For nine years, the federal government paid Maria Lurye to deport criminals.
She left the immigration bench in December and now trains lawyers to stop it.
What she's selling is the exact playbook ICE built its cases on.
Former ICE Prosecutors and Immigration Judges Now Coaching Removal Defense
Maria Lurye didn't just work for ICE – she ran their cases.
From 2008 to 2017, she served as ICE's assistant chief counsel – the government lawyer in the room building the cases that sent criminal illegal aliens home.
Then she spent another eight years as an immigration judge – the person who sits in the courtroom and decides whether someone gets deported.
She left the bench in December 2025.
Within months, she was in front of defense lawyers selling access to the same gaps she spent two decades helping the government close.
Her firm, Maria Lurye Law, markets "Judicially informed strategy and practical guidance shaped by nearly two decades in immigration court."
Raisa Cohen is doing the same thing.
Cohen prosecuted for ICE from 2009 to 2016 – then Barack Obama's Attorney General Loretta Lynch put her on the immigration bench.
Her firm's pitch is even more blunt: "Former Immigration Judge and ICE Prosecutor Fighting for you."
Cohen Immigration Law Group sells case strategy, mock hearings, and legal training to defense lawyers – complete with flat-fee options and payment plans.
The firm's own marketing promises her former-judge credentials can help defense lawyers "attract new clients, and gain a competitive edge" in removal defense cases.
Both women prosecuted for ICE, served as immigration judges, and now sell disassembly instructions for the system they spent decades building.
The Aggravated Felony Loophole These Former Judges Are Teaching Lawyers to Exploit
The National Association of Women Judges hosted this in May.
Their webinar promised instruction on "precise plea language and sentencing records" – coaching criminal defense lawyers to engineer guilty pleas in ways that won't trigger deportation.
When a criminal alien pleads guilty to a charge, the exact wording determines whether it qualifies as an "aggravated felony" under immigration law.
An aggravated felony conviction triggers mandatory deportation.
A "particularly serious crime" finding does the same to asylum seekers – and the seminar covered that classification too.
A carefully worded plea – engineered with inside knowledge of exactly how immigration judges read those records – can slip past the classification entirely and keep a convicted criminal in the United States.
The curriculum also covered advising clients on the "defensive use of the 5th Amendment during hallway encounters" – meaning how to coach criminal aliens to refuse to speak to ICE agents.
And documenting ICE enforcement incidents – lawyer-speak for building legal ammunition against the agents doing the arresting.
Trump's administration has arrested nearly 457,000 illegal aliens since January 20, 2025.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress that 1.6 million illegal aliens currently have final deportation orders – roughly half with criminal convictions.
That's the enforcement effort these former judges chose to work against.
The Immigration Judge Network Coordinating Removal Defense Nationwide
This wasn't a freelance seminar run by two rogue ex-prosecutors.
Lurye and Cohen both belong to the Round Table of Former Immigration Judges – a professional network that the American Immigration Lawyers Association honored for "outstanding efforts in support of AILA's advocacy agenda."
AILA's recognition specifically cited the Round Table's work on asylum claims, immigration detention, and expanding legal access for people fighting removal orders.
Joan Churchill and Carol King – the chair and vice chair of NAWJ's own immigration committee – were also members of the same Round Table, where they had been looking for ways to file briefs in active immigration cases.
A third speaker, former judge Mimi Tsankov, is listed as an adviser to Manifest Law, a firm handling employment-based visa applications.
Former government prosecutors and judges – who collectively spent decades building removal cases against criminal aliens – now run consulting firms, host training seminars, and coordinate with immigration activist groups.
The government built their expertise on the taxpayer dime.
Now defense lawyers are paying them to use it against the largest deportation operation in American history.
Every criminal alien they help stay is one more person with a final deportation order still on the streets.
Sources:
- Natalie Winters, "REVEALED: Former Immigration Judges Train Lawyers to Help Clients With Criminal Records Avoid Deportation," The National Pulse, September 29, 2026.
- "ICE Arrests Under Trump Near 457,000," Washington Examiner, April 16, 2026.
- "ICE Ramps Up Deportation Push with 92,600 New Beds in $38.3B Expansion," Fox News, 2026.
