As the Trump administration carries out a mass deportation campaign, with summary arrests inside courthouses and armed agents detaining people on streets across the country, immigration attorneys on the front lines of opposing the administration's actions are facing new levels of mental strain.

Being an immigration attorney has always meant shouldering a heavy burden. But at a time when increased demand and shifting enforcement norms are making it harder for people in the immigration court system to even find lawyers, the elevated levels of stress and burnout are driving some immigration attorneys from the profession, attorneys said in interviews.

Reached for comment, the Trump administration responded that immigrants — and their attorneys — deserve no sympathy.

"The Trump administration is simply enforcing the law and fulfilling the promise the president made to the American people to deport criminal illegal aliens," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email. "The criminal illegal aliens being lawfully removed from the country are not victims, nor are the attorneys working for them."

The statement that the administration is only deporting "criminal illegal aliens" is false. Seventy-four percent of immigrants in detention in November had no criminal convictions, according to government records collected and released by the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Five attorneys explained to Law360 how this new normal is impacting their practices and their mental health.

Burnout at a Michigan Nonprofit

The Trump administration's ongoing portrayal of immigrants as awful people is one of the painful aspects of working as an immigration attorney at the current moment, Susan Reed, director of the statewide nonprofit Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, told Law360 in a September interview.

"Just talking to people who are so vilified and so demonized, but who you know to be very ordinary, fine people just like you, just like your own family," she said, "and feel the weight of the hostility and persecution every single day, and feel that what you can do for them, while very, very important in this moment, is becoming more and more limited."



The Trump administration has cut funding for specific programs to help defend immigrants in court. Funding cuts are a major factor that caused the lawyer count at the Michigan nonprofit to drop from about 50 attorneys in January to 27 attorneys in September, Reed noted.

Many lawyers left for jobs with a more stable salary and benefit structure, such as public defender offices or larger law firms, she said.

She said burnout also plays a role.

"I mean, I'm just seeing people leave the practice because it's too discouraging, it's too frustrating, it's too hard to make a living," Reed said. "It feels like you're part of a system that's so unjust. And even though you are advocating for justice for your clients, I've just seen a lot of people really burn out, and it's something I think about a lot for our team."

She said the team members try to avoid burnout and help each other.

"We do try to think about case loads and think about what is sustainable, not just for a week or a month or even a year."

Unfortunately, that often means rejecting clients, she said. But she said there's no alternative.

Paring Down a Practice

Catherine O. Brown has been practicing as a lawyer since 2000, and she's had her solo firm near Denver since 2005, specializing in helping businesses handle paperwork for immigrant employees. She did some deportation defense in the past, but recently quit.

"As of January, I'm like, 'I'm not doing any removal, I'm not doing any asylum,'" she said. "I just can't, because the amount and volume of change makes me anxious."

Not only does she fear making mistakes as the Trump administration rapidly changes the rules, she said she also knows her own mental limits.

"I'm not that tough of a mental person — like some of the situations that people are dealing with, like, honestly, [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arresting people at their hearings. I'm just not a person that I think can do that on a daily basis. That's just not my psyche. I'm more of a transactional attorney."

But avoiding handling deportation cases doesn't protect her from the stress of doing immigration work in 2025.

She described a type of case that business immigration attorneys handle, called a national interest waiver. It's a fast track to help immigrant employees win permanent residency, also known as a green card.

Historically, the government granted these waivers to workers for environmental specialties such as working on battery-operated vehicles.

"So all those companies that have been winning those kinds of cases won't be winning them anymore, because the government is Trump, and Trump says that the environment — we don't care about the environment anymore. It's just one example," Brown said.

She said she recently spent many hours working on an application for a waiver for an immigrant who works in an environmental field, and the Trump administration rejected it.

She also described receiving frantic calls from legal immigrants whose student visas are being revoked.

"So you're constantly having to tell people, 'This is not how it's supposed to work.' And you know, when you do that on a daily, weekly basis — 'This is not how it's supposed to work' — you start to feel mentally bummed, right? Like, I'm not able to provide a service that I was pretty good at before this."

Previously, the system followed some legal logic, she said.

"This is how [regulations] are made. This is how they're supposed to behave. But like all other aspects of law in this administration, it's just being blown away," she added.

Brown said she formerly worked on family immigration law, too. Typically, it's someone who's in the country illegally, on an overstayed visa, for instance, and the person wants to apply for legal status through a family member.

But family members are now afraid to come forward, Brown added.

"[U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], the benefits agency, has said anybody who's not in status at the time of their interview could be deported," she said. So her family law business has dried up.

As of January, she had three support staffers and a contractor. She said she let her business immigration paralegal go in June. In November, she let another paralegal go. Her legal assistant left to do a master's degree program.

She said she's now working only with a virtual receptionist, and the lower personnel costs allow her more flexibility.

"I can be super picky," Brown said. "I have the luxury of not having to take every case, financially, because I'm lowering my expenses."

She said in the current environment of fast-changing regulations, she believes she must specialize. She's planning to focus on business-related temporary visas; for instance, people who need to change from a student visa to a work visa. She might still pick up other types of immigration work.

She said she sees doing less as the best way for her to move forward.

"People trying to change status and become permanent residents and become citizens, just being treated like dirt every day, it's just upsetting as a human, not only just as a practitioner," Brown said. "And that's the hard part. I think that's where practitioners that are upset by it have to kind of walk away. We have to just do less of it to bounce back mentally."

"Don't Take It Personal"

Farah Al-khersan, a solo practitioner in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been practicing as an attorney for about 10 years.

"This is the worst I've ever seen it, in terms of how difficult it is, and just the mass enforcement, the detentions," she said in a September interview.

"Every day, it's like we're hit with a thousand things. You have to stay constantly, really aware of the different laws and the different policies, minute by minute, hour by hour, it's changing," she said.

She said she knows some people who have left immigration law because it's so emotionally draining, and she said there's no way to stay in the work if you don't care about it deeply.

"It's not just impacting undocumented immigrants that have severe criminal offenses or whatnot. We're talking families. We're talking children. And so I think the overall goal has just become, 'Let's get rid of as many immigrants as we can, as fast as we can.'"

For her part, it's personal: She's an immigrant herself, having been born in Iraq. Immediately following Trump's 2017 travel ban against predominantly Muslim countries, border officials briefly detained her husband, who was also born in Iraq.

Officials released her husband after several hours, the Detroit Free Press reported at the time.

Al-khersan said she feels deeply invested in the immigration cases she takes on.

"They say, 'Don't take it home. Don't take it personal if you lose.' But that's so hard to do when I've known most of my clients for four years, 10 years, more," she said. "I know them. I know their families. I've recently had clients that were deported, that I've known — I've worked on their cases for a decade."

In March, Trump directed the U.S. attorney general to pursue sanctions against immigration attorneys and pro bono lawyers from BigLaw firms who sue the federal government, alleging without evidence that they coach immigration clients to lie.

Al-khersan said, "Now, you've got to be worried that you're going to be sanctioned — for what? Doing your job? For advocating? A lot of people are afraid to speak out."

She anticipates that as the budget for immigration enforcement and detention expands, the situation will only get worse.

"I feel like the silver lining is we have a lot of good not just immigration attorneys, attorneys in general, advocates, nonprofits that have really risen to the challenge to like, fight and advocate, but there is a lot of burnout already. And I mean, where sometimes it feels like we're already four years in, and then I realize, hey, it's September," Al-khersan said.

An Inherently Stressful Specialty

Denver immigration attorney and American Immigration Lawyers Association board president Jeff Joseph said in an August interview that lawyers are facing real strain.

"I would say, especially in the [deportation] defense space, attorneys are really struggling," he said.

"It is tough to go to court and not know whether you're going to walk out with your clients or not, and to watch families being torn apart. So emotionally, mentally, physically, they're struggling," he said.

"On the other hand, I would tell you that this is probably one of the most consequential legal battles we've ever fought of our time," Joseph added. "I mean, certainly in this administration, it's definitely the most legal consequential battle that we're fighting.

"And so we are very much motivated to keep on the front lines and keep standing for the rule of law. And so I have never been prouder or more excited to be a lawyer than I am right now at this moment," he said.

There are already far too few immigration attorneys in the U.S. to meet client demand. AILA counts only about 17,000 members in the U.S., compared with millions of immigrants in deportation proceedings and millions more who may need help with routine immigration matters.

Immigration law has long been known as a stressful legal specialty.

Attorneys handling asylum cases are especially prone to burnout — they hear their clients' stories of being tortured, persecuted, imprisoned or raped in their countries of origin, and can experience what therapists call secondary traumatic stress.

AILA is well aware of the psychological strain on immigration lawyers.

In May, for instance, the organization took part in Well-Being Week In Law 2025 and hosted webinars with titles such as "Mindfulness in Turbulent Times" and "How to Have Your Best Year Ever During the Toughest Year."

A Nightmare — And Jumping for Joy

Andrew Rankin, a solo immigration attorney in Memphis, Tennessee, recalled that on June 10, he went to the Memphis Immigration Court to file some paperwork.

He happened to witness ICE agents arresting a mother and a young girl in a hallway, he recalled.

Rankin said watching the arrest was so shocking that it seared small details into his memory.

He said the girl, maybe about 10 years old, wore a red jumpsuit and shoes with roller wheels on the bottom. She had frizzy black hair and hair clips with characters from the cartoon show "Bluey." He remembers the mother screaming, then sobbing, and the little girl sobbing too. The agents bound the girl's hands in a zip tie and put handcuffs on her mother, he said.

As the ICE agents — four men with face coverings and sunglasses — led the mother and child away, Rankin said he followed them into an elevator and all the way outside, berating them.

"I said, 'Is this your national security picture, arresting a 10-year-old?' They didn't answer me," Rankin said.

The arrest was one of many similar incidents at immigration courts across the country: ICE agents have been showing up and summarily arresting people.

Rankin said the arrest upset him so much that he barely got any work done that day. He said he later had a nightmare about the incident — as he described it, he woke up to the memory of the screams.

"I've never seen in my years, up close, a child suffering intentionally, and no one stepped in to help," Rankin said. "No one who had the power to stop it cared to do anything about it. And I think that's the evil of this that we've never seen before."

He said he and his wife have discussed retiring outside the United States and perhaps even leaving the country before retirement.

"I just walk around American society, and I just recognize where I am less and less," he said.

So what keeps him going? He enjoys studying the law, he said, and there are moments of victory, even now.

In October 2024, Rankin had defended at an immigration court trial a married couple from Gambia in West Africa. The government had accused them of carrying out a fraudulent marriage to help the husband obtain residency, Rankin said.

The case was so complex that the record of proceedings totaled almost 1,500 pages, he said.

When the immigration judge's decision finally arrived nearly a year later, in an Oct. 3 email, the news was good: Rankin learned that the man from Gambia would receive a full green card and would have a clear path toward applying for citizenship.

Rankin said he literally jumped for joy — and shouted so loudly that a woman who works in an insurance office next door heard him.

"And she came over and knocked on my door and asked if I was OK. I said, 'I'm better than OK,'" he said.

--Additional reporting by Marco Poggio and Rae Ann Varona. Editing by Orlando Lorenzo and Lakshna Mehta.

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