Amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, these future lawyers are undeterred

None of the people in the virtual courtroom had attorneys to represent them. All they had was David de Alva, an aspiring immigration lawyer who decided to bear witness to a world upended by the Trump administration.

Over the course of an hour, roughly a dozen immigrants held in a Louisiana detention center each got about five minutes before a judge for a preliminary hearing. The judge encouraged some to leave the country voluntarily while he ordered others deported against their will, according to de Alva.

“It was heartbreaking,” said de Alva, 30, a second-year law student at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, one of two law schools in Baltimore regarded nationally for their immigration programs.

Immigration law has long held a reputation for being more complicated than it is financially lucrative. People fleeing persecution and seeking asylum often can’t pay the hourly rate that corporations can afford to oversee mergers and acquisitions. From criminal procedure to labor and civil rights, its intersections with other fields of law means attorneys are constantly adapting.

Now, they need to adapt perhaps more than ever, as President Donald Trump’s second term has transformed the immigration landscape.

In just about 15 months, administration officials have largely shut down efforts to welcome refugees and asylum seekers, paused visa and residency applications for people from dozens of countries, supercharged immigrant arrests and challenged the constitutional right to citizenship in court.

But even as those seismic changes are pushing some attorneys to the brink of burnout, they’re also inspiring a new wave of bright-eyed law students to jump into the fray. Some want to work in the field in pursuit of social justice, and for others, inspiration comes from their family immigration history. For de Alva, it’s a bit of both.

One of the men in the virtual courtroom expressed a fear of returning to his native Cuba, de Alva said. The judge gave him two weeks to come back with a completed asylum application. But that’s something that in a complicated case could take months for an experienced attorney to flesh out with hundreds of pages of personal and government documents.

“It was an unfortunate joke of justice,” de Alva said.

Fanglin Ding, one of de Alva’s classmates, said he’s also pursuing a law career because he wants to help people. His interest in the field started largely as an academic exercise, but after volunteering as a mentor to a family of Afghan refugees, he discovered a deeper purpose.

“There are enough lawyers to fill the shoes of whoever big companies want to hire,” he said.

Ding and de Alva are enrolled in UMD’s immigration clinic, a course that gives students a chance to work on real cases under attorney supervision. The clinic typically handles humanitarian cases — everything from asylum petitions to citizenship applications.

“Students are really understanding the historical moment of the circumstances we find ourselves in right now,” said Cori Alonso-Yoder, the clinic‘s professor at UMD.

The letter of immigration law has changed little in recent decades, but under Trump, its interpretation and administration have been drastically altered.

Trump slashed discretionary programs granting legal permission to enter or remain in the U.S. that former President Joe Biden had expanded. Some experts say they’ve watched the Board of Immigration Appeals morph from an apolitical appellate body into another arm of the Trump administration, issuing decisions subjecting more people to detention or preventing them from closing their cases. And the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency now has a robust budget to go after many noncriminal immigrants that were largely off the radar of earlier administrations.

But as they watch the changes in real time, many of the students feel law school is the perfect place to be. They say some of the area’s best legal minds are teaching their courses or have office hours just down the hall from the classroom.

“I’m being trained at a time when the law is really being stretched,” said Pamela Cardoso, a third-year student at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She chose UB in part based on the reputation for its immigration program and a chance to study under Associate Dean Elizabeth Keyes, a leading expert in asylum law.

Madelyn Snider, a second-year student at UMD, said it was a powerful experience to learn first in the classroom about how the immigration law system is supposed to work and then going into the real world to “see in practice the system not working.”

The historical moment is personal for some. De Alva, Ding, Cardoso and some of their other classmates say they were partly inspired by the journeys of their immigrant families.

Earlier this year, Cardoso attended the U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments over birthright citizenship, which the Trump administration has moved to end.

It “hit home,” she said, because she is a first-generation citizen.

But she believes that the personal connection will make her a better advocate for her clients. Cardoso said she’ll lean on that history during an upcoming law firm clerkship where she’ll likely handle everything from asylum applications to writs of habeas corpus, which are increasingly used to keep clients out of detention.

Not every student feels the same calling. Law professors say some considered the immigration field but turned away, fearing that working with immigrants could limit future job prospects in government. Others are worried about the emotional toll of handling difficult cases with vulnerable clients.

But then there are those who are committed. De Alva, an immigrant himself and a former member of the U.S. military, wants his career to focus on the intersection of criminal and immigration law, a burgeoning field dubbed “crimmigration.”

Snider hopes to get hired by a nonprofit organization, be it back home in Michigan or elsewhere, and work on humanitarian cases.

And there will be more students that follow in their footsteps. Alonso-Yoder said UMD’s clinic already has a waitlist for both semesters next year.