Holding On To Hope

One Sunday in June, word spread via social media that ICE officers were seen on the streets in an Oklahoma City neighborhood with a large Latino population.

Neighbors tried to keep ahead of the officers, tracking and posting their movements in real time as best they could, but many vulnerable people chose to stay home. The local soccer club canceled its games. Children were kept indoors. Grocery store runs and children’s play dates were put on hold.

Tara Jordan de Lara, executive director of Latitude Legal Alliance, a nonprofit committed to providing quality immigration legal services for little or no charge, is one of the local attorneys trying to stay on top of these incidents.“There’s been a big uptick [in ICE activity] in the last three weeks and we don’t know why,” she says. “We can infer it’s because of the updated mandate of 2,000 arrests a day. Regardless, we do know it’s definitely affecting people’s lives.”

It is also changing the way lawyers have to work. Elissa Stiles, senior lead attorney at Rivas & Associates, says that as recently as a year ago, she was spending most of her days representing clients in immigration court. She now spends the bulk of her time writing—on any given day, she has about 75 habeas petitions pending and an equal number of cases before the Board of Immigration Appeals. She has started working in the Court of Appeals, filed her first mandamus suits this year to compel government agencies to act on stalled immigration applications, and is wondering how she can use a 1983 civil rights law to challenge her clients’ conditions of confinement.

“We’re no longer just immigration lawyers,” Stiles says. “A lot of us are being pushed because that’s what our clients need. We’re having to learn brand new systems and case types.”

She and other immigration lawyers also need to stay attuned to changing precedents and enforcement policies. The Board of Immigration Appeals used to issue new precedent decisions—ones that determine issues like the legal definition of hardship or the requirement for seeking asylum—a few times a month, Stiles says.

Now, “we are getting an average of one every other day, and every single one of them, for months now, has been very clearly trying to make it harder to win status and harder to avoid a deportation order,” Stiles says. “There could be a new decision while I’m in court that changes the interpretation [of the law I’m currently arguing].”

Jordan de Lara says the new norms mean that even allegedly settled cases, like those of individuals with green cards, are at risk of being reopened, redefined and readjudicated.

“If you had asked me a few years ago if [a green card holder] is at risk of something happening, I would have said no. Once you have your green card, that means the U.S. government has decided that you get to be a permanent legal resident. You can eventually apply for citizenship and, if you pass an English proficiency test, that was that,” she says.

“Now I’m not so sure.”

“It feels so out of control sometimes.”

While federal immigration activity has made the biggest headlines in states like Texas and Minnesota, immigration-related arrests and detention have risen throughout the nation.

Oklahoma is the home state of Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin. In June, President Trump nominated former Oklahoma Highway Patrol Chief Richard “Lance” Schroyer to be the next director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Schroyer, who hadn’t yet been confirmed by the state at press time, was praised by President Trump for promoting and expanding the 287(g) agreements between ICE and other safety agencies. The agreement allows officers and others in these agencies to carry out immigration enforcement on behalf of ICE. More than 90 Oklahoma agencies, including small town police departments, had signed on as of July 24.

Jordan de Lara says these agreements have increased the number of arrests and detentions, encouraging profiling based on skin color and accent. Less talked about, she adds, is how the process has been normalized under the Trump administration and how these superficial characteristics are used to justify investigation. “After a [car] accident, that’s the excuse to investigate a person’s status,” she says. “Once police arrive on scene, they’re profiling and calling immigration.”

Both Stiles and Jordan de Lara share painful stories of families divided and people detained indefinitely. The court system is currently overwhelmed with a record number of habeas cases. In January 2025, 61 suits were filed on behalf of someone challenging their detention, according to figures collected by ProPublica. A year later, in January 2026, more than 6,600 petitions were filed.

That means there’s a long wait time before there can be a coveted bond hearing. But those bond hearings are often not the end of the story.

One of Stiles’ clients, a man in his 40s from Mexico, has been in ICE detention for a year. He is married to a U.S. citizen and has two children who are U.S. citizens. During his bond hearing, lawyers for the government alleged that the man was possibly violent, but presented no evidence. “The immigration judge just ate it up and denied bond,” Stiles says. “We thought we were going to win that bond because he had no negative factors.”

Stiles then filed a cancellation of removal claim, which was also denied.

“The judge had essentially just predetermined that he wasn’t eligible to win and he was denied a full hearing,” Stiles says. “It feels so out of control at times. If this case had been heard 18 months ago, I am certain that the outcome would have been different. We’re just dealing with daily changes and due process violations.”

One of Jordan de Lara’s clients, a Venezuelan chef in his 30s, opted to take advantage of the Customs and Border Protection program that allows individuals to self-deport, promising a flight and cash to start anew.

When the client was scheduled for a routine immigration check in another state, Jordan de Lara warned him that he was likely to be detained. The man, thinking he’d be given an opportunity to facilitate his departure as he’d opted to self-deport, said that was OK. Before he was taken away, as Jordan de Lara gave her client a quick hug, she noticed the enforcement official looking at her “with a sort of a disgust on her face.”

And then the man was swallowed by the system. Jordan de Lara was able to follow his movements around the country using an online resource, noting he was moved to facilities known for dire conditions. One day, when the man’s name wasn’t on the online system, Jordan de Lara worried officials had seen the man’s tattoos and wrongly connected him to a gang.

“There was this mental anguish of wondering whether he was going to be removed to the Salvadoran prison, just this huge amount of anxiety,” recalls Jordan de Lara.

His name never reappeared, but after he spent more than six weeks in detention, Jordan de Lara eventually heard what happened from his family. “He was deported, and with basically nothing, so he had to pawn his tennis shoes to make an international phone call to his family,” she says.

“He’s safe in a third country. He started his own restaurant and is living his chef dreams in a different way than he had hoped,” she says. “But he’s safe, and he doesn’t have the same daily stress and anxiety of being misperceived and sent to a Salvadoran prison.”

“There’s so much fear.”

Every month, Jordan de Lara’s nonprofit holds a clinic open to anyone who has questions about their rights, their immigration status or the status of others. The nonprofit agency rarely has the time or resources to represent someone who is already in detention, so they may recommend a family retain an outside immigration lawyer. Sometimes people just want to know what to do if they encounter ICE.

The hardest part, she says, is giving accurate advice when policies are constantly changing. “We as attorneys rely on statutes, but we also have to provide lots of caveats. ‘Here’s the law, and here’s how it’s been applied in the past, but here’s what we’re seeing now,’” she says. “A lot of the time we’re highlighting trends and giving the best next-step advice that we can. But we pivot a lot. This week alone we’ve had to make several adjustments for our client base. We just received an interview notice for a refugee who applied for their green card. We’ve never had refugee adjustment interviews before, nor is it part of USCIS procedure. But it is now.”

Jordan de Lara says she delivers bad news in about 60% of the cases that she hears during clinics.
“In some cases, where it doesn’t look like [the clients] have long-term relief, it’s probably not worth them paying for an attorney,” she says. “They might as well save their money and help them get started once they’re removed from the U.S. It’s very hard news to give, but sometimes it’s the news that gives people clarity about their situation.”

While Jordan de Lara has not handled cases involving naturalized citizens being stripped of their citizenship, numbers are rising. In 2025, the government took action against eight naturalized citizens. Halfway through 2026, it had filed about 40 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“There’s so much fear at this point,” she says. “But generally, people should not be fearful of losing citizenship unless there was a mistake or a misunderstanding or misrepresentation on their initial application.”

Stiles’ workload is heavy with matters on behalf of detainees, and she’s visited them in facilities around the country, including one of the three facilities in Oklahoma. One occupies the former Tulsa County jail and takes in about 160-180 detainees per month, according to information the sheriff’s office provided to local news station KOTV. The federal government pays the sheriff’s office $118 per person per night.
How the facilities use that money is unknown. Stiles visited the Camp East Montana facility near El Paso made up of temporary buildings with tarp roofs. “I can’t imagine how they regulate the temperature, when it’s very cold at night and very hot during the day,” she says. “I could taste the sand in my mouth, even inside.”

Stiles knows of facilities that serve rancid meat, that delay distribution of medicines and medical care, that have accusations of sexual assault from guards. Reports of maltreatment are rampant, such as detainees’ extended periods in chains on the ankles and wrists that chafe, as the centers overcrowd.
The administration claims that the individuals being detained are “the worst of the worst.” But Stiles is representing, among others, a mother and her adult daughter who were taken into custody during a routine immigration check-in at the beginning of the year and are now being held in Texas. “It’s people who are squeaky clean,” she says, “and who have U.S. citizens who rely on them. Those are the people we’re seeing in detention.”

Still, attorneys are eking out success stories. In June, Stiles won a habeas case on behalf of a client whose child was born soon after he was taken into custody. The man was released from ICE custody when the government didn’t hold a bond hearing within seven days, and he was reunited with his wife and met his newborn baby for the first time. “That is giving me lots of joy and hope today,” she says.

Hope, she adds, “is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and I don’t want to give that up.

“Things may be dark right now, but we continue to win habeas cases, we’re still winning some bonds, we’re still winning cases in immigration court, and when we don’t, we have appeals,” she says. “I still have hope there’s good in the system. It’s just taking a long time.”

Jordan de Lara, too, uses hope to describe perseverance in the face of ongoing hardships.

“My level of hope is unshakable because it’s not based on our day-to-day wins or policies or disruptions and changes. It’s still there, though it sometimes feels deeply buried,” she says. “I hold on to the hope that we can still do good work and make progress when it’s difficult. I think trying to win and celebrate the small moments of dignity that we can offer our clients is what’s going to get us through.”