Some researchers are assessing just how attorneys are going to stay in business. Kocher is a faculty fellow at Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which uses public records to study the federal government. His research is part of the National Immigration Lawyer Survey, a collaboration with Maya Barak at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Katherine Abbott at the University of New Hampshire, and will be part of several forthcoming academic studies, including some about the economics of immigration lawyers.

For ethical reasons, the researchers were unable to share the survey results directly, but Kocher paraphrased some responses for the Prospect. In one example, an immigration attorney at a firm with several other lawyers handled a caseload that was 80 percent removal defense. But under Trump, removal cases were moving too fast for clients to make payments. Consequently, the firm can’t take these clients, because they’re unlikely to get paid. “The reality is that in the immigration field, you’re always on a knife’s edge in terms of breaking even and balancing your budget,” explained Kocher.

“The big story is that all of these changes that the administration is putting in are not just directly targeted at immigrants themselves,” explained Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at Syracuse University whose research focuses on immigration. “They’re quite targeted at destroying the immigration law profession.”