Senate staffer and parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who has twice rejected immigration provisions for inclusion in the budget reconciliation package, may have worked to deport immigrants when she served as a prosecutor roughly two decades ago, Pablo Manríquez reports for Latino Rebels.

Manríquez brings to light a 2012 Politico profile that noted her late 1990s work as “a Justice Department trial attorney, handling immigration cases from a gritty jail office in Elizabeth, NJ.” Respected attorneys tell Latino Rebels that her position and the location of her work means she may have argued in favor of deportations as she’s now given immense say over the future of millions of immigrants.

“Generally speaking, INS trial attorneys were similar to the ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] trial attorneys of today,” University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Immigration Clinic Director Michael Kagan told Latino Rebels. The report notes INS, or Immigration and Naturalization Service, handled deportations before Congress created ICE in 2003. “If [MacDonough] was an INS trial attorney at the Elizabeth detention facility, it’s hard to imagine what role she would have performed besides arguing for the detention of immigrants or the deportation of immigrants,” Kagan continued.

The report said that attorneys are now trying to find out more about MacDonough’s work at the Justice Department, including filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Amy Maldonado, another respected attorney who has advocated for vulnerable children in federal immigration detention,” has not received any specific information from the request, but she told Latino Rebels that she intends to pursue possible legal action against the government if the request is not expedited.” 

But Manríquez noted during an interview with The Takeaway last month that MacDonough “was an immigration attorney so long ago that those records don’t actually exist through FOIA. We’re looking for mentions of her in FOIA, because the impression that a lot of people have who worked at INS back in the day is that somebody of her role could have only done one job, and that is defend the deportations that the United States was doing at the time.”

“It seems to me like a really weird thing that you would have a deporter attorney as the impartial arbiter of an immigration reform package,” he continued.

Advocates have previously called on Senate Democrats to disregard MacDonough’s opinions. Mainstream media outlets and others have erroneously stated that MacDonough’s opinions are final rulings when in reality they are non-binding and can be overruled. Experts have also already pointed out that “[o]n both the budgetary effect and the ‘merely incidental’ test, legalization qualifies” for passage through reconciliation. Now in light of her possible deportation work, the need to disregard her opinion is even more urgent, advocates say.

“The Parliamentarian is supposed to be the nonpartisan referee of the Senate’s rules, but MacDonough is not an impartial voice on the issue of immigration,” the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) said late last month. “Before becoming the Senate Parliamentarian, MacDonough worked as a trial attorney handling immigration cases for the U.S. Department of Justice. As someone who has worked to deport people, she cannot be trusted to rule objectively on immigration issues.”

Senate Democrats may present their third immigration proposal, dubbed “Plan C,” to MacDonough as soon as this week. That plan would allow undocumented immigrants to apply for temporary deportation protections and work permits, a significant departure from the permanent relief offered by a pathway to citizenship (and promised by Democrats). She put forward her non-binding opinion against that in September. A second non-binding opinion against Plan B, which focused on legalization through a “registry,” came just days later.

MacDonough has the final word on permanent relief for millions of undocumented immigrants only if Senate Democrats allow her to have the final word. “So the parliamentarian needs to recuse on including immigration reform in this bill,” Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter tweeted on Tuesday in response to the Latino Rebels report. “And @SenSchumer and @VP need to be prepared to ignore her advice on it if she doesn’t.”