On January 7, Daniel Suitor raced the less than half a mile from his home to the spot where a federal immigration agent had just killed Renée Good in Minneapolis. He had heard from a local group chat that someone had been shot, and he wanted to bear witness. At the scene, Suitor, a lawyer, started talking to witnesses. One observer who had recorded the incident shared the video with Suitor, who sent it to local authorities and the press and posted it on social media. Soon, the images were everywhere.
For most Americans, the shocking killing of Good, followed by government officials’ “domestic terrorism” claims, brought into stark relief the brutality of the immigration enforcement operations the Trump administration unleashed in cities across the country. In the weeks after the shootings of Good and then Alex Pretti, public sentiment has reportedly turned against the crackdown and the actions of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That watershed moment proved to be a catalyst for Suitor, who, until now, primarily represented Minnesota tenants in various disputes. A couple of days after Good’s death, while recovering from emergency gallbladder surgery, he started to consider how to best employ his University of Minnesota law degree. He put his sole practice on hold and stopped taking on new cases. “It’s all hands on deck for the legal community,” Suitor declared on LinkedIn, issuing a call to action to other legal practitioners. “When this is over, will you be able to say you were one of the helpers? Which side are you on?”
Earlier this year, the self-described “nobody lawyer” and “dipshit with a 7-year-old laptop and a bad attitude,” Suitor turned to helping immigrants in Minnesota who have been swept up in the immigration enforcement dragnet and detained by ICE. Undeterred by his lack of immigration law experience, he has joined the ranks of attorneys nationwide filing so-called habeas corpus petitions in a massive legal counteroffensive to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass detention and deportation practices.
Here, Suitor describes his own experiences in this work. His observations have been edited for length and clarity.
I grew up in New Hampshire and spent most of my first few decades in New England. I moved here [to Minnesota] to go to law school. It was 2018, I was 29 years old, and I didn’t like my corporate job [as a financial analyst]. It was kind of boring. I was not living my values. It was the middle of the first Trump administration, and I’m like, what should I do? I really wanted to do employment law and fight for workers.
I wound up starting my career in tenants’ rights, working for a nonprofit called HOME Line, which I found suited me very well. Any tenant in the state can call and get free advice. Eviction is a huge deal in every state, but particularly in Minnesota. Keeping somebody in their home is one of the most powerful things you can do.
The first case I ever did [involved] a single mother. I think she had just had her third kid, and she sued for her security deposit herself and won. She got her security deposit back, but the landlord wouldn’t pay and hired a lawyer to get the judgment undone. It was a pretty simple case and a couple of grand, but it was such a lifeline for that person. Helping people, even in a small way, to claw back against these historic harms means something to my clients. And if it means something to my clients, it means something to me.
I left the nonprofit in September 2024 and did a year at a plaintiff employment law firm. I was fired in September 2025 for my pro bono work. I took a campaign practices case for two Democratic socialist candidates. I told my boss that I was going to take it on my own time. They told me not to file the case, and I said, I’m sorry, I filed it two days ago, and I was fired. I have no regrets. The next day, I started my solo practice [focused on landlord-tenant cases.]
Starting in December and January, as ICE really ramped up enforcement, a lot of people started responding. There was this loose coalition of movement lawyers who were starting to do habeas petitions and doing them really fast and dirty, and trying to just get as many people out of jail as possible. At that time, people were being moved out of state within hours. I got tapped into that.
After Renée Good was murdered, that was the moment when the legal community was like, “This is no longer just for the activists and the dirtbags around the edges.” I always joke that I’m probably like a bunch of respectable lawyers’ dirtbag lawyer friend, and then I’m a bunch of activists’ lawyer friend. I have a foot in both worlds. I put my practice on pause. My wife has a good job, but especially after I was fired, we were pretty paycheck-to-paycheck, and we didn’t have a lot of savings because she had cancer two years ago.
I was trying to make money and trying to take cases, and balance paid work with being committed to my community. I love tenants’ rights. There’s nothing I love more than going to housing court. If I could be a rat who lived under the stairs at that courthouse, I probably would. But my heart wasn’t in it. If I’m not going to give people my best, I don’t think I can take their cases. I just realized that’s what I had to do in that moment. There are times your skills really are needed and vital. What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?
“What am I supposed to do? Work out retainer agreements while I feel like I could be helping people?”
This [Minnesota] law firm organized a habeas training, and 300 attorneys showed up on Zoom. There was another one within a week that I think over 250 people attended. There was this outpouring of support from the legal community. I was still a little worried about doing it because I’m not an immigration attorney. What held me back for a week or two was wondering, What if I screw it up? What if I keep someone in jail?
I started doing the trainings, and a case landed on my lap that needed emergency help. Somebody gets grabbed, and you start burning up your social network and every resource you have available. No one could take the case right away. I can’t just sit around waiting for the right time. There is no right time. There is no perfect time. I was in the Costco parking lot, and then I wound up filing the case at 1 or 2 a.m. the next morning.
People are working at 1,000 percent capacity right now. The nonprofits only have so many resources, and the private firms are taking a lot of these [cases]. A lot of the immigration firms have to make money. They can’t do this for free, so they’re charging. I’m taking a very specific subset of cases that aren’t getting help from other resources. I do them all for free. I haven’t charged anyone a dime for this work. I’ve filed 20 cases. I think I’ve been successful in 14 so far.
A lot of my clients have had criminal histories. Some of them were just one incident, 25 or 30 years ago, and they’ve had entire lifetimes since then. In all cases, they’ve paid their debt to society through imprisonment, through probation, through all sorts of penalties. The government can deport them the right way if they want. But they’re not doing it the right way. Due process in immigration is pretty thin to begin with. If the government can’t even bother to do that, then all these people deserve to be out of detention.
My first client was a Hmong man. He was on an order of supervision, and he got scooped up. They didn’t revoke his supervision until he was already detained. When he was released from jail, he brought with him a handwritten list of people’s names and alien numbers. He said, “This is the same story as what happened to me.” Of those 18 people, I personally filed on behalf of 10, a friend filed on behalf of another one, and we’ve gotten eight released. A few are waiting. Two were denied. I’ve represented people in three different jails in Minnesota—in Freeborn, Kandiyohi, and Sherburne [counties]. My clients have mostly been released without incident.
“I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die, and you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people and that’s enough for me.”
I’m a really small-time guy. Doing 20 cases in the last month was a lot. I can do these pretty quickly, and with every single one, I get better. But there are enough cases in Minnesota to keep me busy. I don’t think I’m a special talent in any way. I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die. And you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people, and that’s enough for me.
I don’t even want the attention for this work. I’m just one guy. There are so many people doing so much more than I. I just have one small corner. The reason why I’ve talked to people about habeas work is because I want to encourage people to do it. What I want to do is get the people who are on the fence, or maybe they have a lot going on, but they see that this work is really important. I think it’s good propaganda to show that we’re winning, that when you fight, you win. You can stand up to bullies. You don’t know when you’ll be next, but prepare your own community.
The level of enforcement activity is down, but it’s still very active. There’s still this long ripple effect because they put so many people in detention. I’m cleaning up the messes of people who were arrested a month ago or two months ago. They’re still arresting more people every day. Last week, I filed for somebody who had been detained two or three days before. They’re still throwing more people on the pile.
We got all these people out on habeas, but ICE is going to try to deport them. I always say I’m not an immigration attorney; I can’t stop your deportation. How do we train non-immigration attorneys to do removal defense? That’s the next battle. There’s a level of camaraderie right now in the state bar that I haven’t felt before in my relatively short career. As things slowly go back to normal, I hope we remember this moment.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.