Why a Devoted Justice Department Lawyer Became a Whistle-Blower

Within the early days of the primary Trump Administration, Erez Reuveni, a lawyer for the Division of Justice, went to court docket to defend the brand new President’s journey ban on overseas nationals from seven predominantly Muslim nations. He advised the federal decide listening to the case to disregard the disagreeable undeniable fact that, as a candidate, Donald Trump had argued for a journey ban on Muslims; these statements, he mentioned, didn’t justify interfering with Trump’s authority to take actions that he deemed essential to guard nationwide safety. Second-guessing a President in that method, Reuveni argued, would place the court docket and the President “in an untenable place.” Because the Administration’s efforts to limit immigration and deport noncitizens continued within the months that adopted, Reuveni defended the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers to show up at court docket hearings to arrest undocumented immigrants. He argued in help of the Administration’s determination to get rid of asylum protections for victims of home violence, and he defended its rule denying asylum to migrants on the southern border except they first sought asylum in Mexico or a 3rd nation.Briefly, Reuveni did his job as a authorities lawyer—and he did so below President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden, and through each Trump Administrations. Till, that’s, April 11, 2025, when Reuveni, after almost fifteen years on the Justice Division, was fired by Lawyer Common Pam Bondi for failing to “zealously advocate” on behalf of the US within the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who was mistakenly deported in violation of a court docket order. Reuveni’s obvious transgression was acknowledging that error in court docket, however, behind the scenes, there was much more friction, relating to Reuveni’s resistance to creating arguments that he thought of baseless. “He’s not with our workplace anymore, and he received’t be coming again,” Bondi mentioned, of Reuveni—who, lower than a month earlier, had been promoted to appearing deputy director of the Workplace of Immigration Litigation. The White Home deputy chief of workers for coverage, Stephen Miller, denounced him as a “saboteur, a Democrat.” In actual fact, state voter-registration information record Reuveni as unaffiliated.On Wednesday afternoon, I met with Reuveni at his residence, within the Washington suburbs. We talked in his kitchen for greater than two hours, as his cat intermittently jumped on the desk looking for consideration and as his canine rang a bell asking to be set free. Reuveni, who’s forty-four, was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, his darkish hair graying on the temples. This was not solely his first interview in regards to the encounters that ended his authorities profession however his first interview with a journalist ever, and he spoke with a mix of ardour and disappointment as he described the occasions that resulted in his dismissal. “They’re placing attorneys who’ve devoted themselves to public service within the not possible place of fealty to the President or fealty to the Structure—candor to the courts or holding your head low and mendacity if requested to take action,” Reuveni advised me. “That isn’t what the Division of Justice that I labored in was about. That’s not why I went to the Division of Justice and stayed there for fifteen years.”Since Trump took workplace, Bondi and different senior officers have summarily fired scores of Justice Division and F.B.I. staff, asserting a broad constitutional energy that lets them ignore common civil-service protections. Stacey Younger, who resigned from the D.O.J. in January and based Justice Connection, a gaggle that helps Division staff, estimates that about 200 folks have been dismissed. In keeping with Younger, dozens extra have been transferred to lesser positions; hundreds have resigned. Reuveni, like many others who have been terminated, has filed an enchantment on the Benefit Methods Safety Board, an unbiased company that was created to safeguard federal staff in opposition to unfair personnel practices. Late final month, Reuveni additionally took an uncommon and dangerous step: he filed a whistle-blower grievance—twenty-seven scathing pages that chart his rising alarm as Trump Administration officers, bent on deporting as many noncitizens as doable, as shortly as doable, ignored court docket orders and made false statements to judges.This morning, Senator Dick Durbin, of Illinois, the rating member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, launched texts and e-mails acquired from Reuveni’s attorneys that amplify the grievance. The paperwork help Reuveni’s assertion that Emil Bove III, the Principal Affiliate Deputy Lawyer Common, who has been nominated for a judgeship on the Third Circuit Courtroom of Appeals, advised senior officers that the Division “would wish to think about telling the courts ‘fuck you’ ” and ignore a court docket order blocking the Administration from utilizing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelans. Bove testified that he doesn’t recall making that assertion; Deputy Lawyer Common Todd Blanche wrote final month, in a submit on X, that he went to the assembly, “and at no time did anybody recommend a court docket order shouldn’t be adopted.” However Reuveni advised me that Blanche stopped into the assembly solely briefly, and a textual content change the next day between Reuveni and his supervisor, August Flentje, seems to reference the assertion. “Guess it’s discover out time on the ‘fuck you,’ ” Reuveni texted Flentje, additionally a profession official. “Yup. It was good working with you,” Flentje replied, showing to recommend that they could need to resign reasonably than violate a court docket order.In an e-mailed assertion Wednesday, Justice Division spokesman Chad Gilmartin mentioned, “There have been completely no court docket orders to debate at this assembly—regardless of what number of instances the media suggests in any other case—and it’s no shock that DOJ attorneys are inspired to vigorously litigate on behalf of the US.” The Division didn’t reply to a request for remark in regards to the newly launched paperwork. Beforehand, D.O.J. officers furiously denied Reuveni’s account. Blanche referred to as Reuveni’s allegations “totally false” claims by “a disgruntled former worker.” In a current court docket doc signed by the Deputy Assistant Lawyer Common Drew Ensign—one of many officers whom Reuveni accuses of deceptive a decide—the Division mentioned that the whistle-blower grievance had been “leaked to the press for political causes and in violation of moral duties.” However a former D.O.J. official who served in the course of the first Trump time period advised me he had “zero doubt,” primarily based on his data of Reuveni, that the allegations have been properly grounded. “He isn’t going to place one thing on the document that’s not correct,” the previous official mentioned. “He is not going to do it. He didn’t do it. Each single factor in there, I’ve little doubt, is true.”President Trump and his allies are decided to uproot the deep state, the entrenched authorities employees who they imagine have conspired to thwart Trump’s efforts, if not by outright defiance then by bureaucratic inertia. There are likely such pockets of recalcitrance. However, primarily based on the accounts of those that labored alongside Reuveni, and on the general public document of his litigation on behalf of the federal government, Reuveni was not part of that. He’s no flame-throwing member of the resistance nor unreconstructed left-winger. “He was a staunch and zealous and artistic advocate for the pursuits of the manager department—for a really muscular government department below the immigration legal guidelines,” Jennifer Ricketts, a longtime Justice Division official, who retired in 2024, advised me. “The notion that he can be fired despatched shock waves by way of anyone who has any data of Erez,” she added. “I feel they realized that, if it might occur to him, it might occur to anybody.” Reuveni’s adversaries converse of him in related phrases. “I’ve litigated in opposition to Erez for a decade and a half, gone up in opposition to him a number of instances throughout many Administrations,” Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Challenge, advised me. “I’ve at all times considered him as skilled, and by no means seen him shrink back from zealously advocating the federal government’s place.” In the course of the first Trump time period, Reuveni acquired commendations for his work suing sanctuary cities and proscribing immigration in the course of the pandemic. Ensign, asserting Reuveni’s promotion in March, described him as “a high notched litigator who has taken on a few of OIL’s most difficult instances over the previous almost 15 years.” Three months later, Reuveni accused Ensign of creating a false assertion in court docket. “If solely I might have a time machine on that one,” Reuveni mentioned, of accepting the promotion. “If it was June, and I’d seen the issues I’d seen, yeah, I feel I might have politely declined the chance to place myself in that place.”How did issues come to this? The way in which to grasp Reuveni isn’t just as a authorities lawyer however as a specific form of authorities lawyer, one dedicated to defending Presidential prerogatives and to creating essentially the most lawyerly of arguments—the plaintiffs lack standing to convey their case, the company motion isn’t but closing, the scope of the injunction is overbroad—in help of the manager department. The immigration unit wherein Reuveni labored is skewed in a conservative course: most of its workload entails defending immigration judges’ determinations {that a} noncitizen must be deported, and the remaining, as a rule, entails supporting the manager department’s actions in opposition to challenges by immigrant-rights advocates. These jobs should not for everybody. Authorities attorneys need to be keen to suppress their private views, and—to a sure extent—to toe the road of the celebration in energy. In fact, what lies between these dashes is all the things. Bondi is appropriate that authorities attorneys have an obligation to zealously symbolize their consumer. However she neglects to acknowledge that attorneys have a further responsibility, in some rigidity with the primary, of what’s referred to as “candor towards the tribunal.” This moral requirement signifies that attorneys can’t deceive courts. The duty goes even additional. They have to appropriate factual statements that turn into fallacious. They have to disclose related precedents that go in opposition to them—even when the attorneys on the opposite facet fail to convey them up. They can not submit proof they know to be false. All attorneys have this duty, but it surely carries specific weight for presidency attorneys, whose mission is to do justice reasonably than to win in any respect prices. “I feel the federal government lawyer is uniquely positioned,” Reuveni advised me. “You’re not simply serving a consumer—you’re serving the general public curiosity.”Reuveni grew up on the West Coast, the older of two youngsters. His dad and mom have been educational scientists who had emigrated from Israel. He attended Brandeis College, after which, on a full scholarship, studied at Boston College’s regulation faculty, the place his unique educational pursuits have been far afield from immigration, within the much more byzantine space of copyright and patent regulation. A 2006 scholar notice that he wrote for the regulation assessment revealed a sure unbiased streak. In it, Reuveni, a former Eagle Scout, expressed sympathy for the Boy Scouts of America, which was then going through public backlash for its anti-gay insurance policies. (Six years earlier, the Supreme Courtroom had upheld the group’s proper to exclude homosexual leaders.) Though the Boy Scouts’ angle was “incompatible with trendy notions of equality,” Reuveni argued, punishing the group for such “quasi-religious” views despatched “a divisive and condescending message: you aren’t one among us. This type of exclusion and smug superiority is the first motive why the tradition wars rage in American society.” This was a stunning place within the liberal ambiance of regulation faculties on the time, earlier than “wokeness” had entered the political debate. After graduating summa cum laude, Reuveni secured clerkships for 2 extremely regarded federal judges: U.S. District Decide Mark Wolf, in Boston, and Decide Jon Newman of the Second Circuit Courtroom of Appeals. In an interview with me, Newman described Reuveni as “modest” and “unassuming,” including, “If I requested for his opinion on a matter, he would definitely provide it, however he by no means tried to be adamant about it. He by no means pressed his view. He simply answered my query in a considerate method, and we moved on to the subsequent difficulty.”After a brief stint at a San Francisco regulation agency, Reuveni headed to the Justice Division, in 2010, in the course of the Obama Administration. He had at all times needed to work on the D.O.J., he advised me, as a result of “it’s simply such an unimaginable thrill to face up in court docket and say ‘I symbolize the US.’ . . . You’re there to not win or lose a case for Chevron. You’re not there to verify somebody will get billions of {dollars} or avoids having to pay billions of {dollars}. You’re there, ostensibly, to do the best factor.” Immigration was an unintentional specialty, but it surely turned out to be a fantastic match. “This was, frankly, attractive stuff,” he mentioned. “That is constitutional regulation.” He was quickly promoted. “I used to be doing the kinds of instances, and I used to be within the kinds of conferences, and I used to be speaking to the kinds of senior folks in companies and inside D.O.J. that make this type of a dream job—like, I’m within the room the place it occurs for this little slice of the universe.”If that room turned much less nice in the course of the first Trump Administration, it was nonetheless manageable. “Trump 1.0, they didn’t say ‘Fuck you’ to the courts,” Reuveni mentioned. In a single case, which was a type of prequel to the second-term controversies, a district decide ordered Reuveni to have a aircraft carrying migrants in another country circled as a result of he had not but had an opportunity to rule on their asylum claims. “And lo and behold, in 2018,” Reuveni mentioned, “the aircraft landed, however they didn’t take them off the aircraft. They turned that aircraft proper round and introduced them again.” Within the first Trump Administration, he mentioned, “the important thing distinction is there have been folks that also weren’t enamored of this concept of coming proper as much as the road, getting on the opposite facet, and saying, ‘Fuck you.’ ” The primary Trump Administration additionally featured Reuveni’s first brush with the ugliness of the fashionable social-media panorama as he defended the journey ban. “Individuals have been, like, ‘The place the hell is that this man from? Why can’t we get an American to defend our Muslim ban?’ ” he recalled. “And I obtained grief from the left as a result of that is, from their perspective, a really screwed-up factor. Like, ‘What are you doing defending this?’ ” Reuveni scrubbed his social-media accounts, and to today it’s troublesome to discover a {photograph} of him on-line.When it got here to immigration, the second Trump Administration began much less chaotically than the primary. That modified in mid-March, when the Administration started its effort to make use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to a supermax jail in El Salvador. In a gathering on March 14th in a convention room, Bove introduced the plans to invoke the regulation, which has been used simply 3 times earlier than and solely in wartime. This was, Bove mentioned, the “highest precedence” for the President, in keeping with Reuveni’s recollection; the planes transporting migrants can be taking off throughout the subsequent twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Then got here what Reuveni described as a “grenade” going off within the room. Bove, he mentioned, introduced, “Ought to any court docket difficulty an order saying in any other case, we might have to think about telling that court docket, ‘Fuck you.’ ” There was “a protracted, awkward, uncomfortable silence,” Reuveni recalled. “Everybody’s one another, eyes darting round.” Lastly, Flentje spoke up. “If that have been to occur,” he mentioned, in keeping with Reuveni, “we’d advise our purchasers to comply with the order.”