Immigration lawyer cautions: Don’t hit the panic button yet

Dallas immigration attorney Jered Dobbs has seen an uptick in people seeking his services since the Trump administration resumed power three weeks ago.

Fear is “the driving factor” in almost all these calls, he said.

Dobbs recently spoke with a Dallas-area church—and in a couple other places that serve immigrants—to allay some of these fears and to help provide clarity on the blitz of executive actions related to immigration.

The Baptist Standard asked him about the types of questions people are asking.

Dobbs said a lot of questions are being asked relating to the executive orders and church.

The big question

“One of the big ones is, ‘Can ICE come into a church or look for somebody while they’re at church?’”

One of the executive orders “was essentially to lift a Biden-era policy” preventing ICE from entering certain sensitive areas like churches and hospitals, Dobbs explained.

So, the answer is yes, “technically ICE could do that.” However, “they do have to have a supervisors’ approval to do anything along those lines. And realistically, I think it’s going to be very rare that we would see anything like that.”

Beyond the requirement of supervisor approval, other legal restrictions might prevent ICE from entering a house of worship, he explained.

“Generally speaking, a private entity does not have to permit ICE entry unless they have a criminal warrant signed by a federal judge. They cannot just force their way in without the proper documentation by a federal judge, which is going to be a fairly rare thing.”

Overall, while it is legally possible and “might occur in limited circumstances, particularly if you have someone who is extremely dangerous,” Dobbs said he did not think ICE entering churches is “super likely” to become a common occurrence.

The same policy was in effect under Trump’s last administration, so it’s not new policy, Dobbs said. “It’s just a rehash of an old policy, and even then, I don’t ever recall hearing about ICE entering a church forcibly or anything like that.”

He noted he can’t say it “definitely won’t happen,” but “ICE knows it’s bad optics to be physically bursting into churches.”

“People, including many of the president’s supporters, aren’t going to stand for that,” Dobbs explained.

Even with one arrest outside a church in Georgia having been reported in recent weeks, Dobbs still would encourage immigrants to continue attending church—while exercising increased caution in general and being sure to know their rights.

“What I have been telling most of my clients is: ‘I think it’s OK. Don’t be afraid to go to church.’ I think that the likelihood of anything happening is fairly slim, overall,” even though the policy does technically mean that it could.

Make a plan

In the event ICE does show up, churches need to have policies in place on what to do, especially migrant-majority churches.

They need to have decided what their response is going to be with their own security teams and what personnel should do in terms of permitting entry.

Having some sort of plan in place would be wise, so that “they aren’t scrambling in the moment.”

To be prepared, churches and their members need to know their legal rights in terms of permitting entry or denying entry.

An example of one such policy might be asking ICE to wait outside until the service is over, and then they could do whatever they need to do.

Dobbs explained in terms of immigration enforcement—permitting ICE to try to enter churches or hospitals—what Trump has done is within the law.

What is not within the law, Dobbs noted, is “the attempt to unilaterally end birthright citizenship. That is almost certainly outside of the law, and at least one or two federal judges have already ruled accordingly.

“That action is definitely unconstitutional, and it’s never been held otherwise,” he said.

In terms of enforcing the laws that exist or allowing ICE more latitude to enforce immigration laws and make more detentions Trump’s actions are legal, “but the birthright citizenship, certainly not.”

Ways to help

Churches can support immigrants by being a resource for accurate information. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there right now,” Dobbs noted, “which is stirring up a lot of anxiety in the immigrant community.”

Making sure the church either has accurate information or knows where to point immigrant members to find accurate information is important, he noted.

Dobbs said immigration attorneys are an obvious resource to recommend. Also, churches can encourage church members not to believe everything they see on social media.

Immigrants should be encouraged to avoid working with what are called “notarios”—people who are not attorneys but who market themselves as “immigration assistants.”

Many notarios are “engaged in the unauthorized practice of law,” Dobbs said. “Aside from having incorrect or incomplete information, sometimes they’ll file an incorrect document.”

Churches can help migrants in their congregations by helping them understand how to distinguish between notarios and licensed immigration attorneys.

In addition to private immigration attorneys, parachurch organizations that support immigration also can be good resources and partners.

In Dallas, For the Nations Refugee Outreach has a qualified immigration specialist on staff. In general, for immigration specific advice, Catholic Charities is a reliable source of immigration council and support.

Additionally, Texas Baptists’ Center for Cultural Engagement created a brief document outlining “what federal government agencies can and cannot do legally as well as the freedoms, rights and obligations of churches,” Executive Director Julio Guaneri noted in his weekly email.

The executive orders relating to immigration have impacted Texas Baptist churches. Dobbs said he has heard of members from Spanish-speaking backgrounds, in his own church and a number of other Texas Baptist churches, who are afraid to come to church.

Majority-culture churches can help support churches largely comprised of immigrants by knowing who in their churches might have knowledge and skills that could be valuable to immigrants and capable of helping at immigrant churches nearby.

“What I’ve tried to tell people is, I think the Spanish-speaking community, the immigrant community, certainly need to exercise more caution now that we have these new orders than under the prior presidential administration, but I also have told them I don’t think they necessarily need to hit the panic button either.”

The rhetoric about mass deportations and ICE or the military sweeping through the streets, “we’re not seeing a lot of that.”

Dobbs said that’s because ICE, like any bureaucratic organization, has limited resources. They have limited numbers of enforcement agents, limited places to hold detainees and limited airplane capacity for deportations.

“And in fact, they have already, just in these two weeks, already maxed out all of their bed space in the United States. They’ve already filled up.

“They’re at 109 percent capacity, and they’ve already started to release immigrants that they have detained because they don’t have anywhere to put them,” Dobbs noted.

Dobbs said he had predicted when the administration first put the focus on deportations, this is what would happen. He thought “they would pick up a lot of people for a few weeks, and then they’re going to have nowhere else to put them, and that’s exactly what’s happened,” Dobbs recalled.

Make wise choices

Yes, exercise caution, but “the best thing most immigrants can do is stay out of trouble with the police.” Immigrants who get arrested are the ones who will most likely find themselves in detention.

Immigrants should be careful about who they’re around and avoid “troublemakers,” he said. Doing so will help avoid being included in an enforcement action by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Dobbs noted a recent enforcement trend of ICE “focusing on easily locatable people, including those who have ICE ankle monitors and those coming to ICE check-ins.”

These tend to be “recent entrants to the U.S. or those who have already been placed into the deportation process, also known as Immigration Court.”

“I have seen increased detentions by ICE for both of those populations in the last two weeks, though not in or near churches,” Dobbs said.

Immigrants need to understand their chances of preventing deportation can only improve if they’re already on the pathway to legal status.

While “simply showing that you’re working with an immigration attorney toward lawful status will not necessarily prevent ICE from taking enforcement action,” depending how far along the path toward lawful status the case has progressed, being in-process might make a difference.

It could help convince ICE to release a person on an immigration bond pending an immigration court case, or it might make defending the person in immigration court an easier prospect.

“It’s never a bad thing to be on the pathway to legal status,” Dobbs said.