Group that defended undocumented migrants cuts dozens of attorneys and staff

With Trump back in the White House after having promised during the campaign to unleash “the largest deportation operation in American history,” the cadre of attorneys at the Southern Poverty Law Center who amounted to a first line of legal defense for undocumented immigrants is no more.

Isabel Zelaya was beginning his shift at a beef slaughterhouse in rural Tennessee on a spring day in 2018 when agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement burst into the processing area and, with guns drawn, ordered him and others to toss their tools to the ground. Zelaya, who was in his 60s at the time of the raid, explained that he had legal status to live and work in the US, but agents nonetheless zip-tied his hands and led him into a van, according to court records. He and about 100 other Latino workers were shuttled to a nearby National Guard Armory for processing. The operation, at the time the largest workplace immigration raid in at least a decade, sent a signal that then-President Donald Trump’s tough talk on illegal immigration would be matched by hard-nosed action. The move triggered a swift response by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil-rights nonprofit with a long history of using the legal system to defend vulnerable groups. Days after the raid, the Alabama-based organization dispatched a team of lawyers to the small towns where the workers lived and were being detained.