The first time I heard of Alejandra Driskell was in 2014, when the Texas Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit in Bexar County accusing her of practicing immigration law without a license.
The assistant attorney general who’d filed the lawsuit against Driskell, her then-husband, and others was kind enough to include in the public record hundreds of pages of depositions that outlined in great detail the shady side of San Antonio’s immigration law community. The depositions described her first operating as what’s called a “case runner,” someone who illegally solicits clients for a lawyer. Driskell worked at several law firms over two years, per the depositions, and was particularly active at the South Texas ICE Processing Center, a privately run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Pearsall where nearly 2,000 people are held in warehouse-like barracks. One attorney paid her a $400 weekly stipend plus a $50 bonus for every client she brought in, according to her own deposition. Another paid her a third of whatever fee the client paid, she testified.
