Immigration lawyer: COVID-19 has made a tough job nearly impossible

For Camille Mackler, the director of immigration legal policy at the New York Immigration Coalition, Tuesday was the worst day so far.

On Monday night, the Justice Department announced that New York City’s courthouse handling cases involving detained immigrants would be shut down because a staffer had tested positive for coronavirus. DOJ told lawyers to file urgent documents in immigration court in Elizabeth, New Jersey, instead. Then the Elizabeth courthouse was shut down. Then U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement announced that a migrant in a detention center in New Jersey had tested positive for COVID-19. The crowning blow came on Tuesday night: The Justice Department issued a tweet informing immigration lawyers that two previously-closed New York City courthouses handling cases for non-detained immigrants would be reopening the next day – and that all of the filings to those courthouses, for which deadlines had been pushed to April, were instead due on Wednesday.

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