ICE raids and visa pauses: How CNY immigrants are navigating a changing system

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

Benjamin Vernon: Practicing immigration law now, I think, feels much more – it feels like playing a game that has no rulebook, and where the rules are constantly changing, and where the opponent is the one who’s constantly changing the rules and doesn’t even tell you that the rules have changed until after the fact.

Sara Oppenheimer: This is Coming to Cuse, a podcast about immigrating to the Salt City. I’m Sara Oppenheimer. We spoke to two immigration lawyers for this podcast. In this episode, you’ll hear from Benjamin Vernon. Benjamin leads the immigration program at the Hiscock Legal Aid Society. The nonprofit saw an uptick in cases after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a Nutrition Bar factory in Cato, New York. Benjamin explained the current administration’s changes to immigration law and the impact that has had on his life and career.

Vernon: I think one of my first exposures to immigration law was when I first moved to New York. I wasn’t licensed to practice in New York yet, so I just started volunteering at the refugee center in Utica. And I think the first day that I went there – back then they were doing once-a-month naturalization ceremonies at the federal courthouse in Utica. And it just so happened that that was the day, so I got to go down there and sit in on a naturalization ceremony. It was really great because it’s, you know, a lot of their clients were naturalizing and it just felt like such a joyous, wholesome experience for everybody who was there. Like, of course, all the people there who are getting sworn in were really into it and they had family and friends and everybody was sort of, I don’t know, it just felt like such an amazing little slice of life in there. So I think I still try to access that feeling when that happens.

Immigration law was one of the areas that really spoke to me because I think it allowed me to work with people in that way, in that direct way, and help them through these like challenging times, challenging processes in a way that really feels both filling to me but also feels like I can make a difference and help them in their lives.

We represent immigrants of all different types in doing both family-based and humanitarian applications for status, both affirmatively and in front of the immigration courts. That can be anything from applying for asylum before an immigration judge. It can be somebody who’s got a close family member or spouse who’s a U.S. citizen who wants to reunite with their family member. It could be applying for a work permit for somebody who’s eligible. It can be many different types of things.

The immigration system writ large, dysfunctional though it may be, sort of operated in a somewhat predictable way such that you could advise a client what you expected and almost every time that’s sort of how things would play out, both as far as what types of cases would be approved or denied and what types of evidence were required and things like that. I think because of all that it felt very manageable. It felt like OK, I can manage my time both as a professional but also so I have time for my personal life.

The reason that I found immigration law so attractive was that I could feel like I’m meeting this person, I’m getting to know this person. I’m asking this person to trust me and share important details about their life and their experience with me, sort of with the understanding that I’m going to be able to help them in some way. And so now that feeling is much less – it’s a lot harder to access that feeling because there are a lot more people that that we can’t help in the same way that we could before.

Probably the moment where it really became clear was around the time where there was the raid in Cato. I think up to that point, almost everybody we represented was out of custody, even if they were in court they were in the non-detained court, so they were just showing up to their court dates periodically and we’re helping them through either an asylum process or something else. I think the raids and then the wave of detentions that have followed, at least my sense was before that point, a couple of people were maybe being detained at ICE check ins, but it wasn’t a super widespread thing. It was really in the fall that the detentions really ramped up.

And so all of a sudden as an office, we’re having to really learn how to negotiate and navigate this other side of the immigration system, which really functions in many ways much differently or at least much more quickly than everything we’ve been doing before. You have to immediately try to track this person down using ICE databases, which are unreliable. Are they still in New York? Are they in Louisiana? Are they in Arizona? So you’re trying to track them down and set up video meetings with them.

And so we’re just having to learn all of this on the fly because until that point very few if any of our clients were detained. It’s really had a profound impact on almost every aspect of the work that we do. And it even touches on the work that we’re doing for people who are not currently detained. It’s really writ large across the practice, it has altered our processes and our systems and almost everything that we do.

It’s very stressful and sad for the reasons I mentioned before, whereas because you have people who you know you should be able to help, but because of the way that the system is processing cases or deciding not to process cases and fast-tracking certain types of cases, ultimately they lose out on the opportunity to actually have their case heard, to actually apply for the green card or have somebody process that application for a green card before they’re ordered deported.

And even if it doesn’t necessarily change the affirmative steps that we take in a case, it profoundly changes the relationship that you have with the client and the way that you communicate with the client and just the emotional weight of all the conversations and decisions you make.

And I think for me that makes me feel sad both on a personal level but then also just thinking of the impacts that that’s having on my clients, our clients, who at least for me personally can’t help but establish some sort of emotional connection to, relationship with, because you are asking them to trust you so much. When I feel like I can’t repay that trust with the outcome or the benefit that I would hope for, yeah, it makes me pretty sad.

I mean, I reassure myself that I think there’s is still value in showing up and being there for people even though you can’t really help them achieve the outcome you hope. And I think that still has value. But I think for me it’s just a little bit more of a process to really access that value and internalize that feeling when you’re seeing on the flip side of that, like the fear and the suffering that folks are going through. I have my own strategies for trying not to catastrophize or focus too hard on things that I can’t control. I think it’s mostly just trying to recognize when I’m doing that and sort of acknowledge that I’m doing that and try to give yourself a little grace every now and then. I think one, it’s sort of redefining what success means, where in some cases success is we got this person out of custody. They’re no longer detained; they’re reunited with their family. At the end of the process they might still get deported, but getting them out of custody in the meantime, that is a success, even if at the end of the process maybe things don’t work out the way they hoped or wanted.

I mean, I still – I love working with clients. And I love getting to know people and talking to them and building that relationship and that rapport and that trust, and even if I can’t help sort of deliver a good outcome for them, I know that it is meaningful to our clients that there was somebody there with them. Even if things go sideways and something terrible happens and things don’t turn out like we wanted to, I know that there is great value that they had somebody standing there with them when that happened.

But there are still green cards getting approved. There are still work permits getting approved. There are still different types of benefits that are getting approved. It’s just that they happened less frequently than they did before. I think you just appreciate those moments all the more because they’re just a little sweeter when you have to work a little bit harder for them or wait a little bit longer.

Oppenheimer: Coming to Cuse is a production of students at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. This episode was reported by Sara Oppenheimer and Luisana Ortiz and produced by Sara Oppenheimer.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity

Jose Perez: Describing how to be an immigration lawyer in one word, I would say: challenging.

Luisana Ortiz: This is Coming to Cuse, a podcast about immigrating to the Salt City. I’m Luisana Ortiz. We spoke to two immigration lawyers for this podcast. In this episode, you’ll hear from Jose Perez. Perez graduated from Syracuse University’s law school in 2007. Now, he is an immigration lawyer with offices in Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo. Jose discussed how the current administration’s changes to immigration law affect him, as a lawyer and as someone with an immigrant’s perspective.

Perez: I am of Venezuelan descent. I was born in Ithaca when my father went to Cornell, but I never spoke the language because I went back to Venezuela when I was 1 year old. I was already a lawyer in Venezuela when I came to the United States in 2002. And when I brought my wife here, I tried to apply for her green card. And we were in Ithaca and we couldn’t find a lawyer that spoke Spanish. Then we came to Syracuse, nothing. Rochester, nothing. We had to go to New York City, pay a lawyer $500 an hour, just get a consultation. That’s when I said, “If I do go to law school here, I’ve got to be a lawyer for immigration.” I represent people in the whole country. I think I have clients in 32 states.

We have an administration that has lost empathy, that has lost any type of humanitarian part of it. The administration has successfully created panic in the community. They have successfully instilled fear in the community. We have clients that cannot go to school. We have clients that cannot go to the grocery store. We have clients that actually don’t even want to come to my office to see me because they’re afraid of being detained by ICE. And not only that, but the reality is that the government is detaining people in court. They are detaining people in ICE check-ins. They are detaining people when they go to the biometrics.

So that requires also to change also those types of things. To change, for instance, that they cannot go to court, so we should request a WebEx motion so that we are appearing virtual with a judge and the client. I mean, we have a lot of adjustments because of the fear and the panic that the government has created.

So I just sleep probably three or four hours a day. That’s what I sleep. And my day starts at 7 in the morning when my daughter goes to school. Then I start court at 7:45. We finish court or I finish court around 4 p.m. Then I start interviews and consultations at 5, 5 to 9. Then I go home, have dinner with my wife, which I finally see her after 12 hours every day. Then I start texting from 10 to 1 in the morning, then I do emails from 1 to 3 in the morning. Uh, emails and, you know, review of documents and filings and stuff like that. So then I go to sleep 3:30 in the morning to 7 a.m. And then that’s what I do every single day.

It’s kind of funny because sometimes people get a text from me at 1 in the morning and say like, “Jose, what the hell? I was sleeping.” Well, this is the time that I was able to do it. What do you prefer that I don’t get back to you? You know, I can’t choose when I’m going to be texting you because this is the time that I can respond. I mean, like, I can show you right now: 6,240 texts in the last week. Humanly, I cannot do it anymore.

Being an immigrant, but at the same time, dealing with the immigration law has been very frustrating in the last couple of months. I have been thinking that I may be facing the same type of situation at some point. Because as you can see, I speak with a thick accent. I look Latino. And is that going to happen to me at some point? I believe it will. And I have I talked to my kids about happening to that to them as well? Yes, I have.

That’s the reality of what we’re living in right now. I have a client that was detained after 22 days of having to give birth to a baby, and she’s in detention with her baby right now. I mean, can you put an ankle monitoring this lady and send her home? They can do that. Why are you going to have a person with a 21-day born baby in jail? You know, I have not seen that in 18 years of practice.

Me being an immigrant myself, seeing that, having my family being immigrants that are subject to the same policies that we see every day on TV, that I live every day with my clients here, is very frustrating because now I know that it’s happening to me as well. You know, then after I do everything that we need to do, 11 p.m., I have my family calling. You know, “I have this, I have that, I have this issue.” I have been with 20 clients already with the same situation.

As I said, it’s very frustrating just because what you used to tell clients, you cannot tell those clients those the same things anymore. If you tell me that Trump is going to stay after 2029 as he wants to be, I think I will have to stop my immigration practice. I cannot continue practicing immigration when we tell clients don’t open the door and they smash the door. We tell clients go to your appointment and they get arrested. You know, so I take it a day at a time.

What keeps me going is to know that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s important to keep in mind that we have been able to challenge part of the administration’s policies, part of the administration’s detentions. I have seen successful stories in my firm in this year in the last two months. I won an asylum claim of a gay person from Venezuela. We have not seen a lot of asylum being, you know, granted after Trump fired all the judges that were granting asylums.

And I have a couple also they have a gap difference in age – 40, 20 – and we were able to get them the green card for the female client after notice of intent to deny. And we have also citizen that had been denied three times citizenship and we took the case and we were able to have him become a citizen. So yeah, we continue to strive. As I said, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think we can always see that light.

To be able to have that American dream accomplished at least with papers, at least with the dream of being stable, it means a lot. It means that we were able to deliver what I went to law school for, you know, like to be able to make them happy to be legally here, then that completes my part.

Ortiz: Coming to Cuse is a production of students at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. This episode was reported by Luisana Ortiz and Sara Oppenheimer and produced by Luisana Ortiz.