If you want to understand what has changed in U.S. crimmigration practice over the past two years, start with the sheer numbers alone. A quota was initiated by the President for ICE to arrest at least 3,000 every day. That sounds almost too outrageous to be true. It’s not. The arrests are being made of various persons who are non-citizens. Often, the people arrested have been convicted of serious crimes. However, some were arrested for the most petty of crimes decades ago, and have lived good, taxpaying lives in America since, building families and even businesses that employ citizens. Someone has to bring these cases to the government’s attention, especially when these folks were erroneously advised by a lawyer years ago that they had nothing to worry about. The constitutional basis for the work, rooted in the Sixth Amendment and formalized most famously in the Supreme Court’s 2010 Padilla v. Kentucky decision, is the same as it has been since 1984 in a case called Strickland v. Washington. The case stands for the proposition that if you have a lawyer, the lawyer needs to do some modicum of an investigation into the case, give you legitimate due process, and if he or she advises you on the law pertaining to a plea agreement, the advice has to be legally correct. That basic law has been on the books for nearly 40 years. What has changed is everything around it: the enforcement tempo, the release rates, the volume of people in detention, and the speed at which removal now sometimes follows arrest.
The Numbers
According to TRAC at Syracuse University, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was holding 60,311 people in detention as of early April 2026. Of those, 70.8 percent had no criminal conviction at all. The population with criminal records, the group that triggers crimmigration work, is the smaller slice, but it faces a more complex legal fight because the immigration outcome usually depends on whether the underlying conviction can be reopened in state court.
The enforcement tempo has reshaped the operational window for that work. Research published by the Deportation Data Project found that between late 2024 and early 2026, the rate of deportation within two months of arrest for people without prior removal orders roughly doubled, from 27 percent to 57 percent. Release within 60 days of arrest, which had been common for people without convictions at about 35 percent, fell to 7 percent. The immigration court backlog reached approximately 3.7 million cases, with average processing times of four to seven years.
The practical meaning of those numbers for crimmigration attorneys is that the window between a client’s arrest and their physical removal from the country has compressed from what used to be weeks or months into something that can now be measured in days. A post-conviction motion that would have been filed over a comfortable two-week period under the old enforcement tempo now needs to be assembled, argued, and decided before a deportation flight that may already be scheduled.
The best practice is correction before an immigration arrest, and Ms. McClure is widely advocating that if a non-citizen has a conviction in their past, even if their criminal lawyer told them not to worry about it, they have to worry, and they do themselves a favor by calling her. Most likely, that advice was wrong. “2026 marks my 20th year as a criminal attorney. In all 20 years, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve seen a criminal defendant fully and properly advised of his immigration-related consequences and rights. That is shocking.”
Stephanie McClure, who runs SMC Law Group, has been practicing in this category for roughly two decades, and her caseload over the past year reads as a working illustration of what the data looks like at the level of individual files. She receives referrals from attorneys across the country whose clients are already in ICE custody and whose only route out of removal runs through vacating an old conviction in the criminal court where it was originally entered.
Two of her cases are representative. In one, a domestic violence survivor who had taken a plea to a drug-related charge fifteen years earlier on bad legal advice was in ICE detention with a final removal order and a flight scheduled for the next morning. McClure obtained an emergency hearing, challenged the underlying conviction, and secured a vacatur literally the day before the deportation flight. In a second, a man who had been living in the country for decades after a 25-year-old drug plea was erroneously taken into ICE custody outside the courthouse during active litigation. McClure returned, coordinated with the cooperating prosecutor, stopped the prison transport, got the client off the jail bus, returned to court the next week, and obtained a vacatur that erased his conviction. That man now, is a citizen of the United States.
“I don’t take easy cases,” McClure says. “I take the ones where something went wrong, and do everything within my power to fix it.“
The Operational Profile of the Practice and The Potential Growth of Immigration Firms’ Bottom Lines
What distinguishes practitioners who produce outcomes in this environment from those who do not is largely operational. The substantive knowledge base, Padilla claims, Pre-Padilla claims, criminal investigation and procedure, post-conviction procedure, immigration consequence analysis, is learnable (albeit over a significant time). The ability to deploy it inside a 48-hour window while coordinating with prosecutors, immigration counsel, detention facilities, and courts in different jurisdictions is a function of both efficiency, a firm foundation and national network, and most importantly substantive subject matter mastery, where legal arguments come together from actual experience and wisdom; not ChatGPT or young associates using A.I. drafting who’ve never actually handled a criminal case before. Such is the nature of McClure’s Firm. Firms that have not set themselves up this way are the ones making the referrals to McClure And it is working toward their benefit.
One silver lining for these referring firms is this: Once McClure cleans up the criminal work, immigration firms can pursue affirmative applications for immigration benefits and legal status that were previously barred by the criminal conviction. Immigration firms carrying lists of potential clients turned away now have a vehicle to revive that business by sending it to McClure first. “Some firms that I work with told me my practice has changed the way they do business and intake new clients. People who were previously turned away as “impossible” cases are now retained, and many firms have lists of dozens or even hundreds of these prospective clientele that are just a phone call away. Reviving untapped potential in their own databases has proven financially very profitable for many of the firms I work with.”
As far as McClure’s prosecutorial background, she prosecuted more cases than she can recall; “drug charges in the thousands; sex crimes, violent crimes, homicides, you name it” describes her case load. Noteworthy is that she was the youngest trial supervisor in her office during her first decade in law, illustrating the trust and natural talent McClure displayed in knowing how to build, investigate, and try a felony case. It gives her a structural advantage in understanding how the state’s side of the case is assembled. Her career-long focus in private practice on crimmigration gives her immigration fluency. The combination explains why attorneys she has never met end up with her cell phone number.
She holds one of the approximately 250 Certified Criminal Trial Attorney designations in New Jersey, granted by the state Supreme Court to less than 1 percent of the bar. In 2024 and 2025, sitting judges nominated her for an Excellence in Pro Bono Service Award, which the Chief Judge of the Administrative Office of the Courts himself presented. She now serves on New Jersey’s Office of Attorney Ethics. The year before, the sitting judiciary awarded her recognition for excellence in handling cases involving seriously mentally ill defendants and even asked her to assist in writing a handbook for the bar.
The broader takeaway from the data is that the gap between crimmigration practices structured for the current enforcement tempo and those that are not has widened considerably since 2024, and when legitimate skill and subject mastery are factored in. The gap widens further, with McClure seemingly sitting at the very vortex of this storm.
