Hours after Donald J. Trump was sworn in for a second term, he issued an executive order laying the groundwork for mass deportations of immigrants and denying them legal assistance.
Public interest groups focused on immigrant rights teamed up to fight the order and called in Gibson Dunn, a major law firm with the resources to help take on the White House. In January, Gibson Dunn, working with the groups, sued the Trump administration seeking to restore legal help for immigrants facing deportation.
Two months later, Gibson Dunn changed its tune.
Even though lawyers from the elite New York law firm had already been working with the public interest groups on drafting another lawsuit, Gibson Dunn said it could not put its name on this latest case, according to five people with direct knowledge of the matter who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared alienating Gibson Dunn.
Lawyers from Gibson Dunn explained that it was afraid of incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath if the firm was associated publicly with a lawsuit that sought to restore legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children, the five people said. Gibson Dunn is not the only large law firm shying away from immigration litigation.
Since March, Mr. Trump has targeted numerous large law firms with executive orders that would cripple their businesses by barring them from representing clients before the federal government. Many of the big firms have opted to reach deals with the White House to avoid Mr. Trump’s issuing an executive order against them. Other firms have challenged the orders in court.
Gibson Dunn has not received such an executive order or reached a deal with Mr. Trump.
But Gibson Dunn’s wariness about the recent immigration lawsuit shows that even firms that have not been targeted directly by Mr. Trump are declining to participate in legal work that challenges his agenda.
Michael Lukens, the executive director for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, one of the public interest groups that worked with Gibson Dunn on the immigration cases, acknowledged that he was “seeing the industry shy away from engaging in immigration pro bono.” But he credited Gibson Dunn for its support through the years.
Groups like the Amica Center have long relied on big law firms to provide legions of young lawyers and paralegals who can help prepare cases free of charge. Traditionally, pro bono work has been intended to help the poor and defenseless.
It is a drastic change from Mr. Trump’s first term, when many big law firms frequently challenged the administration. Skadden Arps has a foundation that funds a fellowship program that enables young lawyers to work for public interest groups. In June 2017, a posting on the Skadden Foundation’s website celebrated the work of a fellow who had helped challenge Mr. Trump’s order barring people from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States. That same year, Skadden rolled out an online platform to quickly pair low-income immigrants with legal services.
Some public interest groups expected that Skadden would be a reliable partner on immigration cases during the second administration. But since Skadden reached a deal with the White House in March to avert an executive order, the law firm has declined to join a public interest group on a lawsuit challenging one of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Davis Polk was another big law firm that helped people ensnared in Mr. Trump’s immigration policies during his first term. In January 2017, the firm deployed some of its lawyers to Kennedy International Airport with people who were searching for family members had been detained as part of the Muslim ban.
But shortly after Mr. Trump won re-election, a prominent nonprofit reached out to Davis Polk to ask if the law firm would do research about the legality of one of Mr. Trump’s immigration proposals. The firm simply said no, according to a lawyer with the organization who asked to speak without identifying her group.
The lawyer interpreted Davis Polk’s response as “anticipatory obedience,” in part because the law firm had done similar work in the past. The firm has not been targeted with an executive order or settled with the White House.
Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project, a nonprofit that litigates cases for immigrants and pushes for their rights, called the large firms’ recent pivots “part of the chilling effect” of Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
“It has gotten much harder to get law firms to take a case on pro bono,” Ms. Shebaya said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Trump has made it clear he does not want elite law firms doing work that undermines his agenda. In his executive orders, he has criticized firms for representing clients he doesn’t like and conducting “harmful activity through their powerful pro bono practices.”
Instead, he has been requiring firms that settled with him to work pro bono on causes favorable to his administration, such as veterans affairs and fighting antisemitism.
Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that said law firms could be enlisted to defend police officers accused of brutality.
Public interest groups, aware of the pressure facing major law firms, are wary about criticizing the firms that are turning down immigration cases. Officials with some of these groups said they hoped that law firms would become partners with them again when Mr. Trump’s pressure started to wane.
“The fact that we’re just 100 days in, and the Trump administration has already been incredibly successful at taking some of its legal opposition off the playing field is truly terrifying,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer whose firm has sued the Trump administration on behalf of a fired member of the National Labor Relations Board and a union representing employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
For now, public interest groups are seeking new partners. One of those is David Zimmer, a lawyer in Boston, who recently started his own firm with two other longtime lawyers. Mr. Zimmer, who left the large law firm Goodwin Procter, where he was a partner focused on appeals, said he had already been approached by public interest organizations looking for pro bono help on immigration cases.
“We opened our doors in March, and have been approached to handle cases that big firms no longer wanted to be associated with,” Mr. Zimmer said.
Democracy Forward and Public Citizen, two large public interest legal groups, also said they were trying to add staff to the fill in the gaps left by large law firms declining to work on cases. Democracy Forward recently hired a number of lawyers who previously worked for the Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Democracy Forward is one of the lead attorneys on 59 cases against the administration. Those cases are among the roughly 350 lawsuits that have been filed challenging Trump administration policies, according to a New York Times tally.
“Large law firms that were frequent defenders of the rule of law have been unwilling and unable to take up that mantle,” said Skye Perryman, the chief executive of Democracy Forward. “We are seeing exponential increases in demand for our work, and we are going to continue to encourage the private bar.”
Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.
