The Justice Department office that defends President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda has lost roughly a third of its attorneys over the past year, a staffing drain that has hit one of the government’s busiest legal shops as major cases move toward the Supreme Court.
The Office of Immigration Litigation had more than 300 attorneys at the start of Trump’s second term, but at least 100 have retired, quit or otherwise left since January 2025. That matters now because the office is not handling abstract policy fights. It is representing the Department of Homeland Security in thousands of habeas cases brought by detained migrants, and it has also been central to litigation over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a Salvadoran prison.
Sarah Wilson, who left in September 2025 after serving as an assistant director in the office’s general litigation and appeals section, said the work demands more than volume and speed. It requires seniority and experience to litigate cases at the scale and pace these disputes demand, she said. Wilson’s departure is part of a broader wave that has hit mid-level and senior lawyers who had worked across multiple administrations.
The departures did not happen in a vacuum. Over the past 16 months, attorneys in the office have grown demoralized by a mounting caseload and the ousting of multiple office leaders, even as the docket kept expanding. DOJ says the office is continuing to operate at full speed, and Natalie Baldassarre, a department spokeswoman, said its lawyers are still “continuing to fire on all cylinders” to defend immigration cases and file denaturalization cases against those who take advantage of American citizenship.
But former attorneys say the loss of experienced staff and leadership is changing what the office can actually absorb. To keep cases moving, the department has had to pull more than a dozen politically appointed lawyers from the Civil Division’s front office to help handle immigration matters, a sign that the strain has spread beyond the unit itself.
The office sits inside DOJ’s Civil Division and has been central to the Trump administration’s immigration litigation push, including the mandatory-detention policy now moving toward the Supreme Court. DOJ fired Erez Reuveni in April 2025 and has denied his allegation that senior department leaders coordinated to defy court orders in deportation cases. What happens next is not whether the office will keep fighting these cases. It will. The question is whether it can do so with the depth and experience that the Supreme Court fight, and the cases behind it, are about to demand.
