneering by supporting specific candidates.
Paxton has also attempted to use Texas business law to go after these groups. So far, every one of these efforts has been a complete failure. He hasn’t found a single judge to rule in his favor on any of these issues. But people are nervous because he continues to try.
Trump himself has also expanded his retribution campaign from groups to individuals. His recent executive order to DOJ to open criminal investigations into whistleblowers Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor is perhaps the most chilling example. There’s no credible allegation that either committed any crime. Their only transgression was to have criticized Trump publicly (as Taylor did), or to have interrupted Trump’s efforts to generate fake evidence that the 2020 election was stolen (as Krebs did).
Trump’s executive order targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey was direct retaliation for that firm’s litigation on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems, a company that was nearly wiped out, and whose employees were harassed and threatened because of insane, easily disproven lies spread by Trump and his allies about 2020.
None of these efforts will hold up in court — or at least they shouldn’t. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that acts we once took for granted as virtuous, routine, and safe — telling the truth, representing those oppressed by the state, providing legal aid to the powerless, volunteering to work at a polling site, basic journalism — now carry some risk. They now require some courage. Maybe the government won’t send you to prison. At least not yet. But it can make your life really difficult.
Clay Jackson hasn’t heard anything more from the two officers who visited him, nor has he heard from whatever agency that employs them. It seems likely that his initial hunch was correct — this incident wasn’t the product of a top-down conspiracy to intimidate lawyers. It’s more likely that two cops were pissed off that someone had the audacity to help a scared and powerless family. But it also isn’t surprising that low-level immigration enforcers would feel empowered to intimidate an attorney as thsi administration defyies court orders, weaponizes the law for retribution, tramples due process, and equates advocating for immigrants with supporting terrorists.
A few months ago, I had a similar conversation with another attorney. This attorney practices post-conviction law. I had called to talk about another matter, but the conversation inevitably turned to Trump. This attorney mentioned that he’d recently had some work done on his home, and had gotten to know one of the contractors. The contractor was undocumented, and feared he may be deported. In the 20-some years he’d been in the U.S., this contractor had done well for himself — he owned his contracting business, his home, and some property. He asked if the attorney could help him transfer the business and title to his home and property to his son, who is a U.S. citizen. The attorney and his wife — who is also a lawyer — agreed to help.
“As my wife and I started filling out the paperwork, we realized that we might be doing this sort of work for other people over the next few years, so she suggested we bring up one of the old desktops from the basement, so whatever immigration work we were doing would be on a separate computer.”
The attorney’s college-aged son had taken an interest in all of this.
“My son asked if what we were doing was illegal. I told him it was all perfectly legal. Then he asked me a question I really couldn’t answer: Why did we feel like we had to take these steps to hide legal work that was perfectly legal? And all I could think to say was that this is the kind of country we live in now.”
"What matters is that acts we once took for granted as virtuous, routine, and safe — telling the truth, representing those oppressed by the state, providing legal aid to the powerless, volunteering to work at a polling site, basic journalism — now carry some risk. They now require some courage."
Do enough of us have enough of this kind of courage to persevere and fight back against an authoritarian power-grab? Time will tell: but every act of courage--including the writing of these words, Mr. Balko--is a reminder that it is still within our power to resist the destruction of our nation.
For me, the most chilling part of your post today:
“My son asked if what we were doing was illegal. I told him it was all perfectly legal. Then he asked me a question I really couldn’t answer: Why did we feel like we had to take these steps to hide legal work that was perfectly legal? And all I could think to say was that this is the kind of country we live in now.”
It's going to take all kinds of courage to get back to an America where we can trust the government to govern with the best interests of The People in mind.