At a petrol station near Clay Jackson’s home in Dallas last month, a worker asked him if he could help an immigrant family in the area with something legal.
A family with a child who is a U.S. citizen wasn’t sure what to do after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid caught the father.
Jackson told them he would help them out informally for free, but not as an employee of Fidelity National Financial, a Fortune 500 company worth billions of dollars in assets.
He told The Independent, “My goal was to try to find someone who could be a conduit for them, ease their immediate worries and fears, and give them a basic understanding of what this is and how it might play out. Then I would try to connect them with a good lawyer.”
Then, he says, two people who looked like federal police officers came to see Jackson.
He said that two agents in plain clothes showed up at his house and accused him of blocking a probe.
Jackson told Radley Balko, a former writer for the Washington Post, about the people he thought were ICE agents who were at his door. The story came out on April 23 and didn’t say where Jackson worked.
He was fired that same day.
This happened after a string of actions by Donald Trump’s administration against lawyers and law companies that did work for people he thought were political opponents. Jackson is worried that ICE’s threats and his sudden firing could make lawyers less likely to do free work or even give informal advice.
In a recent executive order, Trump said that pro bono immigration lawyers were helping their clients “hide their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims” in order to “get around immigration policies put in place to protect our national security and trick the immigration authorities and courts into giving them undeserved relief.”
The order also tells the attorney general to look into immigration lawyers.
Last month, Amir Makled, a lawyer from Michigan, was stopped by federal immigration officers at an airport on his way back from a family holiday. Bachir Atallah, a lawyer from Boston, and his wife were stopped at the border with Canada earlier this month.
Fidelity National Financial told The Independent in a statement that the company does not talk about “personal employment matters.”
“This is to protect the privacy and security of our employees.” There was a note that said, “I will note that Mr. Jackson is no longer with the company.”
Bloomberg talked to Fidelity’s chief legal officer, Peter Sadowski, who said that Jackson was not fired for talking to a reporter or helping an immigrant family. Sadowski told the news outlet, “I can’t say anything else because this is still an ongoing employment matter at the company.”
Jackson told his bosses on March 23 that he was going to talk to a reporter about ICE showing up at his house. And he said he felt compelled to speak out, but he says his boss seemed to ignore his worries.
“People are being sent to El Salvador without being heard in court.” Each and every lawyer has to agree that everyone has the right to due process. “That’s what our job is based on,” Jackson told The Independent.
He told the reporter that if something happened to him or the family he talked to and he didn’t tell anyone, “it would destroy me.”
“I was telling this reporter in good faith, ‘Hey, this is happening. I’m doing this because I feel I need to do it for my conscience. I’m going to regret not talking to this reporter about this because it’s important,'” he said. “I’m not spray painting a government building or something; I’m just helping people in my neighbourhood.”
Jackson began to worry about his safety and asked to be moved from the office he had been working in since 2023 in Texas to one in Chicago, where he has family.
He said that his request was turned down and that his bosses told him not to give legal advise that wasn’t related to helping a client. He was told that his texts about the event and conversations with his boss made it look like he planned to quit, which he denied completely.