Complaints Rise Against Immigration Lawyers

Bolivian immigrants Rene and Fanny Saavedra of Gaithersburg with son Alexis. Rene Saavedra won permanent U.S. residency in 2000, but his wife was mistakenly told by their attorney that she would have to wait for her green card. (By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post)

But there were no jobs. In some cases, Alamgir paid employers who agreed to participate in the scheme. In others, he put up friends or relatives as employers. And in still others, he mingled fake applications with legitimate ones. In all, the fraud took in more than $2 million.

A D.C. Superior Court judge jailed another lawyer, Richard A. James, who, despite having been disbarred, continued to practice immigration law. Given a suspended sentence in 2002 for flouting his disbarment in 2000, James was ordered not to practice. But he did, working out of an office on I Street NW where one of his specialties was helping foreign physicians immigrate to the United States. He's serving an eight-month sentence for contempt.

But most of the wrongdoing that keeps bar counsels busy does not rise to the criminal level.

It is the missed deadline, the unreturned phone call, the obviously overlooked opportunity that frustrate many eager immigrants and prompt a large share of the complaints. Such lapses might be less grievous in other legal arenas, but immigration law is stringent, and immigration tribunals are exacting in their application of it, say lawyers who practice before them.

That is why bar counsel offices such as the District's have made immigration law a priority. "The consequences for missing a deadline are draconian," Herman said. "In civil court, if you miss a deadline, you just file a motion for more time. In immigration court, you can't do that and expect a good result."

Some aggrieved immigrants file complaints. Some have no choice but to file in order to ask an immigration judge to reopen a case. But many never do, being unaware of their rights or reluctant to exercise them for fear of further complicating their situation, advocates for immigrants say.

Complaints can take months or years to investigate and resolve. Documents must be gathered, transcripts of proceedings might have to be ordered and lawyers must be given a chance to respond.

When D.C. bar counsel Wallace E. "Gene" Shipp Jr. elects to seek a sanction, his lawyers have to try the case before a Board of Professional Responsibility hearing committee, then argue it before the board, which ultimately makes a recommendation to the District's highest court, the Court of Appeals.

In 2005, for example, the court upheld a reprimand for a lawyer who had failed to file an appeal that his client had requested after the client was denied asylum and then neglected to tell his client that the appeal had not been filed; the lawyer was in a dispute with the client over how much of a $625 fee had to be paid up front.

Bad lawyering carried consequences for Fanny Saavedra and her family, they said. Born in Bolivia, Saavedra has been in the United States illegally for more than a decade, since she overstayed a tourist visa, was arrested in a workplace raid and ordered deported.

After her husband, Rene, also of Bolivia, won permanent residency in 2000, Fanny should have been right behind him in line for a green card, said her current attorney, the Rev. David Brooks. But their attorney at the time said that Fanny could not piggyback on Rene's residency and would need to wait until he became a citizen.

The lawyer was wrong, Brooks said. But not until last year, as Rene was preparing to become a citizen, did they learn that they didn't have to wait.