Did you have immigration lawyer watch list on your 2025 authoritarianism BINGO card? If so, congrats! But for everyone else, it’s yet another sad slide into federal control to learn that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posted what appears to be a covert roster of immigration attorneys buried on its own website.
The list was discovered by attorney Arlene Amarante, who stumbled upon the list while interacting with ICE’s website and found her own name on it. The list has since been pulled from the website, which is usually what agencies do when a documents is totally normal. Now Al Otro Lado, an immigration advocacy group, has filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding to know who created the list, why it existed, and what ICE thought it was doing cataloging attorneys in the first place.
You don’t accidentally publish the list.
At very large organizations, sharing files easily is a pain in the ass. The available tools are usually tied to your Active Directory, which means you have to know who you’re sharing with, or at least have some idea of what permission groups allow what access.
To share documents appropriately, you still have to do the hard work of finding out who and what permission groups you should be sharing with, even if that means coordinating with other IT teams to make sure you understand their permissions structures properly.
Or you half-ass it, and put the document somewhere public and hope the link doesn’t get shared beyond your control (or found).
I guess I’m saying it’s not intimidation, accident, or resistance — just laziness and stupidity. Both of which are not unfamiliar ground for this administration.
Even easier with SharePoint. A part of my job is making sure that users doesn’t accidentally share literally everything with everyone.