LUMPKIN, Georgia
In a tiny hearing room at one of the country’s most remote and unforgiving immigration courts, Elena Albamonte walked right past the table she had used for years as the government’s highest-ranking prosecutor here. Instead, she put her briefcase on the other table, taking a seat next to an Armenian man in prison garb who had illegally crossed into the United States.
After a three-decade career overseeing deportations as a government immigration lawyer, Albamonte has switched teams.
“Ready, your honour,” Albamonte said to immigration court Judge Dan Trimble after tidying a thick file of legal documents.
She knew her chances of persuading Trimble to grant her client political asylum were awful. Even before President Donald Trump’s crackdown on the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, the judges at Stewart had been deporting detainees at startlingly high rates. Trimble had turned down 95 per cent of those seeking asylum from fiscal 2011 to 2016, according to a study of immigration judges by Syracuse University.
But for 40 minutes, Albamonte gamely made the case for Geregin Abrahamyan, a 23-year-old who said he was repeatedly beaten and threatened because of his political activity in Armenia.
Political asylum
Abrahamyan had been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the day he and his pregnant partner and their 3-year-old daughter crossed from Mexico seven months earlier and turned themselves in at a Border Patrol office. Mother and daughter were quickly granted parole and live with Abrahamyan’s parents in California. But Abrahamyan was shipped across the country and had yet to meet his son, who was born in August.
Albamonte, 60, argued he was eligible for asylum despite being turned down once before and that he had suffered additional beatings in Armenia that the court should know about.
The prosecutor, Cassondra Bly, pushed back on each point, just as Albamonte had done when she was ICE’s deputy chief counsel at Stewart. Indeed, it was from that old seat that Albamonte grew bothered by some of the lawyering she saw across the room. Not only did a lot of immigrants’ attorneys show up unprepared for bond hearings, many didn’t show up at all, appearing instead by audio link. At Stewart, a privately run detention Centre three hours from the closest major airport, many lawyers literally phone it in.
“They really put their clients at a disadvantage,” Albamonte said. She described a lawyer who called in to a bond hearing, having never met his client or reviewed much of his file. A winnable asylum claim was denied. The man’s family, out $3,000 in attorney’s fees, was distraught.
“Sometimes you just cringe, wondering if [the opposing lawyer] is going to make the obvious argument,” Albamonte said. She couldn’t do the other side’s work for them, but she took little pleasure prevailing in a lopsided contest.
She doesn’t apologise for prosecuting hundreds of asylum cases that ended in deportation.
“Not everyone has a right to asylum under the law as it is written,” she said. “But everybody does deserve competent, fair representation. That’s how the system is supposed to work.”
Her office features an extra-large window she requested as an antidote to those years of working in a sunless prison. Next to it — near the “Live the Life You’ve Imagined” plaque — is a whiteboard list of clients: Hoxha, Ozkan, Mendez, Matiroysyan.
She went back to Stewart for the first time in the service of an asylum seeker just months after leaving ICE. She didn’t have to flip any ideological switches. She’s a lawyer, not an activist. Yes, it was weird at first to go up against her former colleagues, but not uncomfortable.
“It’s not like I’m a different person,” she said. “I think they appreciate that I know what I’m doing.”
Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said team switchers can be welcome in a legal thicket as tangled as immigration.
Costly procedure
One reason Stewart rejects so many asylum seekers is that many immigration lawyers won’t take cases there. It’s too remote and its inmates too poor to pay the $5,000 or more that most asylum cases cost. Albamonte said she does some pro-bono work and charges others a range of fees based on the complexity of the case.
These days, when Albamonte passes through security at the door of the detention Centre (no cell phones, no car keys, no money), it is as routine as when she did it with an ICE badge.
“Hey Elena,” a guard greets her on the morning of Abrahamyan’s hearing. “Hey Jackie,” said Albamonte, who has learnt to say “Hey” instead of “Hi.”
A uniformed ICE agent talking to a detainee’s family stops to give her a hug. “How is life on the outside?” he asked. “Better money, right?”
“Ha! Better money on the inside. I have all these mouths to feed,” she said, looking over at her co-counsel Canado-Wallace and paralegal Hasnian.
He turned back to the family. As Albamonte walked on, he told them in Spanish that she was a local lawyer who handled asylum cases.
Waiting in the hearing room were Abrahamyan’s parents, who had flown five hours from Los Angeles and driven three from Atlanta in the hope that their son would be granted bond.
Abrahamyan was led away with a last look at his parents. Later, in the centre’s bare visitation room, he shook his head at the long delay. He spends his days playing chess with detainees from Russia, Armenia, El Salvador.
He walks in the warm Southern sun each day in the exercise yard and talks to his 3-year-old daughter — almost 3,000 miles away — whenever he can.
“I have never seen my son,” he said, tears welling over at the mention of his children. “I am not a criminal, but I am here seven months.”
In the hallway outside, his parents crowded around Albamonte, baffled and anxious over the additional wait.
“This helps us,” she assured them. More time would give them a chance to gather evidence that his life in Armenia was at risk. It would also allow time for the habeas petition she had filed on Abrahamyan’s behalf to work its way through the court.
—Washington Post
