Salazar majored in Latin American Studies, graduating with a B.A. in 1972, according to UW records. He then got his law degree from the university in 1975. He did a stint at the downtown firm McDonald, Hogue and Bayless, and then formed a partnership with a lawyer he met there, according to Carol Edward, who became one of Salazar's first junior associates in 1984.
Handling criminal as well as immigration cases, he seemed capable at the time, Edward says. She adds that in court "he could think on his feet" and "establish a rapport with a jury or judge." He also had a way with clients, according to Edward: "They trusted him."
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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It helped that Salazar was one of the few Latino attorneys in Seattle at that time. Maestas recalls that among Hispanics needing legal advice, the reaction was: "Oh, man, I got to go to him."
Eventually, Salazar began to actively court Latino clients with ads in Spanish-language newspapers like El Mundo and El Siete Dias. He advertised himself and his associates as "bilingual attorneys"—an attractive proposition for clients who in some cases were not fluent in English or even literate in their native tongue. That was true, for instance, of one of the clients whose case was part of the recent bar proceedings. This client, from the Mexican town of Michoacán, was also offered a "discount" by one of Salazar's associates.
At some point in the past decade, Salazar started tapping into another side of the Hispanic market. You can see this side interest on his MySpace pages, which identify him as a "fotógrafo of beautiful Latinas," a calendar publisher, and the director of something called "Chula Vista Media." The pages include not only pictures of the 60ish, gray-haired, mustached Salazar, but multiple shots of his calendars and models—most showing lots of cleavage.
Chula Vista Media has a separate MySpace page, where its address is listed as 810 Third Ave., the marble-halled downtown Seattle edifice called the Central Building where Salazar used to rent office space before trading it for humbler Lake City digs. Andrew Oliver, who worked as a Salazar associate in both locales, leaving in October 2009 after two and a half years, says that Salazar had a room in both offices that served as his photography studios. Mostly the shoots would take place on weekends, but occasionally Oliver says he would see models come in and out during the week.
It's unclear how Salazar's legal business might have benefited from the side project. The calendar does not promote his services as an attorney. In any event, the clients kept coming, but the service they received, it appears, began to suffer.
Edward, the former associate, says that what made an immigration lawyer capable in the '70s and '80s did not necessarily do so in the '90s and '00s. Edward herself recently got the immigration court to reopen the case of a former Salazar client on the grounds of "ineffective assistance of counsel." (Salazar had allegedly failed to inform the client of a deportation order.)
Courtroom proceedings used to be much looser and "personality driven," she says. What mattered was how you argued before a judge. But much more paperwork came to be required, and the deadlines for submitting forms became exceedingly strict, "way stricter than Superior Court," Edward says. The laws about who could and couldn't stay in this country were also ever-changing.
It was apparent even to some who worked in Salazar's office that he wasn't keeping up.
When Manny Rios, fresh out of Gonzaga University's law school, was looking for a first job in 1997, Salazar's office seemed like a natural fit. "He had an all-Latino firm. His goal was helping Latinos," says Rios, who now has his own firm in Seattle and works as a consultant to the Mexican consulate.
He recalls that on his very first day working for Salazar, he walked into immigration court with some 10 cases his boss had assigned to him. All attempted to use a strategy that up until that year had been a reasonable gamble. Illegal immigrants would themselves initiate deportation proceedings—essentially turning themselves in—so that they could then proclaim themselves eligible for certain escape hatches in the law that would allow them to stay in the U.S.
What Rios says he was too green to realize, and what Salazar either didn't know or didn't tell him, is that a recent change in the law had made it almost impossible to win such cases. Among other things, immigrants now had to show that their departures would create "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship," something they'd never had to prove before. The routine business of tearing a family apart through deportation did not meet that standard.
Rios' clients had evidence of no such hardship. "Every single one of them got deported that day," he remembers. "I was almost in tears." The kicker, he says: "Basically, all these people paid for their own deportation" by giving money to Salazar.
Even so, Rios says, "That's not as bad as what happened later. We knew the standard was impossible to meet." Yet, Rios says, Salazar continued to tell people "Yeah, you're eligible," and put them into deportation proceedings.
