Ruth Marcus writes:

In the early days of the first Trump Administration, Erez Reuveni, a lawyer for the Department of Justice, went to court to defend the new President’s travel ban on foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He told the federal judge hearing the case to ignore the unpleasant fact that, as a candidate, Donald Trump had argued for a travel ban on Muslims; those statements, he said, didn’t justify interfering with Trump’s authority to take actions that he deemed necessary to protect national security. Second-guessing a President in that way, Reuveni argued, would place the court and the President “in an untenable position.” As the Administration’s efforts to restrict immigration and deport noncitizens continued in the months that followed, Reuveni defended the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to turn up at court hearings to arrest undocumented immigrants. He argued in support of the Administration’s decision to eliminate asylum protections for victims of domestic violence, and he defended its rule denying asylum to migrants at the southern border unless they first sought asylum in Mexico or a third country.

In short, Reuveni did his job as a government lawyer—and he did so under President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, and during both Trump Administrations. Until, that is, April 11, 2025, when Reuveni, after nearly fifteen years at the Justice Department, was fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi for failing to “zealously advocate” on behalf of the United States in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported in violation of a court order. Reuveni’s apparent transgression was acknowledging that error in court, but, behind the scenes, there was even more friction, regarding Reuveni’s resistance to making arguments that he considered baseless. “He’s not with our office anymore, and he won’t be coming back,” Bondi said, of Reuveni—who, less than a month earlier, had been promoted to acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. The White House deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, denounced him as a “saboteur, a Democrat.” In fact, state voter-registration records list Reuveni as unaffiliated.

On Wednesday afternoon, I met with Reuveni at his home, in the Washington suburbs. We talked in his kitchen for more than two hours, as his cat intermittently jumped on the table seeking attention and as his dog rang a bell asking to be let out. Reuveni, who is forty-four, was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, his dark hair graying at the temples. This was not only his first interview about the encounters that ended his government career but his first interview with a journalist ever, and he spoke with a mixture of passion and sadness as he described the events that resulted in his dismissal. “They’re putting attorneys who have dedicated themselves to public service in the impossible position of fealty to the President or fealty to the Constitution—candor to the courts or keeping your head low and lying if asked to do so,” Reuveni told me. “That is not what the Department of Justice that I worked in was about. That’s not why I went to the Department of Justice and stayed there for fifteen years.”

Since Trump took office, Bondi and other senior officials have summarily fired scores of Justice Department and F.B.I. employees, asserting a broad constitutional power that permits them to ignore regular civil-service protections. Stacey Young, who resigned from the D.O.J. in January and founded Justice Connection, a group that supports Department employees, estimates that about two hundred people have been dismissed. According to Young, dozens more have been transferred to lesser positions; thousands have resigned. Reuveni, like many others who were terminated, has filed an appeal at the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that was created to safeguard federal employees against unfair personnel practices. Late last month, Reuveni also took an unusual and risky step: he filed a whistle-blower complaint—twenty-seven scathing pages that chart his growing alarm as Trump Administration officials, bent on deporting as many noncitizens as possible, as quickly as possible, ignored court orders and made false statements to judges.

This morning, Senator Dick Durbin, of Illinois, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released texts and e-mails received from Reuveni’s lawyers that amplify the complaint. The documents support Reuveni’s assertion that Emil Bove III, the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, who has been nominated for a judgeship on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told senior officials that the Department “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ ” and ignore a court order blocking the Administration from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelans. Bove testified that he does not recall making that statement; Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote last month, in a post on X, that he went to the meeting, “and at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” But Reuveni told me that Blanche stopped into the meeting only briefly, and a text exchange the following day between Reuveni and his supervisor, August Flentje, appears to reference the statement. “Guess it’s find out time on the ‘fuck you,’ ” Reuveni texted Flentje, also a career official. “Yup. It was good working with you,” Flentje replied, appearing to suggest that they might have to resign rather than violate a court order. [Continue reading…]