Last month, Clay Jackson was at a gas station near his home in Dallas when an attendant asked if he could offer up some legal advice to an immigrant family in the neighborhood.
A father was caught up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid, and the mixed-status family with a U.S. citizen child wasn’t sure what to do next.
Jackson agreed to give them informal pro bono support in his personal capacity, not as an in-house lawyer for Fidelity National Financial, a multi-billion dollar Fortune 500 title insurance company.
“My goal was to try to find somebody just to be a conduit for them, to alleviate their immediate concerns and fear, give them just some basic understanding of what this is and how this may play out, and then try to find them with a good lawyer,” he told The Independent.
Then two people he says appeared to be federal law enforcement agents visited Jackson himself.
Two plain-clothed agents appeared at his home and accused Jackson of obstructing an investigation, he said.
Jackson talked to formerWashington Post columnist Radley Balko about the people he believed were ICE agents arriving at his door. That article, which did not mention where Jackson worked, was published April 23.
That same day, Jackson was fired.
The incident follows a series of actions from Donald Trump’s administration targeting individual lawyers and firms that provided work for his perceived political enemies. Jackson fears ICE’s threats and his abrupt termination could send a “chilling” effect preventing lawyers from pro bono work or even informal advice.
In one executive order last month, Trump accused pro bono immigration attorneys of working with their clients to “conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims” in an “attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief.”
That order also presses the attorney general to investigate immigration attorneys.
Last month, Michigan attorney Amir Makled was detained by federal immigration officers in an airport while returning from a family vacation. Boston attorney Bachir Atallah and his wife were detained at the Canadian border earlier this month.
A statement from Fidelity National Financial to The Independent noted that that the company does not discuss “personal employment matters.”
“This is to protect employee privacy and confidentiality. However, I will note that Mr. Jackson is no longer with the company,” the statement said.
Fidelity’s chief legal officer Peter Sadowski told Bloomberg that Jackson was not terminated for speaking to a reporter or for giving advice to an immigration family. “I can’t comment further, given that this is an ongoing employment matter at the company,” Sadowski told the outlet.
On March 23, Jackson alerted his bosses that he was planning to speak with a journalist about ICE appearing at his home. He felt an obligation to speak out, he said, but he claims his boss appeared dismissive of his concerns.
“They’re sending people to El Salvador without a court hearing. Every lawyer has to agree that every human being is entitled to due process. That’s the foundation of our profession,” Jackson told The Independent.
If something were to happen to him, or to the family he spoke with, and he never alerted a reporter about what happened, “it would devastate me,” he said.
“It was in good faith to be like, you know, ‘heads up, this is happening, I’m doing this because I feel like I need to do this for my conscience, and I’m going to regret if I don’t talk to this reporter, because this is an important thing,’” he said. “I’m not spray painting a federal building or something, I’m just helping people in my community.”
Jackson began to fear for his safety and sought a transfer from the Texas office, where he started working in 2023, to a branch in Chicago, where he has family.
He said that request was denied, and said his employers warned him against providing legal advice outside the scope of supporting a client. He was warned that his messages about the incident and his communications with his boss suggested that he intended to resign — which he flatly denied.
Several more days passed, and the article was published. He sent an email to other litigators at his office with a copy of the article, telling them, “if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.”
Roughly 90 minutes later, his access to work equipment and communications was “cut off,” he said. A courier knocked on his door that afternoon handing him a letter, telling him he was terminated for his “unsatisfactory performance” in violation of company policy.
Bill Foley, Fidelity’s billionaire chair, donated at least $500,000 to Trump’s campaign fundraising arms in 2020 and has supported each of the president’s campaigns. He supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary but donated $500,000 to Trump’s campaign when he emerged as the nominee.
Jackson — a former litigator with Tennessee-based firm Bass, Berry & Sims, who had previously worked with clients entangled in byzantine, often years-long immigration proceedings — says he viscerally understands how complicated, and terrifying, the country’s immigration system can be for people suddenly thrust into it.
“I’ve seen that fear. I’ve seen that ‘I don’t know if my kids are going to be safe’ fear,” he told The Independent.
“You have to make a choice. The choice is to be humane or not, and that’s why I do it,” he said. “And it wasn't because I’m some ‘raging liberal that hates immigration enforcement.’ I get it. It’s been really messed up for decades. But what we’ve never had is people being sent to a gulag without a court hearing.”
ICE did not return The Independent’s request for comment.
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