First Trump Came for Immigrants. Then He Came for Their Lawyers. – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

Last year, on Labor Day weekend, an immigration attorney named Cooper Richardson spent her Saturday calling the Phoenix-area shelter where one of her clients—a child from Guatemala—was being held. She was checking to see if Immigration and Customs Enforcement was on the way: Her colleagues at the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project had received word that the Trump administration was finalizing plans to summarily deport the roughly 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children detained across the country.

Richardson made one last call before she went to bed—and that’s when she learned the shelter had been told to have her client ready to leave within two hours. She rushed to her car, then spent the half-hour drive calling colleagues to see if they had advice for how she could ensure her client wasn’t taken. “I was nervous and shaking and scared,” she says, “and I’m not the one who might have been put on a plane.”

Ana Islas, who heads the Florence Project’s Tucson office, was on the other end of one of those calls. She had pulled together a rapid response team of lawyers and social workers available over the holiday weekend—a blood-pressure-spiking task in the best of times, made even more so by the Trump administration’s effort to cut off more than $200 million in federal funding for the legal defense of migrant children. Like many of its peers around the country, the Florence Project had been forced into layoffs earlier in the year, which meant the remaining attorneys were working longer hours to ensure clients got the representation they needed. “I talked to about 30 kids that Friday,” Islas says. “Including one as young as 3 years old.”