Journeys from There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and Contributions by Susan J. Cohen with Steven T. Taylor; Austin, Texas: River Grove Books (cc) 2021; ISBN 9781632-994882; 190 pages; $15.95.
SAN DIEGO – Author Susan J. Cohen is a compassionate attorney who handles many immigration cases on a pro bono basis for the Boston branch of the national Mintz Levin law firm. This book, written with the help of journalist Steven T. Taylor, tells of eleven cases in which she helped immigrants obtain asylum or permanent residency in the United States.
“I grew up listening to stories my parents told around the dinner table,” she commented in the book’s introduction. “They talked about how we were one of the first Jewish families to move to our white suburban town in New Jersey. When my mother and father first drove around town looking for houses with a real estate agent, they asked them if there were many Jewish families in the town. Not knowing my parents were Jewish and interpreting the question differently than how they intended it, he said, ‘Oh no, you don’t have to worry about that.’ My parents also talked about waking up one morning to find a burning cross in our backyard, as well as other experiences that cast them as outsiders.”
The clients about whom Cohen and Taylor wrote are also outsiders. They came from Europe, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa – their individual stories different, but their common experiences of not knowing if they would be allowed to remain in America uniting them in legalistic terror.
Among other issues that Cohen explores is how malfeasance or bias on the part of immigration officers can unfairly jeopardize the future of immigrants who otherwise should be welcomed to this country with open arms.
She told of one woman from the Dominican Republic who scrupulously sent notice to the Immigration Service not once but multiple times that she was moving from one address to another. For years, she didn’t hear anything from them. Then one day she learned that she was facing deportation because she had failed to appear at a court hearing concerning her immigration status. As it turned out, the notice of the court hearing was sent to the previous address at which she hadn’t resided for years.
A legal immigrant from Sudan applied to bring his wife and children to the United States. Amazingly, the immigration service said that would not be possible because he was already married and in the process of divorcing another woman. It was a big surprise to him. In fact, a man with the same name living in the Midwest, and not in New England, was the one going through a divorce.
In another instance, a woman from Rwanda, who had escaped the genocide in that country by fleeing to neighboring Uganda, was denied a green card on the theory that she already had gained refuge in Uganda. The fact of the matter, however, was that while a sympathetic Ugandan official had issued her a passport to travel out of the country, she had not been offered permanent refuge. If she were sent back to Rwanda, the likelihood was that she would be executed by rampaging members of another tribe.
In these three cases, attorney Cohen needed to painstakingly compile countless documents proving that her clients were innocent of the immigration offenses with which they were charged. She needed to be able to cite immigration regulations and legal precedents to undo the mistakes made by the immigration service.
A fourth case saw a man from mainland China, who spoke no English, being released into the streets of Boston without immigration agents first telephoning Cohen, even though she had made arrangements for them to do so. The man wandered the streets, bewildered, until teams from Mintz Levin finally found him and got him settled into a hotel.
Incompetence in the immigration process is not limited to bureaucrats working for the government. In some cases, shoddy work by lawyers with insufficient background in immigration law had the effect of complicating their clients’ cases, even undermining their chances to win permanent residency. In one situation, a female client kept being charged for paperwork by the attorney who had failed to file it. Worse still, being in a position of power with her utterly dependent upon him, the attorney was attempting to seduce her.
Cohen was introduced to a number of her clients through the Political Asylum/ Immigration Representation (PAIR) project. Sometimes, under tight deadlines, she had to undo other lawyers’ mistakes. In other cases, she had to devise complicated strategies to win for her clients permanent admittance to the United States. She had to fight for people whom other countries would be happy to recruit such as a 12-year-old Asian girl who was a concert-level virtuoso violinist and an Albanian man who wrote a highly regarded novel about immigration from Communist bloc countries to the west.
In both the introduction and the epilogue, Cohen inveighed against the anti-immigrant policies of the administration of President Donald Trump. She said they were unnecessarily cruel and have a lingering effect today, even after Joe Biden succeeded Trump in the presidency.
Cohen related the biographies of her clients, to the extent that she felt was safe to do so. Given that repercussions might be levied against their family members still living in their native countries, the clients’ identities were sometimes masked in this book. Rather than saying specifically what countries some came from, Cohen sometimes chose broader geographical categories such as “Asia” and “North Africa.”
San Diego is a port of entry for many immigrants seeking asylum. Those who make it across the border are luckier than those who must wait in Tijuana under America’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. Cohen’s book makes it clear that even when immigrants and asylum seekers are permitted to cross into the United States, their worries about their immigration status are far from over. It behooves all of us to enhance our understanding of the trials that they face.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com