Representing illegal immigrants has always posed challenges to immigration attorneys, one of whom now claims that the government is not doing right by his client.
Desmond P. Fitzgerald of Boston says his client, a native of Colombia, had been granted an asylum hearing scheduled in U.S. Immigration Court in Boston seven days before the man's temporary visa was to expire.
But a month before the hearing, the client received a notice telling him to come back in seven months.
"Then when he goes to court, the judge says, 'You're too late; you have to file within a year, so I won't accept your application,' and he gets deported," Fitzgerald recalls. "At the time, he had no counsel."
The client claims he entered the United States after being threatened by roving militia gangs in Colombia.
"Most people that have to apply for asylum here don't have the resources to get lawyers, so they depend upon the system to be fair enough to navigate on their own," says Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald is seeking an appeal, but he says it is questionable whether the 1st Circuit will overturn the decision.
"They've had regulations saying, 'If we schedule your hearing after a year, you can't file [an appeal], and you can't ask a court to review the determination.'"
Further complicating matters was that when Fitzgerald appealed to the Board of Immigration Reviews, missing from his 500-page filing was the notice of rescheduling.
"Thankfully, my client still had it," he says. "This guy doesn't read English. If he'd lost that piece of paper, there'd be no way for a lawyer to know he had a chance of release."
Adds Fitzgerald: "There must be thousands of cases like this that no one knows about."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment, citing the pending nature of the case.
July 10, 2006
