This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
After the 2024 presidential election, Stacy Tolchin expected the next four years to be an uphill battle.
The Pasadena-based immigration lawyer lived through the chaos from the first Trump term. She remembers family separation, the Muslim travel ban and attacks on refugee and asylum programs.
Yet, Tolchin and other lawyers and advocates were still surprised at the speed and sophistication of the current administration’s mass deportation campaign.
“It’s really much worse than I even contemplated it would be at the beginning of the year,” she said.
The Trump administration has stripped international students of their visas, deported people to one of the most dangerous prisons in the world, and launched violent immigration sweeps in American cities.
Besides the public-facing tactics, the administration has also made a series of quiet legal maneuvers that have made it much more difficult for immigrants to fight deportation cases.
These efforts include: Funneling people into fast-track deportation programs, making it harder for immigrants to hire lawyers and making it almost impossible for detainees to get out on bond.
But after being knocked on their heels in the early months of Trump’s new term, lawyers nationwide are now banding together and developing their own legal strategies.
“We need warriors, we need people to help us in this fight,” Tolchin said.
Chief among them are Writ of Habeas Corpus petitions — federal lawsuits that challenge illegal and indefinite detentions.
Collectively, they have filed more than 4,000 Habeas petitions as last-ditch efforts to get their clients released from immigration detention centers.
The Founding Fathers enshrined Habeas Corpus protections in the Constitution to protect against the whims of a king. It’s essentially a person’s last line of legal defense against illegal detention.
However, the petitions are complicated legal filings that raise multiple challenges for immigration lawyers — especially for those who are not used to the federal court system.
Although it is under federal jurisdiction, practicing immigration law is a lot different than practicing federal law. They are two separate court systems — each with their own unique set of rules.
Immigration lawyers, for example, can practice anywhere in the country. But federal lawyers must be barred to practice in their state and be formally admitted to work in specific U.S. District Courts.
Some immigration lawyers have never had to learn to write a Habeas petition.
“The area of Habeas law is very narrow, very specific,” said Justin Brooks, a law professor at the University of San Diego. “There are very few practitioners that really even practice in it or fully understand it.”
One San Diego-based immigration lawyer told KPBS it took her 25 hours of work to file one Habeas petition.
To help bridge the knowledge gap, immigration lawyers are turning to informal networks for help. Some organizations, like the American Immigration Lawyers Association, have even hosted formal workshops where lawyers can network and get a crash-course in filing Habeas petitions.
“I’m so proud of my fellow attorneys who have stepped up,” said Nerea Sholl-Woods, a San Diego-based immigration lawyer. “Without question, everyone I’ve reached out to will get on the phone with me and walk me through it.”
Some of the mentoring also happens one-on-one, with lawyers reaching out to old classmates of colleagues they’ve met at conferences.
And apart from offering technical assistance, these informal networks also provide emotional support, Sholl-Woods said.
Mitchell Shen, a Los Angeles-based immigration lawyer, said there are multiple email chains where lawyers talk shop about winning legal strategies but also vent about tough losses and try to psych each other up.
"They’re been really helpful,” he said
In response to questions from KPBS about the administration’s tactics and the surge in Habeas petitions, Department of Justice spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre provided the following statement:
“President Trump and the Department of Justice will continue to enforce the law as it is written to defend and protect the safety and security of the American people.”
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Tracking cases
While lawyers push back against the administration’s deportation agenda in federal courtrooms, they’ve found allies in unexpected places. From mutual aid groups that buy food for families of people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to volunteers who visit or write supportive letters to detainees. Some of them have never been involved in any sort of advocacy.
People like John Cronan, a Chicago-based software developer. He got interested in immigration after Kilmar Albrego Garcia, the Salvadorian man living in Maryland, was illegally deported to a Salvadorian prison by the Trump administration because of an administrative error.
Cronen closely followed media coverage about the high profile case. But he wanted to dig further by reading directly from the court documents. That’s when he learned that the vast majority of Habeas petitions are not available online. To look at the Albrego Garcia case files, he would have had to drive hundreds of miles to Texas and physically retrieve them from a federal courthouse.
“If these documents are as important as they are, they should be available online,” he said.
That’s when Cronen, who has no legal training, put his software development skills to work. He created Habeas Dockets, a website that tracks Habeas filings in federal courts throughout the country.
To run the website, Cronen needs a small army of volunteers to collect and digitize this data from all over the country.
One of them is Breaba Gilcher, a massage therapist and musician living in Los Angeles.
Like Cronen, Gilcher doesn’t have a background in activism or political organizing. She didn’t like ICE agents arresting people in her community and wanted to do something about it.
“It was important for me to find a sustainable way to get involved,” she said.
Gilcer is one of two LA-based volunteers. They go to LA’s federal courthouse, ask a clerk for copies of hundreds of documents, scan them at home and email them to Cronen.
She caps the number of pages to about 1,000 per trip because that is all she can carry. A thousand documents — at 10 cents per page — costs about $100. Volunteers pay that upfront and get reimbursed through Habeas Dockets.
Reading through the documents gives Glitcher a clear picture of what happens to immigrants after they’re arrested by ICE. Some contain letters from parents or loved ones begging for their release.
They contradict one of President Trump’s main narratives — that immigrants are dangerous and his administration is keeping Americans safe by prioritizing the worst of the worst.
Volunteers hope that making these documents more accessible will help people understand this contradiction.
“I think the fact that these documents are so restricted only increases the gap between public knowledge and what’s actually happening,” Gilcher said.
Meanwhile, lawyers say Habeas Dockets is helping them with their cases in real time. Specifically, they’re using it to look up previous decisions from individual judges to help them craft their arguments.
Small victories
While Habeas Dockets volunteers try to shed light on the big-picture, individual lawyers take on one case at a time.
“Pushing back on behalf of individuals and winning their cases, that’s really satisfying because this is just so unjust,” said Cassandra Lopez, a San Diego-based immigration lawyer.
While winning one case won’t change the whole system, Lopez said each small victory is a form of vindication.
More importantly, she said, it can change someone’s life.
One of her recent clients suffered a heart attack while he was detained at an immigration detention center in Arizona. He was then transferred to the Imperial Regional Detention Center, where Lopez alleged he was not getting sufficient medical care.
“He gets two weeks of medication for his heart, and then there will be three or four days where he’s waiting for them to re-up his medication,” she said. “He’s extremely worried about his health. They don’t put him on a low-salt, low-fat diet, you know, these kinds of things that if he were out of custody, he’d be able to do for himself.”
At this point, there isn’t a way to easily track the overall success rate of the Habeas petitions, but Cronen says he’s working on it.
For now, he finds solace in anecdotal wins.
“The district courts are serving as an important backstop right now,” he said. “At least in those courts, the system is working, as I see it.”
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