Salazar was nothing if not upbeat about a client's prospects. His trademark line, according to Rios: "Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it."
Oliver adds that Salazar, who personally interviewed every client and decided whether or not to take on each case, "didn't like to turn anyone away." The former associate says he believes it's because his onetime boss "genuinely liked to help people," and was not seeking to exploit them for financial gain.
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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Salazar lives rather modestly in a four-bedroom pink rambler in Lake Forest Park, according to King County property records.
Since few clients were turned away, the volume of cases was overwhelming, even though Salazar worked from 6 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. most days, according to Oliver. "It's hard to do an excellent job when you have so many cases," he says. "I suspect that's the root of most of the problems."
The consequences were disastrous not only for immigration cases.
Rossanne Sosa, now a dentist in San Diego, had picked Salazar's name out of the Yellow Pages in 1996 because he advertised himself as Spanish-speaking. The blonde, blue-eyed Sosa didn't need translation services, nor help with immigration. Rather, she was in the process of divorcing a Puerto Rican who had returned to the island, and she figured she'd need an attorney who spoke Spanish to handle the case.
About to accept a position as an Air Force captain, she moved from Olympia to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. There she received two sets of documents from Puerto Rico written in Spanish, one delivered by a U.S. Marshal. Each time, she says, she immediately sent them to a Salazar associate who had been assigned to work with her. And each time she was fobbed off with reassurances that she needn't worry.
It turned out, however, that the documents were extremely worrying: They contained notice of a custody hearing for the couple's toddler in Puerto Rico. When Sosa didn't turn up, the father was granted exclusive custody.
He showed up on her doorstep at 5 a.m. one morning to take their daughter, Sofia, back to Puerto Rico. "I just had to hand her over," Sosa says of Sofia, then 2. "She's looking at me, like, 'What's going on?' It was devastating. "
Sosa says it took her three years to get Sofia back. She later sued Salazar for malpractice in King County Court. In court documents, Salazar claimed he had advised Sosa that she should get a lawyer in Puerto Rico, which she denies. She says she settled the case for a nominal amount when she learned that Salazar, unlike the vast majority of attorneys, did not have malpractice insurance.
Many clients, of course, want to be told that they needn't worry, their case will turn out just fine. That's part of the problem, says Baron of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. "People are desperate to get [a lawyer] to tell them 'Yes, we can help you,'" he says. If one lawyer refuses to take a case, they'll look for someone else who will.
And some lawyers deliberately take advantage of that desperation, occasionally even resorting to fraud to tackle dubious cases. Baron points to a trial last November in Sacramento, in which three lawyers were found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the government after submitting as many as 1,000 asylum applications supported by phony documents.
In addition to lawyers, some so-called immigration consultants or "notarios" employ dubious methods. One self-proclaimed immigration "expert" from Kent named Steven Mahoney admitted last year to filing almost 100 false asylum petitions. His tack was to have clients say they were subject to persecution back home because they were gay—whether they were or not.
State Attorney General Rob McKenna is currently conducting investigations into whether 11 other notarios around the state are giving out misleading and possibly fraudulent legal advice.
According to Ann Benson, now director of an immigration project at the Washington Defender Association, which provides assistance to public defenders around the state, lawyers as well as consultants can fall down on the job simply because immigration law "has become so unbelievably complex."
"Not only that," she adds, "it doesn't make sense."
To give a prime example, a host of crimes are considered "aggravated felonies" under immigration law, and immigrants, whether they come here legally or not, are (with few exceptions) subject to mandatory detention and deportation if they commit one of these. Some of the crimes—theft, for example—are not even felonies in criminal court, let alone aggravated ones. (Theft is considered an aggravated felony in immigration court if it results in a sentence of a year or more.)
The list of "aggravated felonies" was expanded by Congress in 1996 amid an anti-immigration backlash. Partly due to increased enforcement—stepped up after 9/11—immigration law became a burgeoning field of practice. Whereas before the 1996 law, the state chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association had something like 30 members, now there are approximately 300, according to Benson.
To make the finances work in a legal niche that serves many low-income people, it's common for attorneys to rely on volume, Benson adds.
