The Department of Justice wants “substantial monetary sanctions” against a California immigration attorney, marking a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s threats to lawyers and law firms taking up cases against the president’s agenda.
Joshua Schroeder appears to be the first attorney to be singled out by Justice Department lawyers in court documents following the president’s push to punish law firms and immigration attorneys over what he considers “frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious” claims.
“I am not worried. I willingly take hard cases, and I’m not afraid to lose them,” Shroeder told The Independent on Thursday. “When the motion came in, I didn’t know it would be a story. I just kind of thought, ‘well, I guess I’m gonna fight that too.’”
The sanctions motion, first reported by Politico, followed Schroeder’s attempts to block the government from deporting his client, a Hmong immigrant identified in court documents as V.L., who has a green card and immigrated to the United States as a child in 1987. He was living with his wife in Oklahoma when he was arrested during a routine Immigration and Customs Enforce check-in. The government pushed to deport him to Laos, according to court filings.
In court filings, Schroeder argued that his removal to Laos “could be deadly.”
Schroeder had successfully temporarily blocked his removal while the legal challenge continued, but V.L. was moved to detention in Guam from another facility in Texas to prepare for his removal. Despite Schroeder’s appeals, V.L. was deported in June.
Schroeder, who is working on the case pro bono, had asked for court orders to block V.L.’s removal — pointing to, among other things, the Trump administration’s aggressive push to summarily deport immigrants to a brutal El Salvador prison and so-called “third countries” beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
“The president is using orders of removal as permission slips to do whatever he wants,” Schroeder told The Independent. “The reason we don’t know what he would do is we have no notice or an opportunity to be heard about how broad these orders can be used.”
In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport Venezuelan men accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which many of their attorneys and family members have denied. Government attorneys have also admitted that “many” of the dozens of immigrants deported under the law — and then sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison — have no criminal records whatsoever.
In court filings, Schroeder said Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act unleashed “unbounded war powers that could apply to any immigrant or disfavored U.S. citizen,” and argued that V.L. may similarly be targeted.
In June, the federal judge overseeing the case in Guam District Court dismissed the case, noting that the government’s removal “is not based” on the Alien Enemies Act, and that Schroeder had made an “improper invocation” of that law to challenge V.L.’s detention and removal.
Nearly two months later, the Trump administration is now asking that judge to punish Schroeder over those arguments.
“I didn’t make money from this. It was a very high cost to me, and very difficult,” he told The Independent. “And the profession depends upon these pro bono cases. It depends upon normal, ordinary lawyers being willing to take time out of their schedule to help people who can’t pay. And if we don’t have that, if that all dries up, we’re going to have a huge due process issue, not just for immigrants.”
The president has raised dozens of legal threats aimed at his ideological opponents and issued a series of executive orders targeting the law firms representing them.
In March, the president ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States” — including immigration lawyers.
Lawyers for the government have accused Schroeder of arguing that he falsely claimed V.L. was facing removal under the Alien Enemies Act and continued to do so despite arguments and court orders stressing that V.L. was being deported under standard immigration law.
A sanctions motion filed on August 1 accuses Schroeder of acting “unreasonably and vexatiously.” The motion claims Schroeder continued to insist the government was trying to deport his client under the Alien Enemies Act while he “knew that assertion to be false.”
The 29-page complaint accuses him of making “bad faith” arguments, “and even if Schroeder did not know that his arguments were frivolous, at a minimum, he recklessly maintained his frivolous arguments.”
The Justice Department is also seeking sanctions as a “deterrent” to other lawyers to prevent “frivolous claims that would stoke unnecessary controversy,” government lawyers wrote.
Legal experts have warned that the motion amounts to a significant turning point in the administration’s avalanche of legal battles that appears aimed at preventing other lawyers from taking on cases against the government.
“This is just harassment of good and reasonable lawyers [and] I expect judges and the bar will see through this ruse from Trump’s DOJ,” wrote Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
The Trump administration is “stripping away a core tenet of our justice system — the ability to defend oneself against [government] accusations,” according to Justice Connection, a network of Justice Department alumni.
“This will have a chilling effect on lawyers willing to take on clients against DOJ,” the group said.
Schroeder, meanwhile, says the motion will not prevent him from continuing to represent immigrant clients.
“I’m willing to take the heat. I’m not afraid. If bad things happen, they happen,” he told The Independent. “I’m willing to go down, but I’m not going to give up.”
