Masked ICE agents are only the start of the assault on government transparency. Now, government attorneys that are arguing to deport immigrants are doing so in secret.
The Intercept reports on two separate instances immigration judges in New York City declined to identify the government attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the first case Judge ShaSha Xu said, “We’re not really doing names publicly.” But that’s not really true. Because she *did* ID the immigrants before her in court and their lawyers. It was only the government attorney that operated anonymously — in contravention of every custom of the legal profession.
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The attorneys arguing against the nameless agent of the government, Jeffrey Okun and Hugo Gonzalez Venegas in separate cases, were shocked by the development. Okun called it “bizarre” and Gonzalez Venegas said it was “a terrible lack of transparency on the part of officers of the court.”
The identity of the government attorney was revealed to the attorneys through private messaging. And Gonzalez Venegas identified her as Cosette Shachno.
Judge James McCarthy was also spotted declining to identify government ICE attorneys on the record, instead using the dystopian moniker “Department” in open court.
And it could even get worse:
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“This is a very new and very disturbing turn of events,” said Daniel Kowalski, a former longtime immigration attorney who now edits the legal journal Bender’s Immigration Bulletin for LexisNexis.
“Where does it stop?” asked Kowalski. “Are the immigration judges going to be unnamed? Behind a screen?”
According to another immigration judge, Shirley Lazare-Raphael, there is no formal policy directing judges to anonymize ICE attorneys on the record. “It’s up to the judges whether or not they want to do it,” she said. She also noted some ICE attorneys believe it’s “dangerous to state their names publicly.” Cue the eye rolls. That’s the same tired excuse ICE agents are using to conduct masked raids, when really it’s being identified with the controversial and harmful “mass deportations” of the Trump administration that’s the issue.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].