Immigration lawyer: ‘Passion isn’t enough anymore’

NEW BEDFORD — Ondine Gálvez Sniffin typed frenetically as a Latin jazz track played in the background, the staccato of the keys adding to the controlled chaos in her office.

As she reviewed the regular list of questions with a client, a phone call interrupted the conversation.

“Somebody that just got picked up today?” she asked. “Is he our client?”

He wasn’t. The Guatemalan man’s wife, who is Sniffin’s client, reported his detention. 

“There’s nothing we can do for him,” she said. “If he has a removal order, he’s not even going to go before a judge.”

The call was one of hundreds she has received since President Donald Trump launched a mass deportation campaign earlier this year that has nabbed almost 60 people in and from the Greater New Bedford area. 

The Trump administration’s myriad rapid-fire changes to immigration law and policy have led immigrants to inundate immigration attorneys with potential cases, leaving the lawyers struggling to keep up, according to several who spoke to The Light. 

In addition to the pressures on immigration judges nationally to tow the administration’s line on immigration, it has created a pressure cooker for lawyers and their clients that many feel trapped in.

Sniffin hung up the phone and sighed before returning to the client before her. 

“Passion isn’t enough anymore.”

More cases, fewer lawyers

The number of immigration lawyers in Massachusetts has always been low relative to the number of immigrants here. 

Massachusetts has more than 1.2 million foreign-born residents, according to the American Immigration Council, or slightly over 18% of the state’s population. Though no complete database of immigration lawyers exists statewide, the directory of the American Immigration Lawyers Association lists 113 in the commonwealth.

“There’s always been a shortage of immigration lawyers to meet the demand of the population that’s out there,” said Ragini Shah, a clinical professor of law at Suffolk University and faculty director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic. “The difference right now is you’re seeing a lot of people who would not have sought out legal help seeking out legal help.”

At least five immigration attorneys have offices in New Bedford, a city where over one-fifth of residents are foreign-born. That’s not enough to ensure that all immigrants in the area have access to counsel nearby, according to advocates. 

“There’ve never been enough pro bono attorneys,” said Helena DaSilva Hughes, president of the Immigrants’ Assistance Center. “Now that immigration is a hot button issue, they’re overwhelmed.”

Some lawyers have stopped taking on cases with detained clients. That’s because the Board of Immigration Appeals nearly eliminated bond hearings in two decisions this year, the Matter of Q. Li and the Matter of Yajure-Hurtado. Among the lawyers refusing detainee cases is Deborah González, an East Providence-based immigration attorney and director of the Roger Williams University Immigration Clinic in Bristol. 

“It’s a tremendous amount of work for a low chance of winning,” she said. 

Another change is about to hit both attorneys and clients hard. In July, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that, as a result of the One Big Beautiful Act, it would only be allowing payment for filing fees through bank transfers or credit cards, not checks or money orders, a policy set to go into effect on Oct. 28.

“Do you know how many clients have a bank account?” González said. “A lot of this is punitive.”

Immigration attorneys in Rhode Island, whom many New Bedford residents hire for legal counsel, deal with the same pressures as those in Massachusetts, she said: too few for too many people in need.

“In Rhode Island, the number of lawyers who do this work and know what they’re doing, there are very few of us in the state,” she said. “All of us are overworked.”

There are only seven immigration attorneys in R.I. listed in the AILA directory. According to the American Immigration Council, there were 160,000 immigrant residents in the state in 2023, almost 15% of its population.

Lucy Pineda, founder and director of Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts, an Everett-based advocacy organization, said their communities have noticed their diminished chances in immigration court.

“In the majority of cases we’ve seen, it ends the same whether they have a lawyer or not,” she said. “If immigration wants to take them, they’re going to take them.

“So why spend the money on a lawyer if they can’t do anything?”

DaSilva Hughes said that she still sees families looking for representation, but that the deluge of cases lawyers are experiencing make a previously difficult task near-impossible.

“People get frustrated and it’s taking so long,” she said. “We’ve always had a challenge, but right now, with the waiting periods, it’s just becoming harder and harder to find them.”

Sniffin said the system seems rigged to hurt attorneys and clients. She said she’s noticed a paradox of more people expressing interest in services but her having to turn them away due to the numerous hurdles being thrown up by the administration. 

“In the beginning there were a lot of detained cases, and they were current clients that had suddenly become detained,” she said. “In the past couple of months I’ve seen a downturn in clients coming.”

She said the onslaught of policy changes coming from the administration and ICE’s continued aggressive tactics have left people scared to even approach lawyers for services. 

“That’s what this administration has done,” she said. “It has taken the wind out of our sails.”

Despite the financial pressures she feels — making payroll, paying the mortgage on her office — she still feels an ethical obligation to be honest with her clients. 

“I’m very open with my clients, and say ‘look, this is what I can do for this much. But your likelihood for success is this much,’” she said.

González, at the Roger Williams clinic, said getting attorneys for clients in previous years, while it still took time, was not the Sisyphean task it is today.

“In terms of clients coming to see me [in my private practice], that hasn’t gone down,” she said. “But the obstacles put up by the administration have really made this practice miserable from a lawyer’s standpoint.”

Those chances of success have hit lawyers hard mentally.

“It really has you depressed and sad that you want to help people and the law says you can,” she said. “Yet [immigration] judges are being coerced to do things certain ways.”

“It’s almost like I’m in high school again,” she said, “but with the federal government.”

Immigration judges under siege

The downsizing of the immigration judge force since Trump’s return to office has also impacted practice. At the Chelmsford Immigration Court, until recently the largest in New England, the number of immigration judges dropped from 20 in January to five, despite a large immigration court backlog.

“The current policy has chosen to attack the immigration judges and the immigration courts and it has undermined fair hearings and due process,” said George Pappas, a former immigration judge in Chelmsford who received a pink slip on July 11. “We had seen firings before but nothing to the scale we started to see in February.”

Pappas, who returned to private practice in Asheville, North Carolina, after the Department of Justice fired him, said that the year began with 700 immigration judges nationwide and has since fallen to around 600. And there is a pattern to it.

He said that the judges that were let go were coming up on the end of their two-year probation terms, and did not appear to be fired for their performance on the bench.

“In April there were eight or nine fired nationally,” said Pappas. He said three of those who hit the end of their probationary period in Chelmsford were let go. Only one, a former attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, was retained.

“The three that were fired had private practice experience or advocating for immigrants,” he said. “The judges were fired not based on what they did on the bench but what they did before they were there.”

He added that he was expected to close out 700 cases annually as an immigration judge and closed 2000 cases during his tenure. According to data from Transactional Record Clearing House, he heard 117 asylum cases between fiscal 2019 and 2024 and denied asylum in over 76% of cases.

“What’s ironic in my case is I had one of the higher denial rates in 2024,” Pappas said. “If they were actually looking at statistics I wouldn’t be fired.”

He said the Trump administration’s actions reinforce the perception that immigration courts are no longer impartial.  He said an example is the administration’s recent decision to eliminate immigration law experience as a requirement for a temporary immigration judge position, arguing such requirements make it difficult to tackle the case backlog. The DOJ recently started training military lawyers as temporary immigration judges.

“We were terminated clearly based on partisan affiliation,” Pappas said. “The policy decisions coming from Falls Church (in Virginia, where the BIA is based) were there to pressure judges and intimidate judges.

“I was told to grant the motions to dismiss if granted by DHS,” he continued. “I refused because it was a violation of the Constitution and due process.”

He added that since he has returned to private practice he has noticed the impact of the immigration court system’s changes on attorneys.

“Unlike before January we have to navigate a bunch of administrative changes,” he said. “Just paying fees has become a major learning curve.”

He added the federal government also seems to have taken aim at immigration attorneys, such as when agents seized the phone of Chelsea-based attorney Andrew G. Lattarulo upon his return from vacation at Logan Airport on Sept. 28.

“It sends chills to the people who are doing the job the right way,” he said.

Trying to keep up

The federal government’s shifting priorities have also forced lawyers to learn new skills, such as the use of habeas corpus petitions.

“When you have ICE transferring people from facility to facility, different jails across the country, it makes it even harder for that person to get into contact with their immigration attorney,” said Heather Arroyo, an immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. 

“But that’s not enough now, because of the way DHS is taking positions contrary to the law.”

“It’s a brilliant move,” said Pappas. 

He added that since Attorney General Pam Bondi fired nine Biden-appointed members of the then-28-member Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest immigration court has become a rubber stamp for the administration’s whims. In April, she reduced the BIA’s membership from 28 to 15. This is what enables decisions such as Yajure-Hurtado to tie the hands of immigration judges further down the line. This leaves federal district courts as the only way for lawyers to get their clients out of detention.

“Virtually every single [habeas petition] that has been filed nationally has been granted,” Pappas said. “Federal courts are saying this is total BS.”

González said she constantly feels gaslighted by the federal government, with policy changes happening swiftly and without warning.

“It’s like somebody in a newspaper writing something in Chinese and they’re telling you it’s in English,” she said. “I go and read a statute and see: My interpretation is right. But the federal government is telling us otherwise and it’s infuriating.” 

Arroyo pointed out that swift transfers of detainees — such as New Bedford asylee and resident Pascual Cuin González, who was transferred between prisons in Burlington, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; and Pine Prairie, Louisiana in a single week before the federal government released him — make it more difficult for immigration attorneys to understand procedural rules for an appropriate jurisdiction and to stay in communication with their client.

“It’s requiring immigration attorneys to have a robust practice in federal court to protect immigrants’ rights and challenge the unlawful behavior of ICE and DHS,” she said. “A lot of immigration attorneys have recognized the need to get the training to represent people in federal court because that’s the only way to defend their rights.”

Despite the increased demand, some lawyers, such as Sniffin, said they’re making less income because of the clients they’ve had to turn away.

Self-care

Sniffin said that she and her employees feel under siege mentally and are taking steps to mitigate that. She said she recently enrolled her employees in a trauma workshop through AILA to learn how to cope with the effects of the intense experiences they encounter daily. 

“In the past, there used to be ethics seminars, but now it’s vicarious trauma,” she said. “It’s very hard to keep going forward in this storm of illegality and unfairness.” 

“As much passion as we have, it’s very hard to keep going.”

She added that the stress has impacted her physical health and she is now finding it difficult to get to sleep some nights.

“I used to brag that I could fall asleep at the drop of a hat,” she said. “Now I still fall asleep exhausted but I wake up after four hours and I can’t go back to sleep.”

“I was running at 4 a.m. the other day because I couldn’t sleep.”

She added that she has also returned to literature as a source of escape.

“I need some fantasy,” she said. “I need a fairy tale. I need something.”

She added she is learning more about habeas corpus to better help clients. She is also expanding into criminal and family law to diversify her income streams. 

González said she has also felt the pressures of shifting priorities in the immigration system.

“I find myself having a lot of anxiety,” she said. “Every night I pray: ‘Dear Lord, tell me how we’re doing.’

“I workout daily and find myself needing to work out more.”

Immigration lawyers are also reaching out to each other as a way to combat the stress. They said they schedule get-togethers, where they empathize and share strategies.

“We commiserate,” said González. “How do we feel? Etc. And we all try to end on a positive note.” 

She said that is a sign of the intensity of the moment.

“A group of lawyers who are busy take time to meet,” González said. “That says something, that the community is coming together because things feel so bad, so un-American, that you need to find community.”

Sniffin said if there is one upside to the tumult, it is that Americans are taking a new interest in immigration law. 

“I’ve been doing immigration law for 30 years now and I never felt like it was mainstream until the last 10 years or so,” she said. 

Sniffin, who also teaches asylum and refugee law at Roger Williams University Law School, said interest in her class has been increasing. And recently, an anonymous donor sent her office a large check to spend at her discretion.

That sense of community beyond the legal world, Sniffin said, including natural-born U.S. citizens with little reason to fear ICE detention or deportation, gets her to the office daily.

“To see that there are other people who have no skin in the game, seeing them fight for us when everything was going on with Juan Francisco [Méndez],” she said. “I need to feel supported, and I do.”

Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.