The Clang of the Prison Door
This is not about lawyers. It’s about power—and who has the courage to stop it.
A Door Closes
It starts with a sound. You might not notice it right away. But if you’ve spent your life inside courtrooms where the law is more myth than reality—if you’ve stood beside children fighting alone to stay in this country—you know that sound.
It’s the sound of a prison door closing.
Saturday, that sound echoed in a memo issued by President Trump. One line, buried among bureaucratic language, marks a chilling escalation:
“I further direct the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize enforcement of their respective regulations governing attorney conduct and discipline.”
That is the sound of the regime turning its attention to lawyers.
Not just any lawyers—those who have made it their life’s work to protect immigrants, children, the marginalized, the accused. This is the moment they rip the parachutes off the children—and now they’re coming for those of us who were trying to catch them.
This memo is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a signal. It means that defending the most vulnerable has now been redefined as dangerous, as suspicious, as grounds for punishment. And it means we’ve entered a new phase—one that authoritarian regimes throughout history have crossed, always on the path toward despotism.
In Nazi Germany, the regime purged Jewish attorneys and prosecuted those who dared defend the communists, the trade unionists, the disabled. In Chile under Pinochet, human rights lawyers were labeled subversives—surveilled, imprisoned, disappeared. In apartheid South Africa, the defense of Black lives in court became a prosecutable offense as lawyers like Bram Fischer and Nelson Mandela himself were persecuted for standing up to tyranny. In Erdoğan’s Turkey, lawyers were thrown in prison for “national security” violations—for doing their jobs. The pattern is not new.
Authoritarian regimes do not come first for the powerful. They come for the people who defend the powerless. Because those defenders stand in the way of absolute control.
I know this not just because I’ve read it in history books—but because I’ve lived it.
I’ve practiced immigration law in Texas for two decades, the very state where the logic of authoritarianism has been tested, refined, and normalized under the guise of immigration enforcement. DHS built its machine here, using immigrant children and families as test subjects in a system of impunity—creating a legal gray zone where the Constitution is more of an aspiration than a reality. They created, in effect, a black site for the American legal system, just out of public view.
One day in December, years ago—but not long enough ago—I received a call from the City of San Antonio. It was the Saturday before Christmas, December 23rd. A group of immigrants had been found in the back of an 18-wheeler, abandoned, trapped, terrified. The city asked if I could come help advise them of their rights, and help them share information with law enforcement about the smuggler who had locked them inside. I did what any lawyer with a conscience would do—I showed up.
Months later, I was subpoenaed and hauled into court by the State of Texas. I spent two days being interrogated by lawyers from the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton. It was a civil trial, and I was a witness—but the message in off-the-record conversations was chillingly clear: criminal charges against me, and the nonprofit I led, were on the table. For simply answering a call for help. I’ve seen the seeds of this national injustice, long before it bloomed in the open. And I’ve seen how a nation's indifference can let such a thing take root—until its branches reach into every corner of our lives.
Now, the quiet acts of cruelty once hidden behind closed doors are stepping boldly into the light.
This MAGA regime memo is not about ethics. It’s about power. It’s about eliminating opposition. It is the clearest statement yet that those who use the law to defend the targets of this regime will become targets themselves. It is meant to chill nonprofits, silence immigration lawyers, intimidate asylum advocates. It’s a loyalty test wrapped in legalese. And it won’t stop with us.
The sound of that prison door is not just symbolic. It’s strategic.
But we can still choose to stand in its way.
This Week Was a Blueprint
Some will glance at Saturday’s memo and file it away as just another weekend headline—another tremor in a landscape they’ve trained themselves to ignore. But if you’ve been tracking this closely, if you’ve refused to look away, you’ll know that what happened this weekend is not an isolated lurch toward authoritarianism. It’s the culmination of a tightly choreographed week—perhaps the most revealing yet under this regime.
In seven days, the MAGA administration unveiled the shape of its strategy. Not just who it wants to silence, but how.
It began with the shocking news that immigrants—some of whom are not Salvadoran and have no ties to El Salvador—are being forcibly removed there using a wartime statute passed in 1798. That law was designed to be used in moments of declared war, and its rare invocations in U.S. history have largely been condemned as disgraceful chapters, including the internment of Japanese Americans and other moments we have later sought to apologize for. Yet today, it has been exhumed to disappear people into a country they’ve never known, without hearings, without accountability, without the protections of due process. That is the new face of disappearance in the United States.
Next came the mass termination of legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children in federal custody. Thousands of children—some mere infants, toddlers, and what the government calls "tender age" youth—are now being thrust into the chaos of the U.S. immigration system without an attorney. Simultaneously, the government is accelerating their cases on so-called “rocket dockets,” pushing children through the legal machinery at breakneck speed. On one side of the courtroom will stand a trained government attorney. On the other—nothing but a child, alone.
And over the weekend, the final piece: the targeting of the lawyers themselves.
The message is unmistakable. First, isolate the vulnerable. Then eliminate their defenders. Do it fast. Do it legally. And hope that no one sees the pattern.
But we see it. And we will name it.
This is not a bureaucratic stumble. This is a stress test on the system’s integrity. A step-by-step plan to redefine the role of government, law, and civil society. They are not chipping away at norms—they are bulldozing guardrails.
What’s more, they’ve mastered the aesthetics of legitimacy. Memos, statutes, policy adjustments. But underneath the formalities lies raw authoritarian impulse. To disappear. To silence. To dominate. And all of it is being practiced, not in secret, but in full view—on the border, in detention centers, in courtrooms without cameras.
This is why The Firewall exists—not to document every fire, but to reveal the arsonist’s plan.
We must understand what’s happening as more than cruelty. It’s strategy. The immigration system is the training ground, the Petri dish, the place where despotism is tested—because it is where most Americans are not looking. And what is normalized there is quickly exported everywhere else.
Do not be distracted by the pacing. That is the point. The regime overwhelms the senses with daily outrages not to provoke clarity, but to provoke collapse. The news cycle becomes a smokescreen. Crisis fatigue sets in. Each new blow feels smaller than the last—until, suddenly, you wake up in a country you no longer recognize.
This was not a week of unrelated policy shifts. It was a blueprint. A preview. And if we don’t see it as such, we will lose more than a few battles. We will lose the war for the soul of our democracy.
This Isn’t About Lawyers
Don’t be distracted by this weekend’s headline. This presidential memo wasn’t really about lawyers—any more than last week’s deportations were about immigrants, or the contract cancellations were about budgets. This is not a government targeting a profession. It is a regime pursuing power.
The people being targeted—immigrants, children, public interest lawyers—are not the end goal. They are stepping stones. Soft targets. Convenient scapegoats. The real objective is to see what this regime can get away with. Who will speak up. Who will comply. Who will remain silent.
This is how despotism grows: not by immediately going after the powerful, but by stripping protections from the least protected—until those in positions of strength look around and realize they’re surrounded by a void of vanished rights and vanished voices.
The memo might use the language of “discipline” and “regulation,” but it is about something more primal. It is a warning shot. A loyalty test. A way to turn fear into compliance and make advocacy feel dangerous.
If you’re not a lawyer, you might wonder if this moment concerns you. It does. This moment concerns everyone who works in an institution, everyone who has built a career around service, knowledge, accountability, or truth. Because lawyers are not the only ones under attack. The attack has already begun on educators, journalists, scientists, civil servants, librarians, tech workers, and healthcare providers. The pattern is the same: define dissent as disloyalty, then criminalize it.
We cannot afford to let ourselves be siloed. That is exactly what the regime wants—to keep us fractured, reacting, each group defending only its own. But there will be no firewall unless we build it together. No firewall without coders who refuse to build surveillance infrastructure. No firewall without teachers who refuse to whitewash history. No firewall without journalists who keep telling the truth when the government demands a lie.
We have to stop waiting for the attack to come to our door before we act. Because by then, the system that could have protected us will already be dismantled.
This isn’t about lawyers. It never was. And that’s exactly why all of us must care.
How They Manufacture Power — and How We Take It Back
Power is not just seized. It is engineered. Constructed, piece by piece, using tools that are often invisible until it's too late: fear, repetition, spectacle, isolation, and the illusion of inevitability. The MAGA regime doesn’t just want control—it wants to convince you that resistance is futile, that the future is already written, that the descent is inevitable.
And that’s where they’re most dangerous.
This week was a masterclass in how autocrats build power in a society that still calls itself free. First, they strip rights from the most vulnerable and wait to see who notices. Then, they punish those who defend the vulnerable. Then, they spin a narrative that those defenders were never legitimate in the first place—that lawyers, scientists, journalists, and even children are somehow enemies of the state.
Every step is designed to deepen the regime’s hold and erode the people’s will to stop it. And at every step, the media unwittingly amplifies their power. Outrage drives clicks. Fear sells ads. Even sympathetic stories of victims can paradoxically reinforce the regime’s dominance by making the rest of us feel too small to help.
That’s why we have to stop letting them control the narrative. The more we allow their every action to dictate the terms of conversation, the more power we give them. Attention is currency, and we are handing it over freely.
But the truth is, they are not invincible. Their power depends on us believing they are.
So we must learn to wield our own.
We begin by understanding their tactics—so we can disrupt them. We resist being dog-walked by their crises, and instead anticipate where they are going. We stay focused on the architecture of authoritarianism—the irreversible thresholds, the prison doors before they slam shut—and we organize to block those outcomes, not just lament each step toward them.
We must stop confusing access with influence. Being invited into the rooms of power is not the same as changing the decisions made there. Often, the purpose of those meetings is not to listen—it is to pacify. To post a photo. To say, “We met with them,” while doing nothing.
That is why we must push for friction. Risk. Real stakes. Change only happens when we apply pressure that makes inaction more costly than action.
And we must understand our strength: not as individuals, but as a collective. When we unite across professions and institutions, when we refuse to be siloed, when we build a true firewall of solidarity, we interrupt the regime’s plan. We take back the initiative.
Because in the end, power is not something they have. It is something we give. And it’s time we stopped giving it.
The Firewall Starts Here
The Firewall is not just a newsletter. It is not a brand. It is not a passive place to read and react.
It is a blueprint for resistance.
This moment demands more than knowing what’s happening. It demands a strategy for what we do next—together. The memo targeting lawyers is not the endgame. It is one more lock clicking into place in a growing apparatus of control. But the door isn’t shut yet.
We still have time. Not much—but enough.
That’s why The Firewall exists: to help us identify those final doors of no return and organize the people, actions, and pressure required to keep them from slamming shut.
Every institution has its thresholds. Its levers of power. Its pressure points. And in every institution, someone holds the keys. The judge who won’t rubber-stamp a sham proceeding. The coder who refuses to write the surveillance algorithm. The dean who won’t fire a professor for dissent. The bureaucrat who delays implementation of an unlawful order. The lawyer who keeps showing up, even under threat.
We’re going to find these people. We’re going to connect them. And we’re going to support each other to hold the line—together.
That is how we fight. Not by waiting for the perfect leader or the next election cycle. But by becoming ungovernable to tyranny right now. In our schools, our companies, our courts, our communities.
And yes, we will continue to report what is happening. But we will do so with intention—not to wallow in despair, but to sharpen our strategy. To stay ahead of the regime’s next move. To choose our battles not based on their headlines, but on our values, our foresight, and our collective strength.
This is the beginning of The Firewall’s next phase. Soon, you’ll hear more about how we’re turning this space into a full-fledged organizing platform—connecting people across sectors, training for institutional resistance, and building real infrastructure for the fight ahead.
Because if we want to win, we need more than awareness.
We need action. We need courage. We need each other.
We need a Firewall.
A Closing Call to Action
There will come a day—perhaps not far from now—when a judge walks into an empty courtroom. No attorney rises for the defense. No advocate stands beside the child. The room is quiet, except for the sound of a government lawyer asking for deportation. And the door closes.
Let that day never come.
We are not helpless. We are not alone. And we are not waiting.
The Firewall is being built—not by one person, not in one place, but by all of us who see what’s coming and refuse to look away.
We need you in this fight. Not as an observer. As a builder.
If you work in tech, we need your skills to design safe, decentralized infrastructure for organizing. If you work in education, we need your courage to defend truth and free inquiry. If you’re in law, healthcare, media, finance, government, or the arts—we need your vision, your networks, your imagination.
We don’t need permission. We need commitment. And we need coordination.
So here’s how you can start:
Subscribe to this publication. Read every dispatch. Share them. Use them to start conversations in your workplace, your classroom, your union, your book club, your dinner table.
Reach out. Introduce yourself. Tell me what you do, what you see, what you want to build. You don’t need a title. You need conviction.
Organize. Wherever you are, there is something to protect—and someone who needs protecting. Start there. Don’t wait for the plan to arrive. You are the plan.
And stay tuned. In the coming days, I’ll be unveiling the next phase of The Firewall: a hub for real organizing, real tools, and real strategy. We are creating a space to connect the people and institutions that are still free—and still willing—to resist.
We are not victims of history. We are its authors.
We still have time. But the doors are closing. Let’s make sure we’re standing in them—together.
In solidarity,
Jonathan Ryan
Founder, The Firewall
#Immigration #CivilRights #Democracy #TheFirewall #Authoritarianism #LawyersUnderAttack