When I first decided I wanted to go to law school in early 2000, friends used to send me this quote as a joke. I actually had never read Shakespeare’s Henry VI, so I didn’t have the context. I just laughed it off and moved on. When I started law school at Penn State Dickinson in 2002, the Dean gave a welcome speech to all the students. He started it with Shakespeare’s famous line —“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. It got lots of nervous laughter. But he didn’t laugh. He continued and gave the context. It was never a jab at the profession. It was a warning. The rebel who speaks it dreams of dismantling order and seizing power, and knows that the quickest path to tyranny is to eliminate the people who understand and defend the law. Today, immigration lawyers stand exactly in that crucible. As due process is eroded through rushed dockets, expedited removals, chronic under-funding of courts, and policies that turn life-or-death asylum claims into administrative shortcuts and political games, the work of immigration attorneys has become one of the last safeguards against injustice.
Every time an attorney stops an unlawful removal, forces DHS to follow the statute, or helps an asylum seeker tell their story despite trauma, language barriers, or misinformation, they are fulfilling the role Shakespeare celebrated: defenders of fairness, clarity, and accountability. In a system strained by political rhetoric and structural imbalance, immigration lawyers are the ones who keep the rule of law tethered to real human beings. Shakespeare understood that if you want disorder, you get rid of the lawyers. But if you want justice, even when the system feels hostile to it, you stand with the lawyers who protect it every day.
