Erez Reuveni, Esquire: A PROFILE IN COURAGE 2025.
Flying on the Fourth. (Author Photo)
Erez Reuveni was the lawyer that the Department of Justice sent to a hearing in Maryland on April 4, 2025. It's not like DOJ had no inkling what he would say. Reuveni had been raising concerns to his superiors about the regime's noncompliance with Court orders and candor to the Courts "for nearly three weeks," his lawyers advise.
Three weeks to the day before the Hearing in Maryland, Reuveni was promoted to Acting Deputy Director of the Office of Immigration Litigation in the DOJ. In fact, that same day Reuveni was summoned to a meeting by the Deputy Assistant Attorney General.
That was the now-infamous meeting at which Emil Bove spoke. Mr. Bove had been a criminal defense lawyer who unsuccessfully defended the regime boss in New York in the case in which the jury convicted the boss of all 34 felonies with which the boss was charged. The regime boss made Mr. Bove the Principal Assistant Deputy Attorney General.
In that capacity, apparently, Bove addressed the March 14, 2025 meeting concerning "the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts 'fuck you' and ignore any such court order."
Mr. Bove denies that he used the F-word, and he may be denying that he said such a thing at all, although the reporting does not seem to be quite as clear on that last point.
Mr. Reuveni, however, does not deny that he was in shock at hearing these words of which he had never heard the like before, and he was not the only one. Whether or not others spoke out, Reuveni did.
It was dangerous to speak out in the DOJ, but he did. As noted, he spoke to his bosses about the need for DOJ lawyers to act with truth and candor to the Courts, and to comply with the Courts' Orders.
Parenthetically, Mr. Bove has since been nominated to become a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court to which the boss's sister was appointed with the recommendation of the ubiquitous Rudolph Giuliani.
Parenthetically, Mr. Giuliani's license to practice law has since been suspended.
Back to the April 4, 2025 Hearing in Maryland. Reuveni was fully aware of how the powers-that-be at the DOJ made it a priority of the DOJ to deport people. The quicker, the better it seems. As between Mr. Reuveni and the DOJ, if anyone changed their position on complying with Court Orders and on candor to the Court, it was not Reuveni.
The Maryland Hearing was in a case involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia who had been removed from the United States to El Salvador. Judge Paula Xinis asked how that came to be despite the fact that an immigration judge had entered an Order barring the deportation.
Erez Reuveni told Judge Xinis that it was an administrative error, a mistake. On April 4, 2025 Judge Xinis commended Reuveni for his truthfulness and candor to the Court.
"Later that evening," his lawyers report, "Mr. Reuveni refused directions from his superiors to file a brief misrepresenting those facts to the court."
On April 5, 2025 Erez Reuveni was placed on administrative leave, the first step to being fired.
On April 11, 2025 Reuveni was fired from his work at DOJ, work which was recognized for a promotion by the DOJ less than a month earlier.
I understand that Mr. Reuveni is appealing his firing for a variety of reasons under the circumstances, some of them obvious I should think.
In a week ending on the Fourth of July 2025, it is appropriate to acknowledge Erez Reuveni as a 2025 PROFILE IN COURAGE. He spoke up at the DOJ and told his bosses that the regime should comply with Court Orders and the DOJ lawyers should act with candor to the Court. That's what the Disciplinary Rules and Ethical Considerations require and like it or not, that's what all lawyers are supposed to do, including DOJ lawyers. Maybe even especially DOJ lawyers.
He consistently acted with candor to Courts and in compliance with Court Orders, and it apparently cost him his job.
Reuveni did more than that, though. By his own individual conduct, by conducting himself with integrity, his behavior contrasted sharply with the actions of the people who now control the DOJ and much if not all of the federal government. His story favorably sits alongside the stories of many other people, including lawyers, who unknown to most of us were standing up for ethics and speaking back to power. Without stories like theirs, we might never have known that so many people were acting for the right, in many cases, alone. But aware of likely retribution, they stood up and spoke out anyway.
A few days past five months into this regime and it's only now that we are privileged to see what these individuals did, and hear what these lonely people spoke along the way. We could not hear them or see them, many of them, before; but we can now.
For all these things, Erez Reuveni deserves to be recognized as a 2025 PROFILE IN COURAGE.
Before concluding, here is the 35-page letter (27 pages of text plus attachments) of Reuveni's lawyers on June 24, 2025 to the DOJ Inspector General, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, and the Chairpersons and Ranking Members of the Senate and House Committees on the Judiciary.
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