With ICE sweeps ongoing, Pasadena lawyer navigates clients and consequences

Stacy Tolchin was pulling into her office parking lot in Pasadena one recent morning when she got a notification on her Next Door app.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were conducting a raid two blocks away. She raced over.

“I feel very protective of the neighborhood and was very upset that ICE had been invading,” said Tolchin, an immigration attorney who grew up in Pasadena and lives in Altadena.

The moment indicates a new reality for Tolchin and other attorneys in Los Angeles County and beyond who specialize in immigration matters. Now that the federal government is following through on the Trump administration’s promise of mass deportations, her work days have become more fraught and more frightening for her clients.

Here’s a look at a day in Tolchin’s life now.

The Pasadena Three

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were gone by the time Tolchin arrived at the bus stop in Pasadena that day. They had taken four men who were waiting there to get picked up for a construction job.

“ICE has been very quick in these kidnappings,” she told LAist.

Tolchin, 50, decided to hand out business cards to several people at the scene. The sister of one of the men ended up with one of the cards. Tolchin now represents three of the people who were arrested.

They are known to supporters as The Pasadena Three.

“It's all a blur at this point,” Tolchin said of the last few months. “It's just been insane.”

She said she began getting flooded with requests for help in January after President Donald Trump was inaugurated. The pleas grew more frantic in early June when the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, started conducting raids throughout Southern California.

It’s been emotionally draining, she said. “I need a vacation.”

Tolchin said she was raised in an activist family. Her father was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, the nation’s oldest progressive bar association. She went to Oberlin College in Ohio before attending UCLA Law School, where she studied public interest law.

She got into immigration work right after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, another time when immigrants were under scrutiny and threats of deportation.

“For me immigrants rights and civil rights are the same,” she said. “I believe this is my calling in a lot of ways.”

A ‘Bureaucratic mess’

On a Tuesday in early July, Tolchin was on her way to the Adelanto Detention Center to see three clients. The facility, where many unauthorized immigrants end up after getting picked up by ICE in Los Angeles, is in the high desert east of Victorville, an hour-and-a-half drive from her Pasadena office.

It holds 2,000 people and is operated by The GEO Group, the private prison company.

“At least it's not North Carolina or Louisiana," she said, noting that the U.S. government has shipped some people to detention centers thousands of miles from where they were detained.

That day, it was nearly 100 degrees in the high desert. Tolchin didn’t appear to break a sweat in her full length cerulean blue coat as she entered the facility for a hearing for Carlos Alexander Osorto, one of The Pasadena Three.

Attorney Stacy Tolchin waits to see clients at the Adelanto Detention Center, where some of her clients are being held among many others arrested during recent immigration raids.

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Frank Stoltze

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LAist

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Her contention was that federal agents racially profiled Osorto, 50, who has been in the country 14 years, and the two others and that the arrest was illegal.

Tolchin was hoping to have a bond hearing at Adelanto so Osorto could be released, but the immigration judge said that would have to happen later.

“Because the numbers of people that are in Adelanto, things have become a bureaucratic mess,” she said later.

Tolchin said she doesn’t have much faith in immigration judges.

“There’s just a predisposition in favor of the Department of Homeland Security and it's not a fair tribunal,” she said.

An ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the hearings or on how many people are currently incarcerated at Adelanto.

Judge issues restraining order

The Pasadena Three are lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Department of Homeland Security, alleging officers are conducting illegally indiscriminate arrests.

On Friday, a judge in Los Angeles issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting agents from stopping people based on race, whether they speak Spanish, whether they speak with an accent, where they work or what kind of work they perform.

“It's a great decision, a huge victory,” she said.

The government has appealed the ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court.

In a statement to NPR, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin criticized the ruling.

"A district judge is undermining the will of the American people," McLaughlin said. "America's brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, rapists — truly the worst of the worst from Golden State communities. Law and order will prevail."

The lawsuit argues that immigration officers must have a reasonable suspicion someone is in the country illegally before the officers stop anyone. To arrest them, the lawsuit says, officers need the higher legal standard of probable cause and an arrest warrant.

Constant emergencies

Back in the car, Tolchin’s phone rang. It was an attorney from her office. An Iranian client called and said immigration agents were at his door.

Tolchin said the man had already agreed to self deport and reenter the U.S. with a visa, but they’re going after him anyway.

“They’re rounding up all the Iranians they can,” she said. “We’ve got constant emergencies.”

Immigration officials have set a daily arrest total of 3,000 nationwide.

She advised that the man stay in his house.

Another call. Immigration officials were not releasing two of The Pasadena Three, even though they posted bond the day before.

Tolchin got on the phone with an assistant U.S. attorney. She politely but firmly asked for their release. ICE was dragging its feet, she said.

The assistant U.S. attorney said she’d look into it. Tolchin told the attorney she’d give her 30 minutes before she notified the judge in the case that the government wasn’t following the law.

When the government attorney called back, she said she was working on it. She asked: Can she have more time?

Tolchin agreed, and asked the attorney to keep her posted.

The men eventually were released to organizers with the National Day Labor Organizing Network, who were at the gates of Adelanto to meet them.

Tolchin said her job comes with a lot of pressure.

“You’ve got real lives that are on your shoulders,” she said.

She said she’s also getting calls from U.S. citizens worried they’ll be targeted for their speech.

People are asking if they should erase their social media and whether it's safe to travel out of the country if they’ve been vocal about their opposition to the Trump administration.

“I’ve never had questions like that from U.S. citizens before,” she added.

In March, Tolchin was a lead attorney in the national student visa case in which the Trump administration attempted to deport nearly 5,000 international students based on arrests or minor criminal convictions.

Trump retreated on the policy in April. It wasn’t Tolchin’s case, but she’d helped with the legal strategy to win a nationwide injunction out of a federal court in San Francisco.

“It was a really big victory and I was very proud,” she said.

'Human' stories

Tolchin said she learns about the politics of other countries in her work. She recalled how a client from Cameroon was forced to pay ransom for his own freedom. But that made him ineligible to apply for asylum in the U.S. because he’d given money to a terrorist organization.

“The human stories that are attached give you reason to do this litigation,” she said.

Tolchin has her own human story, of course. She nearly lost her Altadena home in the Eaton Fire.

“For me, we just dealt with the fires and that has been a lot as well. It's day by day. Trying to be a mommy too,” said Tolchin, who has a 5-year-old daughter.

She explained that she was really burned out at her job last year. She didn’t want to continue the work.

“But I feel like my skills are really needed right now,” she said. “I sometimes feel like it's a bit of a superpower.

“And you can’t abandon [people] when you’re needed.”