Hundreds of employees at the Department of Justice have been pushed out this year for a variety of reasons, although many of them aren’t even sure why they were fired.
The firings have spread fear across the DOJ workforce, which has also been demoralized by carrying out President Donald Trump’s agenda, reported NPR.
“Being a government lawyer, you don’t pick who is president and you don’t pick which policies you like to defend and which you don’t,” said Erez Reuveni, a former immigration lawyer for the department. “The job is to defend the agenda, for me the immigration agenda — the policies and priorities of whatever particular administration is in charge.”
Reuveni was fired shortly after his promotion this year for telling a federal judge that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador in error, and he said his supervisor had told him the White House wanted to know why he had not told a judge the migrant was a terrorist.
“Career attorneys have to go to court,” Reuveni said, “and judges say, ‘where’s the evidence,’ and we have no evidence because there is no evidence.”
Reuveni has since filed a whistleblower complaint, saying that DOJ political appointees had misled the courts about immigration cases to ensure quick deportations.
“It’s just putting career civil servants in this position of just, sometimes just even looking like fools before courts,” Reuveni said, “and why would you sign up to do this given that you are being treated as a punching bag and a pawn for these people? They don’t care about your livelihood or your reputation.”
Reuveni highlighted a meeting from March where then-top DOJ official Emil Bove told lawyers they should consider saying “f–k you” to the courts if judges blocked those deportations, which he denied during his confirmation hearings after his nomination to an appeals court. But Trump’s former criminal defense attorney was ultimately promoted to a lifetime appointment by the Republican-controlled Senate.
“My disclosure is just one tiny piece of it,” Reuveni said. “It’s just three weeks in the life of me. But there are many other stories and many other people who have similar experiences.”
He’s hopeful that his complaint will motivate others inside the DOJ to come forward to report their experiences.
“The voice of one, that’s one thing, fine,” Reuveni said. “The voice of two, that’s better, but a chorus? It’s hard to ignore that.”