After 23 years on protection, veteran Federal Defenders lawyer Deirdre von Dornum is itching to play offense.
The longtime public defender — often called a smiling authorized gladiator who’s gained uncommon acquittals in a federal system the place prosecutors prevail at trial 90% of the time — is making the transfer to the Manhattan-based regulation agency Sher Tremonte to battle the Trump administration over immigration and First Modification instances.
“I intend to use that skill to ensure dissent is not silenced.”
Lawyer Deirdre von Dornum is pictured outdoors Brooklyn Federal Court docket in Brooklyn, New York, on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2025. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Day by day Information)
The 56-year-old litigator is becoming a member of Sher Tremonte, a litigation boutique agency, that, most lately, represented the plaintiffs in a case difficult the Trump administration’s efforts to deport non-citizen faculty college students and school, like Columbia College grad pupil, Mahmoud Khalil, participate in pro-Palestinian protests.
Massachusetts Federal Court docket Choose William Younger dominated for the scholars final month in a blistering opinion that blasted Trump for ignoring the regulation and the Structure.
Von Dornum stated she hopes to pursue related instances.
“I’m making it so I have more freedom to take on cases against the administration, not just do reactive criminal cases,” she stated.
Von Dornum, a Columbia College Regulation Faculty graduate who clerked for Supreme Court docket Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, served because the Federal Defenders Lawyer-in-Cost of the Japanese District of New York, lately stepping down from that prime spot to signify shoppers full-time.
She’s so properly regarded in her area that Juliana Margulies shadowed her for a number of days to organize for her protection lawyer character on “The Good Wife.”
Julianna Margulies attends a non-public screening of ‘Millers In Marriage’ hosted by ROAR Ahead and Esquire at Lincoln Heart on February 20, 2025 in New York Metropolis. (Photograph by Santiago Felipe/Getty Photos)
“There is nothing more unsettling to a lawyer than a smiling adversary, and Deirde has hard earned confidence, intelligence and experience behind her smile,” stated former Brooklyn U.S. Lawyer Seth DuCharme. “She has a genuine enthusiasm for litigation.”
Von Dornum led the cost towards horrific circumstances on the MDC Brooklyn jail, urgent federal Bureau of Prisons officers throughout an eight-day blackout within the lifeless of winter 2019, after a flood of complaints about no warmth, noxious fumes and no electrical energy. Jail officers stored suspending authorized visits and claiming that the lights and warmth had been nonetheless on, main a federal choose in Brookyln to ship von Dornum into the jail to see for herself what was occurring.
“What started our MDC litigation was just a flat out lie of the lights are on, the heat is on. And we were standing there in the freezing cold and dark,” she stated.
Von Dornum was additionally a part of the group that challenged Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s dying sentence, and considers the ruling to overturn the sentence one in every of her profession highlights. Although the Supreme Court docket upheld the dying sentence in 2022, Tsarnaev’s destiny stays up within the air after an appeals courtroom ordered a probe into claims of jury bias final yr.
She credit Ginsburg’s classes about consideration to authorized element as what led by way of her first breakthrough within the appeals course of, when she seen skipped numbers on the docket.
“I saw the power not just of strong beliefs, but of making really careful legal judgments and writing really tightly so that it can’t be undone,” von Dornum stated of Ginsburg. “I was really amazed by her ability to go piece by piece, so that it could never be changed.”
Former Assistant U.S. Lawyer Nicole Argentieri stated von Dornum can also be keen to construct relationships with prosecutors and federal brokers, regardless of sitting on the protection desk.
“Even though there were times we were adverse and she was tough, she was very practical and willing to work through issues where we could. She picks the fights that matter, not every fight,” she stated.
A kind of fights was the trial of Thomas Welnicki, 75, who was accused of threatening to kill President Trump in a sequence of rambling telephone calls to the Secret Service in 2021.
In an argument that included lyrics from the John Lennon track, “Imagine,” von Dornum stated Welnicki wasn’t making precise threats — he was merely unhappy, drunk and lonely whereas cooped up in his Queens house through the pandemic and the Secret Service had been those to take his calls.
The jury acquitted Welnicki, who three years later calls von Dornum “an angel” and a “warrior woman.” Welnicki, who goes by the nickname Knicky Knightrow, stays in contact together with her, sending her traditional rock playlists.
