By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Attorney Daniel Swedlow has a client from Ethiopia seeking asylum in the U.S.
“When gunfire started erupting he just ran, and he ran and ran and ran and wound up going through something like 17 different countries,” Swedlow said. “All of his being beaten, detained and shot at is simply being a member of this minority group in Ethiopia.”
The man eventually ended up in California, and is currently living in SeaTac. He is scheduled for a hearing this month to grant him permanent residency here.
Swedlow is one of a number of Seattle-area lawyers affiliated with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s Cardozo Society, whose leadership a year ago decided to begin a pro bono representation project to take on asylum cases.
Cardozo partnered with an organization called the Northwest Immigration Rights Project, which exists to provide pro bono assistance to people in the region seeking asylum.
“It’s a wonderful partnership because there’s such an inherent connection between the Jewish community and the plight of the immigrant culture, regardless of who those immigrants are,” Swedlow, now one of Cardozo’s co-chairs, said.
What’s clear is that several attorneys taking part in this program aren’t doing it because they have extra time on their hands.
Cardozo member Souphavady Bounlutay came to the U.S. as a child from Laos and her family had to deal with many of the same issues as her pro bono client: Language barriers, no family support network, navigating a new culture.
Bounlutay successfully represented a 20-year-old Somali woman who underwent genital mutilation at the age of 8 and was raped at the age of 9.
Because of that event, “her father disowned her and kicked her out of the house,” Bounlutay said.
The woman later became pregnant out of wedlock, and has since had the child. Had she been deported to Somalia, Bounlutay said, “her clan members or family members would kill her because she shamed them by being pregnant.”
That threat posed the basis for the asylum plea. Research on other cases showed that Bounlutay’s client had a strong case, but she received affidavits from a doctor confirming the genital mutilation as well as from members of the local Somali community that her life would indeed be in danger should she return home.
“Being a woman and being an immigrant and having no family here, I knew how hard her life is currently, and I knew that if I could make it just a little easier, [and] make her legal, that I would be at least giving her an opportunity…here in the U.S.,” Bounlutay said.
Trial lawyer Barry Wallis also has an immigrant story: He came to the U.S. from France when he was a year old. His family had tried to gain asylum in the United States during World War II but only his mother, who was a toddler at the time, was granted entry.
“How can they send a 2-year-old child to America?” Wallis said.
His grandfather was in the French resistance and captured by the Gestapo.
“They took him and tortured him for 12 weeks because he was Jewish,” Wallis said.
Wallis spent far more hours than he expected on his first pro bono case, which as principal of his own firm caused him a bit of hardship, but “it’s actually one of the best cases I ever had,” he said. “It was really unbelievably rewarding.”
The case, a Colombian woman on the run from her “business lord” husband, resulted in her release from nine months in detention at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Tacoma.
“We were able to demonstrate that she had a real, credible fear of being tortured if she was forced to return to Colombia because of her husband’s extensive contacts,” Wallis said. “I hope that she’s going to be safe here.”
Wallis got so much satisfaction from his first case that he took another: This one in defense of a Moldavian Jewish woman who was raped by white supremacists there and threatened if she returns to Moldavia.
NWIRP assists with these cases the same way it does with the roughly 200 pro bono cases it assigns each year in addition to those taken by its staff attorneys. Jordan Wasserman, the organization’s pro bono program coordinator, makes it clear that each lawyer who takes a case is the attorney of record.
“They’re ultimately responsible,” Wasserman said. “We see our role as support and help them do what they need to do.”
The partnership with the Cardozo Society is the only group of otherwise unconnected attorneys with which NWIRP works, Wasserman said, though one large firm in Seattle has taken on asylum projects as a companywide mission.
“To me it seems like a great idea to commit to one project because the firm or organization creates an institutional knowledge and it becomes easier and easier for them to do a good job on the cases,” he said.
Wallis said that given his family’s own troubles when trying to leave Nazi-occupied France, the issue of asylum “is something that’s very, very close to my heart.
“We have a duty to the world to help anybody who is suffering in another country because of race, ethnicity, political disposition — anything to upset the status quo,” he said. “Jews have a deep obligation to help these people.”