Tempest-Tost

The Trump administration’s mass deportation policy has had far-reaching consequences that are affecting immigrants and immigration attorneys every day. “We’re on the front lines,” says Alexis Axelrad of Barst & Mukamal.

The four attorneys interviewed last summer for this piece include Axelrad, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association; David K. S. Kim, one of more than 130 immigration judges fired by the Trump administration; Lauren DeBellis Avis, a former Manhattan public defender who compares her practice to a full-contact sport; and Michael Wildes, whose father, Leon, represented John Lennon during his immigration battles with the U.S. government, and who is himself the immigration attorney for both Yoko Ono and Melania Trump.

They give us their thoughts on the rapid shifts in immigration policy, the ICE crackdown, and the toll it’s taking on people and the rule of law.

How has immigration law changed since January 2025?

Lauren DeBellis Aviv, DeBellis Aviv Pardini: During Trump 1.0, people were upset, they felt like they were being targeted. In Trump 2.0, the feeling is fear. I think that’s part of the priorities of the administration. People get scared to challenge the system and self-deport. The demand for constant advice and support has skyrocketed. People don’t trust what they’re hearing. Everyone wants advice all the time. They’re not wrong to want this advice.

Michael Wildes, Wildes & Weinberg: Friday afternoons have largely become a source of anxiety within the firm—as the Board of Immigration Appeals issues about 80% of their decisions on Friday about 2 p.m. We believe this is deliberate by the administration. It’s less likely to hit the news cycles. We’ve had about a 200% increase in the amount of firmwide meetings. I have team meetings every week with a different group. We’ve had to add emergency counsels for folks who are detained or need to see us in 24 hours. ICE moves people quickly to Texas or other parts of the nation—if we can get in fast, we can avoid having to litigate in a Southern state. We have lawyers having to appear at multiple hearings for cases that have been closed administratively for years. Stress levels with attorneys are very high.

Alexis S. Axelrad, Barst & Mukamal: Trump 1.0 was intense—the Muslim ban and the travel ban. Trump 2.0 came in with a playbook: Project 2025. They learned the lessons from Trump 1.0. But I have all this experience and I adapt. In our Bar association, we’re here to help each other. We’re very unique in that way. We educate our fellow attorneys.

David K. S. Kim, Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli & Pratt: I got sworn in as immigration judge in September 2022. I applied the law. And I was fired via email in December 2025. A three-sentence email. I’m all over the news. Even South Korean and Japanese news media came to interview me. That was a shock. I had probably the highest asylum grade among all judges in New York City’s immigration court. It’s not because I’m liberal—I tried to be fair to both parties. Homeland Security prosecutors, they all agreed cases should be granted, except for a few cases where they reserved appeal but never filed. But people commented: “Oh, this liberal leftist communist.” I’m nowhere close to communist. I loved that job, but I got fired.

What policy changes stand out for you?

Wildes: The birthright citizenship ban was just a negative-Nancy thing to do—horrid and constitutionally unsound and foolish. The ICE raids had a chilling effect on lawful visa holders, even those entrepreneurs that own their own companies. … The $100,000 visa fine [issued by executive order in September 2025, later struck down by a federal judge] was clearly intended to target the 2025 H-1B visa program. This last Friday, May 29, is the cherry on top. They’re going to reverse 70 years of people processing green cards domestically. A generation ago, they wanted to take the pressure off America’s embassies. Now they want to ban people from adjusting status and force them to apply for green cards at America’s embassies. It’s upending itself. It will be reversed. 

Axelrad: It’s a constant up-and-down, up-and-down. The adjustment-of-status memo that came out the Friday before Memorial Day, it felt like anyone I’d spoken to—current clients, former clients, anyone who had my name—reached out: “What does this mean?” Now we’re already seeing the way it’s being imposed—more family-based cases, fewer unemployment-based cases, but also a “gotcha” mentality. Things that had not been a factor before now are. Figuring that all out—it’s constantly adapting and keeping the will to do this.

Today, June 23, was a very bad news day. I was driving, I wasn’t looking at my phone. By the time I looked at it, I had 20 messages. And all the news was terrible. In a 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that a U.S. border agent could put a green-card holder on parole if they had been accused of a crime. If their criminal case is not finished, they really shouldn’t travel, because it’s up to Customs and Border Protection to decide whether they get treated as a returning resident or a person for admission—and then they could get put in removal proceedings. 

Kim: The day he got sworn in under this term, Trump fired the top three government officials within the executive office for immigration review: the director of EOIR, deputy director of EOIR and chief immigration judge. Then they started firing immigration judges that were still on technical probation. They fired them, without cause, one week short of their second anniversary, when they would have passed probation. Then they started firing judges who passed probation. They’ve fired, now, more than 130—almost all appointed under the Obama or Biden administrations. There were a few who were appointed under Trump 1.0, but they turned out to be great judges, fair judges. I guess they saw that as not supporting their agenda. After firing the immigration judges, they advertised new judges as “deportation judges,” not immigration judges. No such job exists. So they’re looking for judges who can rubber-stamp the government’s policy to deport as many people as possible. There are so many more examples I can give you. Right now, the immigration court has become a court without any due process.

How are you handling the stress? 

Axelrad: The American Immigration Lawyers Association focuses on wellness and well-being. You can’t help your clients if you can’t help yourself. There have been, unfortunately, incidents where people in our Bar association have taken their lives. It’s just an incredible amount of stress. Depending on the type of work you do, by stroke of a pen, or an illegal memo, you could be out of that business. How do you pivot? We are a support system. We’re over 18,000 members now. I’ll become president January 1, 2027. We need each other more than ever to be a sounding board, to ask the question, “Should we refer it out or not?” This is where our association is at its best—helping each other.

DeBellis Aviv: It’s like a pressure cooker, trying to prioritize and help people prioritize things. It’s advanced lawyering every single day. It really is an exhaustive amount of self-discipline, of looking at my day, and when I’m bombarded with requests for my time and knowing that I can maybe only do X number. I have to be careful about how I spend my days—like everyone else, just trying to find pockets for space where I’m taking a break. 

Wildes: Look, I teach at two law schools. I’m an EMT with Hatzalah, the Jewish volunteer ambulance service in Manhattan. I’m a mayor of a city in New Jersey, where I live. I have, thank God, 10 grandchildren. When you’re an owner of a practice, it’s a 24/7 endeavor. Whether I have five clients or 500 clients, I just have to make sure that I have good deputies and support so we can observe and help.

Why did you go into law? 

Axelrad: I decided to be a lawyer when I was 10. Before that, I wanted to be a writer. One day, we went to visit my older cousin, who lived in Hoboken. He was a writer. Hoboken in the early ’80s was not amazing. I looked around his place and I was like, “I don’t know if I want to be a writer.” I changed to lawyer because my family said I liked to argue.

Wildes: I loved my father [Leon Wildes, who helped John Lennon become a U.S. citizen]. He was my rock, my hero. I wanted to be like him. I carried his briefcase when I was 7. On Sundays, I would go into the office, where I’m still practicing, 515 Madison Avenue. “Come to the office,” Dad would say. Mom made kosher sandwiches. We’d go to the waterfall, half a block down, and sit there and unwrap these sandwiches—it took an hour and a half to open with the tin foil. At the end of the day, if I was a good boy, I’d get a law book. That was his way of bringing me into the practice.

Kim: I was pre-med initially but it didn’t work out. I ended up in Philly, where my younger brother was going to university. I was living with him and doing all kinds of jobs and ended up getting a job as a Korean interpreter. The title was “human relations specialist” with the city of Philadelphia’s human relations commission, in charge of investigating alleged discrimination and conflict resolution. They didn’t have an in-house examiner who could examine Korean. I worked there for a couple years. And that’s when I first thought about law school.

DeBellis Aviv: I was always drawn to a profession where I didn’t have to convince people that they needed my services. You go to an attorney knowing you need an attorney. I could just focus on doing the work. 

What are some of your big cases?

DeBellis Aviv: I was just having a call this morning on this case—a top music conductor, European. He’s living in the South, in the U.S. One of the benefactors of this orchestra contacted me and said, “Lauren, we need you to jump in immediately to save this guy, because he and his family live here and they’ll have to leave the country, and the orchestra will be without a conductor, and it’s a big mess.” You have someone who has a body of accomplishments, and when you talk to them, they’re just like any other dad or mom who wants their kids to stay in the same school and doesn’t want their lives disrupted. It becomes very basic. We were able to quickly take this on and fix it for this client.

Axelrad: My first asylum case, in 2000, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was so nervous. This girl had gone with her mother to the Ivory Coast before she came to the U.S. Under the law, she really didn’t have a claim anymore. I made the claim that she wasn’t safe in the Ivory Coast—she was a refugee there, and the Ivory Coast didn’t appreciate these refugees coming from the Congo. It took a really long time, but I successfully argued she was not “firmly resettled” in the Ivory Coast and met the exceptions in the bar to asylum. I was just so happy that I changed this girl’s life. She was a young adult by the time we were done. She had a partner. She had a kid.

Wildes: My dad’s most important client was Mr. Lennon, and I’ve had the privilege of continuing to represent Yoko Ono, our first lady Mrs. Trump and other wonderful entertainers and talent: Karim Benzema, Pelé, Sinéad O’Connor, Millie Bobby Brown. I represented President Trump’s immigration interests for many years: Trump models, Miss Universe, the Kushners. I understand the need to get rid of bad people in this country and the kind of porous borders that we had. It created a problem that needed to be controlled. But I feel he appointed bigots and not businessmen. And some of the things that he personally would be promoting aren’t getting done—mainly green cards for talent and onboarding foreign students into the workplace. It’s foolhardy to take the world’s smartest kids, educate them, and then compete against them.

Kim: There was a case involving a mother, her son and two daughters. The husband remained in South Korea, because he had a successful business there, but they wanted to send their kids to study in the U.S. There’s a program called EB-5, an investor immigrant visa. You get a green card by investing in a company or enterprise, and you have to prove, as a result of the investment, that you created 10 full-time jobs for U.S. workers. They qualified for that. When the kids were young, they settled in Northern California. They went to church, and someone there and another guy created a fraud scheme. It involved an INS supervisor, with two prominent community leaders within the Korean-American community. INS found out about it and put them all in deportation proceedings. … They were all innocent victims. Hundreds of South Korean nationals were placed in removal proceedings in San Francisco.

I reviewed their case. By now, the son was in law school, the oldest daughter married her boyfriend, who was a big corporate lawyer in Korea, and the younger daughter remained here. I did a motion to reopen with the Board of Immigration Appeals. I told them, “Look, the only way you can revive your case is reopening your deportation proceedings.” It’s a Hail Mary, because this case arises out of a very high-profile fraud case. Two brokers went to prison for four years. We got hundreds of petitions signed by community leaders to petition BIA to reopen that case.

I reached out to opposing counsel in San Francisco but she said it was out of her hands. But she was sympathetic. She called me back to say, “We’re not going to file any opposition. You can refile a motion to reopen.” I filed it and it was granted. I flew to San Francisco with the family. We had a final hearing and we won. They all got green cards. They’re all naturalized. Cases like that are really hard to win.

When did your own family arrive in the U.S.?

Wildes: Both sets of grandparents came through Ellis Island. There was a wonderful show on Fox Nation [What Made America Great in 2022], where I went down with Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News anchor and a tour guide, and I went through the different points where my grandparents came in—where there were medical tasks and legal tests and questions of financial liability. They were considered to be citizens by choice as opposed to citizens by chance. I found old correspondences, love letters, between my grandparents, who had been in Germany, and how they were fighting to keep their Yiddishkeit, their Jewish culture and faith, alive. One was trying to escape Hitler, and they traveled to Lichtenstein, where my mom was born, then immigrated to America. The other one was fighting to get a sukkah and a lulav and a cantor for a certain holiday [Sukkot] in a little coal mining town in America. I saw this beautiful kind of commonality. 

Kim: I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and my family immigrated to the U.S. in 1983. My family first settled in Lexington, Kentucky, because my father was pursuing a graduate degree at a seminary—he was a methodist minister. We only stayed in Lexington for three months, then we moved to Baltimore. I had to repeat 10th grade because of my English. My English was so poor, at the time, I wasn’t able to take the SAT. 

DeBellis Aviv: My great-grandparents are immigrants, from Italy and from Canada. On one side, third generation, on the other side, fourth generation.

Axelrad: My only grandparent not born here was my mother’s mother—my paternal grandmother, whom I was really close with. I thought she came from Russia but it was actually Ukraine. She arrived with my great grandmother and great uncle, May 10, 1921. I have her passport. She was 10 years old. 

How concerned are you about the rule of law? 

Kim: We’re still a country with one of the best judicial systems in the world. I’m still hopeful. As a student of human history, there’s always ups and downs, governments fall and a new government arises. We’ve had our lows in U.S. history, similar to what’s happening now, but we always came back. I believe we will eventually prevail and regain the original goals of our founders—go back to the Constitution, separation of powers, due process. We’ll regain those ideals.

DeBellis Aviv: I do think the judiciary is holding its own right now. But the more holes you poke into something, the more doubt you sow. If you don’t have the rule of law, then we just become a nation of chaos.

Wildes: My grandparents’ passports had the letter “J,” for Jews, and swastikas in front of them. And if that wasn’t insulting enough, they put the name Sarah before every female and Israel before every male in case you took the “J” off. So I have their passports with the “J” and the Sarah and all that stuff. That is my motivation in seeing that this country keeps the train on the right track.

Axelrad: I’m both very concerned and, at the same time, believe in the power of lawyers. At the beginning of Trump 2.0, it did feel like “Who would stand up when he was going after the law firms?” Some law firms capitulated. Then it stopped and people stood up. I’m concerned the threat is real, but I still have faith in lawyers and the public who know what is too extreme. We want a fair, safe immigration system, and not to hurt people who’ve come here who contribute so much to this country. I’m very grateful for anyone who wants to come here, and they still do, and we’re very lucky.