INTERVIEW
Mass Deportations and the Rule of Law: A Conversation with DDC Director Alex Holtzman by Gregory DeFreitas
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workers in his undergraduate years at Kalamazoo College. After graduation, he went on to earn a law degree at Ohio State University. After earning his JD, he was awarded a fellowship from the Immigration Justice Corps in New York. Over the next three years, he represented migrant youth as a staff attorney at the Safe Passage Project, before his appointment to lead the DDC. We spoke at his office in mid-April.
hroughout the past decade’s election campaigns, immigration’s impacts on crime and the economy have held center stage. Donald Trump’s claimed that an “invasion” was underway at our southern border that could only be defeated by mass deportations – despite all evidence to the contrary. But from the very start of the second Trump administration this year, he has broadened its deportation targets beyond undocumented immigrants to include lawful foreign-born residents, even green card holders. Among the most scrutinized cases is that of a Salvadoran migrant, Kilmar Armondo Obrego Garcia, mistakenly deported without due process to a notorious El Salvador prison. Even after the US Supreme Court in April ordered the government to “facilitate” his release and return to the U.S., the Trump administration has so far shown no intention of complying.
Q: Could you first please tell us about your background and how you got into immigration law? AH: Well, my mom and her whole side of the family are immigrants from Serbia. They came prior to the war in the nineties. So I was exposed to immigration issues early, including issues of integrating into a new society and having family members who initially speak English as a second language.
Long Island has assumed an outsized role in the nation’s volatile immigration debates since the first sizeable refugee flows escaping the Central American wars began arriving in the early 1980s. Over the last decade of Trump’s political activity, he has spotlighted the region in trying to make the case that unauthorized immigration posed a growing crime threat that justified unprecedented increases in deportations. Having called the country’s cities “bloodstained killing fields” overrun with undocumented immigrant gangs, he branded Long Island a suburban test case. In a 2016 visit he told a Brentwood audience: “I never thought I’d be standing up here talking about liberating towns on Long Island where I grew up.”
Then in college, I spent a year in Ecuador, and learned Spanish. And when I came back to my undergrad, I decided that I wanted to kind of keep up that skill. Then I started working for Farm Worker Legal Services of Michigan. I did outreach. Kalamazoo was a great undergrad school for social justice and study abroad. So while I was there. I worked at this law office on farm worker legal services. I did outreach to over 100 migrant camps as part of my summer experience, I was supposed to inform workers of their civil and human rights and connect them with attorneys if they were interested. It was a law office representing farm workers. They were largely picking fruits and vegetables in the fields of Western Michigan.
A few weeks after Trump’s January 2016 inauguration, Judge Gail Prudenti, dean of the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, announced the formation of the Deportation Defense Clinic (DDC). Since it began operations in June 2017, the DDC has provided direct representation for individuals at imminent risk of deportation as well as law reform advocacy and education in communities near its Long Island base. Its legal team has represented clients from Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Cote D’Ivoire, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Peru and Venezuela.1
I was frankly appalled by what I saw. There were migrant camps built off of highways pretty hard to access. You wouldn’t know they were there unless you were kind of looking. I saw workers with terrible skin conditions from pesticide exposure, children who had been injured from falling through kind of dilapidated trailers, in these trailer parks, which were the migrant camps. Some were here lawfully on H-2B or other seasonal visas. But other workers were undocumented – maybe had already been living in Michigan and ended up taking that work without agricultural visas.
The director of the DDC since 2019 has been Alexander Holtzman, an Assistant Clinical Professor at Hofstra’s law school. He was born in New York to Serbian immigrant parents and began working with nonprofit organizations assisting seasonal migrant
Workers complained about farmers having shotguns and threatening to call ICE on them if they asked for minimum wage, 16