Over lunch at Harborview's cafeteria, Addai attributes her husband's situation to years of bad legal advice that has cost the couple some $20,000. "I'm a U.S. citizen," she says. "I never knew how many crooked attorneys there were out there."
One, by her account, promised to do pro bono legal work for the couple, then sent a collection agency after them for an outstanding fee of $4,000. The collection agency sued, but a King County District Court judge found there was no proof of debt and ordered the agency to pay Addai and her husband $500 instead. Other attorneys simply made promises they couldn't keep.
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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In a crowded field, though, Addai singles out one attorney for particular scorn: Salazar, someone she now calls "the worst attorney you could go to."
Addai's husband first went to Salazar for help in the mid-1990s, before the couple met. Once a computer-science student, he had left school due to financial problems, and was therefore no longer eligible for a student visa. He decided to apply for asylum instead. He tells his story in a declaration he later submitted to the Department of Homeland Security.
In the late '80s, he says, he had participated in protests against Ghana's Marxist president at the time, Jerry Rawlings. As a consequence, he was jailed for three months, tortured, and—he heard via dissident military officers—scheduled for execution. While he escaped that fate, and Ghana, with the help of the dissident officers, he later heard he had been sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison.
Immigration judges don't just take immigrants' claims of persecution at face value, however. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done to prove the case," says Robert Pauw, who many years later took over representation of Addai's husband, and whom Addai considers the only good lawyer the couple has had. "An immigrant's lawyer is certainly obligated to do that," he says.
Salazar, who kept a rotating crop of young attorneys in his office, assigned one named Christina Aquino to the case. "One time when I went to Salazar's office, I asked for Christina, but I was told she wasn't working there any more," Addai's husband says in his declaration. He says he was assigned a new lawyer, one in whom he lacked confidence because she was newly arrived from India and didn't seem to have much experience. "Nevertheless," he says, "I did not think I had a choice since the time for my hearing was near."
At the hearing, he says he presented the judge with a letter from a lawyer in Ghana attesting to the 20-year sentence. The judge said she wanted more evidence, however, and postponed making a decision.
Addai's husband was left on his own to gather whatever proof he could. Finally, he reached a former friend now living in Germany who said he had a court record verifying the 20-year sentence.
Excitedly, Addai's husband called Salazar's office to relate the news. "I called the office many times, but no one talked to me." At last, he reached an assistant, who told him that the judge had already denied his asylum application. Worse still, the deadline for submitting an appeal had already passed.
"I was astonished," he says in his declaration. Like Masud Chaudhary, he was illegal without even knowing it.
A lot has happened in the case since then, but the most damaging chapter in the story remains the bungled asylum petition, which resulted in a deportation order. Pauw has since tried to reopen the case. But according to the immigration system—a legal arena subject to far less public scrutiny than criminal or civil courts—the Department of Homeland Security must agree to do so. It has refused.
At 5:30 in the morning on a cold January day in 2007, ICE agents came to the door of the couple's Eastside home, where they lived with their then-18-month-old son.
"We're not answering the door," Addai says she told her husband. Finally the agents left—and so, some hours later, did Addai's husband.
Traveling on foot, taking just as many belongings as he could carry, he disappeared into an underground life. Afraid to return home or seek work for fear that ICE agents might return, he has ever since then been shuffling among different friends' houses. He meets with his wife and child maybe once a week, for a couple hours at a time, at locations they judge to be safe.
Salazar was a bright prospect when Roberto Maestas first encountered him in the late '60s. Maestas, a former director of El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill, was then a graduate student taking Latin American Studies courses at the University of Washington. He says he had helped lead campus protests demanding more minority students and staff on campus, and as a result of that pressure, the university started taking recruiting trips around the state to find some.
One such trip to the Yakima Valley, home to many Latino farm workers, turned up Salazar. Maestas remembers him as a "smooth" kid—"good-looking, tall, and he spoke good English."
