DOJ Immigration Veteran Resigns Over Sanctuary Group Transfer

A career leader of the Justice Department office handling civil immigration litigation is resigning after he was told to join the Trump administration’s new sanctuary city task force, according to five people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

David McConnell, a more than 30-year veteran of the department whose last day is Friday, chose to leave his post as director of the appeals section of the Office of Immigration Litigation, where he oversaw hundreds of attorneys, rather than move to the task force.

The Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group, announced in a memo the day after President Donald Trump took office, has been tasked with working with the DOJ’s Civil Division to identify state and local laws that impede federal immigration operations.

Part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the group focuses on states with so-called sanctuary policies, a catch-all term to refer to jurisdictions which limit collaboration between local officers and federal immigration authorities.

McConnell started as a trial attorney at the immigration office in 1990. He has been a leader in the immigration office since 2011, according to a Justice Department bulletin announcing his promotion.

“Dave McConnell is synonymous with immigration law in America,” said Leon Fresco, a Holland & Knight partner who worked with McConnell at the department for three years. “It’s a huge loss to the department that Dave is no longer going to be there.”

Neither DOJ spokespeople nor McConnell immediately responded to requests for comment.

Christopher Tenorio, the former deputy assistant attorney general at the office who left in December, described McConnell as “the heart and soul of the Office of Immigration Litigation.”

“Our country and the proper administration of our immigration laws will suffer from losing his stewardship. He is irreplaceable,” he said.

McConnell becomes the latest long-time senior civil servant at the department to be transferred out of their post for the sanctuary cities initiative. Others, such as public integrity chief Corey Amundson and international affairs adviser Bruce Swartz, also opted to resign rather than accept the reassignment.

Although the Trump administration had been targeting the senior ranks of other such DOJ offices not directly focused on immigration, McConnell is the first senior agency official involved with immigration known to have received the order.

The office, known by the acronym OIL, was targeted before the election in the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 policy blueprint. The project called for removing OIL from DOJ and merging it into a new border and immigration agency.

McConnell was also identified on a list of “Bureaucrat Watchlist Targets” published by the American Accountability Association, a conservative group, of people they saw as a threat to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.