Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico.
This commentary originally published on her blog May 7, 2025.
A couple weeks ago, I began describing my work as a little like palliative care. Some colleagues were accompanying a big family to an ICE check-in where they would almost certainly face removal to their home country. They lawyers were incredible advocates and had taken some swings, but options were running low - it seemed like it was time to tell the family to prepare for the fact that they were going to face deportation. They had to figure out what they needed to manage stress, to be as comfortable as possible, and to exert as much control as they could on how it all went down.
One way to describe my job is to help people avoid this moment. We take detailed notes about their histories and their families and review regulations and footnotes in practice advisories to try and find a path through the labyrinth of immigration laws that could allow them to avoid being forcibly removed from the country. Those pathways are rarely easy and never cheap or fast. Sometimes those pathways take an unfathomable amount of strength for our clients to follow. But very often we find them. So, one of the hardest parts of the deal is when you have to level with a client and explain that there is nothing you can offer them and that they need to start wrapping their head around what it is going to mean to face their imminent removal. I have gotten better at this conversation over the years but it can turn an already difficult day into one where I come home and cry or zone out to a couple hours of TV, as I have been doing lately.
Which is why I have been pretty solemn lately facing the days at work. There hasn’t been much fanfare, but on April 11, the government somewhat quietly enacted a new (but also old) registration requirement for certain non-citizens living in the US. This has not made much headway in the news yet. How could it when the White House has been engaging in a standoff with the Federal Courts over the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia from the CECOT in El Salvador? But that horrifying mess can also inform us about what is so terrifying about registration. Let me explain:
About two weeks ago, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) opened up the process of Alien Registration and issued a warning. Through reviving a dormant piece of the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is now regulation in the U.S. that a certain class of non-citizens fill out a form to register as not having any immigration status, get fingerprinted, and carry a card that says they are undocumented. It’s a simple online form called the G-325R. It doesn’t cost anything to fill out. The idea is to send in your information, go to the nearest application support center, get fingerprinted, and then be issued a card that says you registered. The card does not confer any status or access to work authorization. If a person fails to do this within a very short time frame they could face fines, potential criminal liability, and myriad unforeseen consequences. If it sounds like a trap, well, that’s because it is. And we are already seeing the first reports of federal criminal charges for people failing to register.
Please do not mistake this newsletter as permission for you to now analyze and advise your non-citizen neighbors on their need to register with USCIS. There are enormous swaths of folks without discernible legal status in the U.S who are also not required to register because they are already considered registered by virtue of something in their history as a non-citizen in the U.S. like, say, a previous employment authorization document, a notice to appear in immigration court, or an expired visa. The media is going to say things like “illegal immigrants required to register under new law” but this is false. It only applies to certain individuals. Registration is dangerous and people should consult with a qualified practitioner to understand if they are currently subject to the requirements. Again, it does not affect everyone and comes with significant consequences. Do not advise if you are not qualified to do so.
This kind of classification is a step towards genocide. If that sounds dramatic to you, consider that people are being disappeared from our country into an El Salvadoran torture center from which no one has ever been publicly released. The government is now also saying that they will send people to Libya. Through registration, folks are demanded to carry proof that they are subject to this kind of treatment. And if they choose not to? Then they face criminal penalties that could separate them from their children and would almost certainly be paired with deportation with aggravated consequences.
There are those of you out there who might think that there is an element of fairness here. After all, people in the United States without permission have violated a law - why shouldn’t they be subject to enforcement? The problem is that people perceived as “illegal immigrants” in this country are being deprived of due process and subjected to extraordinary levels of human rights abuses. Perhaps it seems fair to ask someone to carry around a card that shows they do not have immigration status in the U.S. but that’s not really what is being asked here. Folks who engage with registration have to show up and be fingerprinted and face the potential gulag. How could anyone trust that they are not the next to be sent to CECOT, or interned without due process? The government is actively lying about the people who they are disappearing and baselessly claiming that they are heinous criminals. Is it reasonable to ask a person to roll the dice and subject themselves to this? Why would anyone incriminate themselves as being an undocumented immigrant when our country is treating that administrative violation as being on par with terrorism? There is an extremely strong legal argument that under the fifth amendment, non-citizens subject to registration have the right to remain silent. But will that protect them if and when charges come down in Federal court?
The ethical quandary here for an attorney is unenviable. On one hand, it is a lawyer's job to advise their clients to comply with the law. Registration is now required for many and avoiding it creates criminal liability and could prevent folks from accessing future immigration benefits. And yet the Trump administration is publicly engaging in illegal human rights abuses of people who are classified as undocumented. How could a lawyer advise a person to incriminate themselves and expose their family to that level of illegality and violence? The only thing that one can do is examine each case individually and explore the various options and consequences. There’s no real way around trouble. Ultimately, every person must decide for themselves what they want to do with this quagmire.
I saw a headline a couple weeks ago about a person who disappeared - a Venezuelan man who ran astray of his truck route at the Canadian border and got detained crossing back. He wasn’t located in ICE detention and wasn’t on the deportation manifests. Only now is the Trump administration saying he is in El Salvador. We will certainly be told that he was a heinous criminal as a means of justifying his disappearance, assured we are all safer because of this brutality. From reading the articles about it, I understand that this gentleman waited in line to get his parole into the U.S. last November and came across the bridge with the permission of our government, hardly here illegally. I think about the many mornings I spent at a shelter in El Paso last fall helping recently arrived individuals just like him fill out their work permit applications before they headed out for their destination in the U.S. Was he among them?
Here in New Mexico, ICE reported the arrests of 48 people straight off back in March - straight off of the mean streets of Santa Fe and Albuquerque – and none of those individuals have been identified by name or located. Jonathan Blitzer’s article in the New Yorker - The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests – bears out what happened or didn’t happen or … no one really knows who those people are, if they ever existed, or where they are now. In the article ICE list crimes these mystery men had committed – homicide, child sexual assault, drug trafficking … shoplifting. We are meant to simply trust that disappearing people from our streets is in all of our best interests.
The question of course is, what can we do? It is really important that all of us continue to reflect on our attitudes towards non-citizens and illegality in this country. I will talk till I am blue in the face about how misunderstood the concept of immigrants as criminals is, but I don’t actually think that is what is relevant here. What’s relevant is that even if a person does the most vile thing in the U.S. if they murder or rape or kidnap a kid, they are afforded due process in criminal courts and in U.S. immigration courts and we are not allowed to disappear them. It’s part of the constitution that is supposed to protect us all. We have to immediately stop qualifying that protection as only for people who are born here.
The Trump administration just recently expressed frustration that if everyone got due process it would "take, without exaggeration, 200 years.” It’s really difficult to stomach this President, who himself benefited from lengthy legal battles for extremely serious criminal charges, asserting that in some cases, due process is simply too inconvenient.
I may be naive, but I still think there is time for all of us to express to our elected officials, from Congress people down to our local city councils, that the right to due process under the constitution must be defended – because none of us should be naive enough to believe that this is going to stop with non-citizens. It is intolerable now. And we must say so. And act as if it is so.
I discussed this all on the phone a couple weeks ago one of my best friends, who can be counted on to send me thoughtful encouragement, and afterwards he texted me a quote from John Berger: “When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar — from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.”
Thanks, friend! I am reflecting on that quote today. Wishing everyone courage for the things they face today, no matter how large or small.
