Joshua Schroeder is convinced of his actions. While trying to ensure due process for a client of his before the latter was deported to Laos in late May, he filed one habeas corpus petition after another -- in courts across the country, even in Guam -- following the silent maze laid out by prosecutors in Donald Trump's government to sabotage the legal defense of migrants in active removal proceedings. His conscience and commitment drove him to exhaust every possible avenue, even if he had little hope that his motions would succeed. In the end, as could be expected under the current ruthless immigration policy, they did not. But Schroeder was in for a surprise nonetheless: in one of the prosecutors' responses, there was also a motion seeking sanctions against him. They accused Schroeder of deliberately wasting the courts' time and money.
As far as anyone knows, Schroeder is the first attorney to face such an accusation, stemming from a presidential memorandum signed in March directing officials "to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States." There is no precedent for this, but Schroeder -- who is also a legal scholar and author of treatises on the United States' founding laws -- places his case within a broader attack on the republic's values that the current Trump administration, through its Department of Justice, is carrying out.
"I'm just one attorney, and no attorney can withstand the government if they really wanted to do something to you. It's really rare for the government to make this choice because it's so consequential. But at the same time, there are a lot of odd things about this sanctions motion. For one thing, it cites a memo of the president, which seems to indicate that it's not an independent choice of a lawyer to make the sanctions motion. Usually it would be. The idea that they're following a direct message from the president, a political person, is extremely dangerous or strange. It's hard to even put your mind around exactly what that means," Schroeder says in a video call with EL PAÍS from Los Angeles.
The situation Schroeder now finds himself in -- facing a punishment that could range from an unspecified fine to, given the vagueness of the accusation, a permanent impairment to his career -- began with a desperate phone call on Memorial Day Weekend. His client, a man with a criminal conviction originally from Laos whose family had fought on the U.S. side during the Vietnam War, told him he was about to be deported.
Schroeder acted quickly, filing a habeas corpus motion in the Northern District of Texas, where his client was detained. He thought there had been a significant lack of due process given his client's background: Laos did not accept deportations from the United States, and people of Hmong ethnicity -- his client's group -- were lawful immigrants to the United States because they had allied with the United States in the war. He wanted notice that his client was definitely being removed to Laos, that Laos was now accepting deportees, and that the United States had secured legal status for his client in Laos to make sure he wasn't effectively being made stateless.
But that didn't happen. The authorities instead transferred his client to another detention center -- the same one that had held hundreds of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador in March to be imprisoned in Bukele's maximum-security facility, the Center for Confinement of Terrorism, commonly known as Cecot. It was also where migrants later sent to South Sudan were held.
That set off all of Schroeder's alarms. He feared his client might be accused of being a terrorist, as Venezuelans had been accused of belonging to the gang El Tren de Aragua. Those fears were confirmed when he received notice that his client had been placed on an international flight -- despite the judge's order stating that he was not to be deported while the case was still open.
While the plane was in the air, Schroeder filed more documents asking the judge to enforce his authority and order the plane back. At the same time, however, prosecutors had filed their removal order. "I kept thinking this was not going to work, but generally I'd rather try and fail than not try at all. So I just kept putting one step in front of the other," Schroeder says, explaining the simple logic that guided him as he took the case to its final instance.
After he thought his client had been deported in violation of a court order, unexpectedly, Schroeder got another call from him; exasperated, he explained that he was in Guam -- a U.S. unincorporated territory in the Pacific -- and asked him to drop the case. But Schroeder sensed something strange, as if there were someone else pressuring his client. Suddenly that presence lifted, and his client told him the plane was leaving and they were going to leave him there -- and to please keep fighting for him. Then the call cut off.
Schroeder filed another habeas corpus motion, this time in Guam, since the previous one in Texas was no longer valid -- the custodians to whom such petitions are ultimately directed were no longer the same people. At the same time, the Texas court withdrew the judge's order halting deportation, leaving his client unprotected in that jurisdiction. So Schroeder petitioned to transfer the case to Guam.
"And this is where the controversy comes up, because one of the reasons you can file a motion for sanctions is that you're frivolously and needlessly multiplying litigation. But I filed everything in Guam procedurally correctly. I hired a local attorney there. I disclosed the earlier case to the Guam court. I took things step by step and did everything as up front as I could," Schroeder insists. And the court initially agreed with him, issuing an order protecting the client until a hearing could be held.
The jurisdiction change could easily have been avoided if the Administration had kept the man in Texas, but Schroeder was forced to respond to a new, unofficial government strategy of transferring immigrants to make their defense more difficult or to place cases before more favorable judges. "They fly you around and don't tell you where you're going. You land, stop, wait -- hours, days -- and it disorients you. It's really a form of torture."
Once in Guam, Schroeder sought confirmation that his client would be deported to Laos and not to a third country, as in the cases of those accused of gang affiliation. "It really was not clear that they were following the order of removal just because it existed. And then I would argue: does being 'subject to the order of removal' mean that it's mutually exclusive? Are they not going to remove him to El Salvador, or somewhere else?" recalls the attorney, whose argument gained force when Trump later included Laos in a partial travel ban. Later, at the Guam hearing, Schroeder again asked both the judge and the prosecutors where his client was being sent, but the government's lawyers said they didn't know. Moments later, the client was put on a plane and deported.
Schroeder filed an emergency appeal to try to stop the deportation order. It was dismissed. The court of appeals also rejected his emergency motion but opened an appeal that remains pending. As the case has moved forward, Schroeder believes it has revealed that "there really wasn't this hard and fast distinction between an ordinary immigration case and these Tren de Aragua cases." "Multiple things can be happening at the same time. And if you have ordinary immigration paperwork, that doesn't mean you're not going to be treated like a terrorist or extraordinarily renditioned or disappeared -- which is what our case was really about," Schroeder now argues.
"In fact, because we had the sanctions motion, we had the full post-mortem and went really slowly through everything. There's a statute -- and the order of removal itself states -- that further process will happen, explaining when, where, how, why: all of the notice and opportunity to be heard before you're actually removed. That process never happened. Immigration attorneys have gotten used to this -- the government ignoring procedure all the time."
Schroeder also fears the strategy used in his case could be replicated, instilling fear among younger attorneys who may not yet have thick skin. "If attorneys are too afraid to bring valid, reasonable arguments -- even if the judges are going to disagree with it -- , that's a way of controlling the entire court system."
But Schroeder is not merely an immigration lawyer; he's an attorney specialized in habeas corpus. His instincts are different. During Trump's first term, he wrote a guide to help lawyers get immigrants out of detention centers -- and has written another one now for Trump's second term, though it hasn't yet been published.
"I've published on reproductive rights. I've published on free speech issues. I think a part of the reason I am number one [to be targeted] maybe is I am a threat. I am someone who has a very well-thought-out, calm, reasoned position that is hard to deal with." The fact that, just as the sanctions motion first became public, Schroeder was bombarded on X by the attorney general's chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, with personal attacks on his character, strengthens his suspicion that the entire case is politically motivated.
Although Joshua Schroeder is not James Comey -- the former FBI director unprecedentedly charged by Trump for allegedly lying to Congress -- nor Letitia James, the New York attorney general who prosecuted the president and was also charged this week by Trump's Justice Department, his case is yet another example of the Republican administration's instrumentalization of justice. For the lawyer, there is no doubt: "For the United States, this is an existential issue."