Erick Widman, principal at Passage Immigration Law, talks about how his firm is adapting to a second Trump administration.
Erick Widman’s interest in immigration law came of personal necessity.
Widman grew up in Silicon Valley. After attending UCLA and law school at UC Davis, he took a job teaching law in Hungary — where he met a Hungarian woman and married her in 2001.
“She was my first immigration law client, in a sense, and that persuaded me to get into immigration law,” Widman tells Oregon Business.
When he first returned to the U.S., Widman was in-house counsel working on business contracts and immigration for Philips Electronics in Silicon Valley, before moving to Portland in 2008 and opening his own practice.
That practice — Passage Immigration Law — now has a staff of 12, including five attorneys, and satellite offices in Seattle and Los Angeles as well as its Portland headquarters.
Earlier this year, Passage moved its Portland headquarters to a new office located directly across the street from the Portland field office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Pearl.
“I have a business immigration background because of Philips Electronics. But starting out, getting my first set of initial clients, it was often people like me: Americans who had married foreign nationals,” Widman says. He worked with those couples to handle green cards, a process called adjustment of status. Over time the firm’s focus shifted to family and business integration — and now, in view of President Donald Trump’s second term, removal defense.
“It’s just going to be necessary to have that practice area,” Widman says.
Widman spoke to Oregon Business in January, just days after Trump was inaugurated for his second term. The vibe, he said at that time, was already noticeably different.
“There was kind of a sense [during Trump’s first term] they knew they wanted to get tough on immigrants, but many people point out they didn’t really know what they were doing and kind of sloppily constructed executive orders,” Widman says, such as a Muslim ban that was shut down multiple times.
“This time, however, it’s much more focused, much more deliberate. They learned a lot of lessons,” Widman says. But the administration was still issuing executive orders that faced immediate legal challenges — including one challenging birthright citizenship, which was shut down in Washington state with an injunction within hours of its issue. (That legal challenge was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court as this issue went to press.)
When Widman spoke with OB in January, he said clients and potential clients were reaching out with a host of concerns across the firm’s major practice areas, with family-based immigration clients worrying about family members; businesses or immigrants who have immigrated on work visas expressing concern about threats to programs like the H1B visa program; and deportation defense, where there is the most fear.
When OB spoke with Widman again in April, he said his office was receiving a wider variety of inquiries, including from individuals who, as naturalized U.S. citizens, are concerned about being denaturalized. That process is rare; those who are denaturalized are generally accused of “doing really horrible things,” like lying to get citizenship, Widman says.
A lot of the firm’s work involves reassuring people that they still have rights — and that includes holding open houses and workshops with the community to educate people on their rights — and reassuring them that the judiciary is not going to go away, that so far many executive orders have been met with immediate legal challenges and injunctions.
Day to day, the work involves meeting with clients and potential clients about their concerns. Most of the time, he said, “people do have a remedy. If they’re nervous, they can naturalize.”
He has spoken to clients who want to leave the U.S. and want to discuss their options, but so far such inquiries are the minority.
“There’s some of that, for sure, but day to day, we’re talking to nervous people about their options, and the challenge is showing them what they can count on in weeks to come, because things are changing so quickly. Where is the certainty that they can that the rug won’t be pulled out from under them?” Widman says.
Dealing with that uncertainty means the work can be not just demanding but can burn attorneys out.
“Trump 1.0 burned out a number of good immigration attorneys, and removal-defense work is the toughest — the tears, the stress, the high-stakes situations, that’s really rough. And in general, there are all kinds of studies out there about how lawyers have high rates of alcoholism, high rates of stress and anxiety. So you combine these things together, it could be really, really toxic,” Widman says. He works to encourage high morale in the firm — encouraging staff to praise each other in the firm’s Slack channel.
“We have to keep things in perspective and keep positive and focus on solutions. And you have to have hobbies and exercise a lot, meditate, all of the good stuff to keep yourself healthy.”
There’s also the matter of minding the store.
“In law school, they certainly don’t teach you how to run a business,” Widman says. Doing good work helps, as it leads to word-of-mouth referrals and good reviews — and being located across from USCIS also helps draw interest in the firm, along with traditional marketing.
“People don’t get into immigration law because it’s lucrative, and that makes the people who do this work really enjoyable. It’s often a labor of love,” he says.
“There are a lot of fearful people, especially about travel,” Widman says. “And there are a lot of legitimate fears, because the Supreme Court has said that the Fourth Amendment, which protects all of us from unreasonable search and seizure — the protections are not the same at the border when you’re traveling, compared to if you were stopped by the police in the middle of the U.S.” That has led to travelers from other countries — and U.S. citizens — being put into “secondary inspection,” a “kind of purgatory where they can hold you for a while,” Widman says.
And — as with economic policy, including tariff news that seems to change hourly, and international relations — there’s “a lot of uncertainty in immigration policy,” he says.
While Widman says he spends a fair amount of time reassuring clients that the judiciary isn’t going away and that the administrative branch can’t simply do whatever it wants, there is still a more foundational concern about due process.
“The scary part is when the executive branch is ignoring the judges’ clear rules, — that should make us all fearful. A true constitutional crisis is when the three branches are not following their clear roles. Thankfully there has been pushback, thanks to the press, who are highlighting that; I saw lots of town halls with citizens speaking out. It’s not a liberal or conservative issue; Americans are concerned about due process. It invokes freedom of speech and fundamental liberties that are key for everybody. It’s not a political issue. It’s ‘What does it mean to have a democratic republic?’ Really foundational stuff.”
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