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.
In an e-mailed statement Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Chad Gilmartin said, “There were absolutely no court orders to discuss at this meeting—no matter how many times the media suggests otherwise—and it is no surprise that DOJ attorneys are encouraged to vigorously litigate on behalf of the United States.” The Department did not respond to a request for comment about the newly released documents. Previously, D.O.J. officials furiously denied Reuveni’s account. Blanche called Reuveni’s allegations “utterly false” claims by “a disgruntled former employee.” In a recent court document signed by the Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign—one of the officials whom Reuveni accuses of misleading a judge—the Department said that the whistle-blower complaint had been “leaked to the press for political reasons and in violation of ethical duties.” But a former D.O.J. official who served during the first Trump term told me he had “zero doubt,” based on his knowledge of Reuveni, that the allegations were well grounded. “He is not going to put something on the record that is not accurate,” the former official said. “He will not do it. He didn’t do it. Every single thing in there, I have no doubt, is true.”
President Trump and his allies are determined to uproot the deep state, the entrenched government workers who they believe have conspired to thwart Trump’s efforts, if not by outright defiance then by bureaucratic inertia. There are doubtless such pockets of recalcitrance. But, based on the accounts of those who worked alongside Reuveni, and on the public record of his litigation on behalf of the government, Reuveni was not a part of that. He is no flame-throwing member of the resistance nor unreconstructed left-winger. “He was a staunch and zealous and creative advocate for the interests of the executive branch—for a very muscular executive branch under the immigration laws,” Jennifer Ricketts, a longtime Justice Department official, who retired in 2024, told me. “The notion that he would be fired sent shock waves through anybody who has any knowledge of Erez,” she added. “I think they realized that, if it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone.” Reuveni’s adversaries speak of him in similar terms. “I have litigated against Erez for a decade and a half, gone up against him multiple times across many Administrations,” Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “I have always viewed him as professional, and never seen him shy away from zealously advocating the government’s position.” During the first Trump term, Reuveni received commendations for his work suing sanctuary cities and restricting immigration during the pandemic. Ensign, announcing Reuveni’s promotion in March, described him as “a top notched litigator who has taken on some of OIL’s most challenging cases over the past nearly 15 years.” Three months later, Reuveni accused Ensign of making a false statement in court. “If only I could have a time machine on that one,” Reuveni said, of accepting the promotion. “If it was June, and I’d seen the things I’d seen, yeah, I think I would have politely declined the opportunity to put myself in that position.”
How did things come to this? The way to understand Reuveni is not just as a government lawyer but as a particular kind of government lawyer, one committed to defending Presidential prerogatives and to making the most lawyerly of arguments—the plaintiffs lack standing to bring their case, the agency action is not yet final, the scope of the injunction is overbroad—in support of the executive branch. The immigration unit in which Reuveni worked is skewed in a conservative direction: most of its workload involves defending immigration judges’ determinations that a noncitizen should be deported, and the rest, more often than not, entails supporting the executive branch’s actions against challenges by immigrant-rights advocates. These jobs are not for everyone. Government lawyers have to be willing to suppress their personal views, and—to a certain extent—to toe the line of the party in power. Of course, what lies between those dashes is everything. Bondi is correct that government lawyers have a duty to zealously represent their client. But she neglects to recognize that attorneys have an additional duty, in some tension with the first, of what is called “candor toward the tribunal.” This ethical requirement means that lawyers cannot lie to courts. The responsibility goes even further. They must correct factual statements that turn out to be wrong. They must disclose relevant precedents that go against them—even if the lawyers on the other side fail to bring them up. They cannot submit evidence they know to be false. All lawyers have this responsibility, but it carries particular weight for government attorneys, whose mission is to do justice rather than to win at all costs. “I think the government lawyer is uniquely positioned,” Reuveni told me. “You’re not just serving a client—you’re serving the public interest.”
Reuveni grew up on the West Coast, the older of two children. His parents were academic scientists who had emigrated from Israel. He attended Brandeis University, and then, on a full scholarship, studied at Boston University’s law school, where his original academic interests were far afield from immigration, in the even more byzantine area of copyright and patent law. A 2006 student note that he wrote for the law review revealed a certain independent streak. In it, Reuveni, a former Eagle Scout, expressed sympathy for the Boy Scouts of America, which was then facing public backlash for its anti-gay policies. (Six years earlier, the Supreme Court had upheld the organization’s right to exclude gay leaders.) Although the Boy Scouts’ attitude was “incompatible with modern notions of equality,” Reuveni argued, punishing the organization for such “quasi-religious” views sent “a divisive and condescending message: you are not one of us. This sort of exclusion and smug superiority is the primary reason why the culture wars rage in American society.” This was a surprising position in the liberal atmosphere of law schools at the time, before “wokeness” had entered the political debate. After graduating summa cum laude, Reuveni secured clerkships for two highly regarded federal judges: U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf, in Boston, and Judge Jon Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In an interview with me, Newman described Reuveni as “modest” and “unassuming,” adding, “If I asked for his opinion on a matter, he would certainly offer it, but he never tried to be adamant about it. He never pressed his view. He just answered my question in a thoughtful way, and we moved on to the next issue.”
After a short stint at a San Francisco law firm, Reuveni headed to the Justice Department, in 2010, during the Obama Administration. He had always wanted to work at the D.O.J., he told me, because “it is just such an incredible thrill to stand up in court and say ‘I represent the United States.’ . . . You’re there not to win or lose a case for Chevron. You’re not there to make sure someone gets billions of dollars or avoids having to pay billions of dollars. You’re there, ostensibly, to do the right thing.” Immigration was an accidental specialty, but it turned out to be a great fit. “This was, frankly, sexy stuff,” he said. “This is constitutional law.” He was soon promoted. “I was doing the sorts of cases, and I was in the sorts of meetings, and I was talking to the sorts of senior people in agencies and within D.O.J. that make this kind of a dream job—like, I’m in the room where it happens for this little slice of the universe.”
If that room became less pleasant during the first Trump Administration, it was still manageable. “Trump 1.0, they didn’t say ‘Fuck you’ to the courts,” Reuveni said. In one case, which was a sort of prequel to the second-term controversies, a district judge ordered Reuveni to have a plane carrying migrants out of the country turned around because he had not yet had a chance to rule on their asylum claims. “And lo and behold, in 2018,” Reuveni said, “the plane landed, but they didn’t take them off the plane. They turned that plane right around and brought them back.” In the first Trump Administration, he said, “the key difference is there were people that still were not enamored of this idea of coming right up to the line, getting on the other side, and saying, ‘Fuck you.’ ” The first Trump Administration also featured Reuveni’s first brush with the ugliness of the modern social-media landscape as he defended the travel ban. “People were, like, ‘Where the hell is this guy from? Why can’t we get an American to defend our Muslim ban?’ ” he recalled. “And I got grief from the left because this is, from their perspective, a truly screwed-up thing. Like, ‘What are you doing defending this?’ ” Reuveni scrubbed his social-media accounts, and to this day it is difficult to find a photograph of him online.
When it came to immigration, the second Trump Administration started less chaotically than the first. That changed in mid-March, when the Administration began its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to a supermax prison in El Salvador. In a meeting on March 14th in a conference room, Bove announced the plans to invoke the law, which has been used just three times before and only in wartime. This was, Bove said, the “highest priority” for the President, according to Reuveni’s recollection; the planes transporting migrants would be taking off within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Then came what Reuveni described as a “grenade” going off in the room. Bove, he said, announced, “Should any court issue an order saying otherwise, we may need to consider telling that court, ‘Fuck you.’ ” There was “a long, awkward, uncomfortable silence,” Reuveni recalled. “Everyone’s looking at each other, eyes darting around.” Finally, Flentje spoke up. “If that were to happen,” he said, according to Reuveni, “we would advise our clients to follow the order.”
That was only the start of what Reuveni experienced as the most disturbing events of his legal career. At an emergency hearing the following day, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg instructed the Justice Department to not proceed with the deportation of any Venezuelans detained under the Alien Enemies Act. If there were any planes in the air, Boasberg said, they were to return and the migrants were not to disembark at their deportation destinations. Ensign, appearing on behalf of the Justice Department, told Boasberg he had no knowledge of what flights were planned—even though he had been present at the earlier meeting when Bove said the flights would take off that weekend “no matter what,” according to Reuveni’s complaint. As Ensign spoke before the judge, Reuveni and an unnamed colleague, listening in, were texting each other about the apparent misstatement. “He knows there are plans for AEA removals within the next 24 hours,” the colleague wrote. In fact, a flight left for El Salvador during the hearing. The complaint goes on to depict Reuveni trying diligently, sometimes frantically, to insure that the agencies did not remove migrants in violation of court orders—even as more senior officials were orchestrating such evasions.
The end of Reuveni’s career at the Justice Department came about in connection to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was returned to El Salvador that weekend, in violation of a 2019 court order that had found he was at risk of persecution. Reuveni told me that, at first, he did not think this mistaken removal would turn out to be such a big deal: after all, in Trump’s first term, he had seen such accidents be quickly resolved. But, this time, the White House and the Justice Department appeared determined to prevent that from happening. In an April 4th court hearing, Reuveni acknowledged that Abrego Garcia had been mistakenly deported. Afterward, Reuveni says, Ensign called and asked why he had failed to describe Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, or to argue that the original order preventing Abrego Garcia’s return to El Salvador was no longer valid because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had declared members of the MS-13 gang to be terrorists. Reuveni responded that there was no factual or legal basis to make those claims. A few minutes later, Ensign called again and told him “that these inquiries were prompted by the White House,” according to the complaint. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) Reuveni recalls that he then had a heated discussion with Flentje. Reuveni was refusing to sign an emergency brief asking the federal appeals court to overturn the lower court’s order that Abrego Garcia be returned to the United States. The brief included the arguments Reuveni considered unsupported. “You wanted to be the deputy. You signed up for this,” Flentje said, according to Reuveni. “I didn’t sign up to lie,” Reuveni replied.
At that point, “I was a dead man walking, in my mind,” Reuveni told me. He was with his family at a local breakfast place the next morning, a Saturday, when an e-mail on his work phone brought the news: he was being placed on leave. Later that day, Reuveni spoke with a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project, which is currently representing him in the whistle-blower case. Six days later, as Reuveni had expected, the suspension became a firing.
I asked Reuveni if he was worried about the consequences. “I don’t want to sound naïve. I’m fully aware that I have stuck my neck out there and I have drawn attention,” he said. “Am I afraid of retaliation? Absolutely. But, at the same time, I feel so strongly about the things I’ve seen and what it’s done to the D.O.J., what it’s done to my colleagues, what it’s done to the rule of law, that it’s worth the risk.” Reuveni was realistic about what he might accomplish. “I want people to know what happened, even if nothing changed,” he said. “People should know this is what they’re doing.” He is not sure about what will come next for him, a difficult situation for someone who told me that work was so all-consuming that he had no hobbies. Could he imagine returning to the Justice Department someday, I asked. “Yes, of course I can,” he said, and it was the happiest Reuveni had seemed during our long conversation. “To fix what has been broken.” ♦
