The doorbell rang at 7 a.m.
Jonathan Wilcox
Peter Mumford
American-born Celeste Addai (shown with son Kwasi) is forced to meet in secret with her husband, who could be deported at any time.
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Barbara Chaudhary was putting on makeup and so asked her husband, Masud, to get out of bed and answer.
As it turned out, he was the one the visitors wanted to see. Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had come to the Bothell home to take Masud away.
A native of Pakistan and a citizen of Canada, the 50-something engineer once held a green card. But he'd pleaded guilty a few years before to a theft charge involving some items pilfered from Target. As a result, an immigration judge had ordered him expelled from the country.
Even so, Masud and his wife were shocked to see the agents. After all, his case was being appealed in federal court—or so they thought.
"I have a lawyer. I gave him fees and everything," Masud told the agents.
But when Masud's wife mentioned their lawyer's name, Antonio Salazar, it elicited a surprising response from the agents: laughter.
"Salazar? You guys used Salazar as a lawyer?"
Unbeknownst to the Chaudharys, Salazar had never filed an appeal of their case. And this was by no means the first time the attorney had failed to follow through on a case.
So as a school bus rolled up for the Chaudharys' oldest daughter (then in middle school), and their preschooler was asking what was happening to Daddy, the agents handcuffed Masud and transported him to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where he was kept for more than a month before being deported to Canada.
"It was just heartbreaking," Barbara recalled at a disciplinary hearing regarding Salazar's conduct held by the Washington State Bar Association last October, a year and a half after Masud was kicked out of the country. A nurse at Children's Hospital, she said she felt the trauma all the more acutely because she had previously lost a husband and a son in a fatal car accident.
Salazar, who works out of a Lake City Way office and frequently represents clients in the courtrooms of the Northwest Detention Center, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Barbara Chaudhary. (Her husband could not be located.) At the hearing, however, Salazar said he'd told Masud he was not filing the appeal until he received the last $500 of his $1,500 fee.
Hearing Officer Kimberly Boyce, in her findings of fact, concluded that Salazar's claim was not credible, especially since the Chaudharys had a receipt marked with the words "payment in full for 9th Circuit petition."
The Chaudharys' grievance was just one of six against Salazar that were reviewed by the hearing officer in October. Most told a similar tale—of missed deadlines, work never performed, and life-altering consequences for Salazar's clients and their families. In fact, a stack of Bar Association records several feet high—dating back to 1990 and encompassing seven prior disciplinary actions involving 13 clients—tell that story, as do multiple lawsuits and Seattle Weekly interviews with Salazar's clients and colleagues.
Given that history, and the more recent cases, Boyce recommended that the bar's disciplinary board ask the state Supreme Court to disbar Salazar. Three weeks ago, the board made that request, and now Salazar's fate is before the court. The court's decision is expected soon.
Veteran immigration attorney Bart Klein wonders why it took bar officials so long to take this step. "They've been sitting and doing nothing against him for years," he contends.
If Salazar is finally disbarred, it will be the end of a 35-year legal career that has been both celebrated and strange. Coming from a farm-working family of Mexican descent, Salazar was one of the first Latino attorneys in this state, according to several of his colleagues and former associates. Despite years of complaints, he developed a high-volume practice, while also running a side business producing risqué calendars featuring buxom "Seattle Latinas."
Salazar is emblematic of a subset of immigration attorneys who are negligent, incompetent, predatory, or all three. They hang out their shingles within a byzantine immigration system that requires expert command, but offer none, taking advantage of people desperate for their help and messing up in ways their clients may not understand until it's too late.
"It's a significant problem because the stakes are so high," says Jorge Baron, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.
The proportion of bad lawyers in the field may be relatively small. Only four immigration attorneys in Washington were disciplined last year, and eight the year before, together representing less than 3 percent of the 473 attorneys who identify their specialty as immigration law. Baron says the effect is compounded by the fact that they, like Salazar, often run their businesses as "mass operations."
Celeste Addai is a native-born American who works at a Medicaid office at Harborview Medical Center. Her husband is a Ghanaian who came here on a student visa in 1991 and overstayed. When they married in 2001, he normally would have been considered a good candidate for citizenship, given that he had come here legally and committed no crimes.
But although the couple didn't know it, his fate was already close to sealed by the time he wed. Today he could be deported at any time, which is why the couple meets only in secret.
