CHAPTER TWELVE

LAWYER DREAMS

Daniel Rodríguez, thirty-one

Monterrey, Nuevo León/Phoenix, Arizona

DANIEL RODRÍGUEZ is an attorney specializing in immigration and family law. Although this is a common area of specialty among lawyers in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border, Daniel’s case is unique: as of May 2017, he was the only undocumented attorney in the state of Arizona licensed to practice law.

The struggle to make it into the courtroom and open his own law practice began when Daniel was just a boy. With a family history in two countries, like many immigrants, Daniel’s family has lived on both sides of the border, shaping how they saw the world, and how the world saw them.

Although he knew from a young age that he wanted to practice law, the family’s financial circumstances and certain laws in place posed a series of obstacles in the way of Daniel’s dream. He decided to go to law school and, at the same time, clear those stumbling blocks from his path, for himself and for other binational young people who would come after him. Now, he works on their behalf to eliminate some of those obstacles in US immigration court.

Daniel’s maternal grandmother was born in Texas, where some of his relatives still live. When he talks about his family history, Daniel—trim, with dark hair and a goatee, almond-shaped eyes, and a sharp gaze behind his glasses—explains his family is part of a group that, because they have lived there for centuries, did not cross the border. Rather, the border crossed them, an allusion to the 1845 annexation of Texas from Mexico. When his grandmother married his grandfather, the couple moved to Monterrey, in Mexico, and settled there.

Daniel’s mother was one of fourteen children. She was the first girl in the family to graduate high school, before earning a certificate as a secretary and marrying Daniel’s father. They had a troubled relationship, and one day Daniel’s mother decided to leave with her children and go to the United States. She had a cousin living in Phoenix who knew what a hard time she was having and offered to help.

“It wasn’t very planned. I don’t remember any conversations about it,” Daniel tells me, looking back. He was seven years old at the time. I got together with him and Luis Ávila, both activists, at the Fair Trade Cafe in Phoenix, which has become a gathering place for human rights defenders in Arizona. “We left on a weekend; we crossed the border. I don’t remember much about crossing, except that for me it was like going on a hike, up over a mountain. That’s all I remember.”

When the family arrived in Phoenix, they moved into their cousin’s garage. Daniel’s mother went from having a house, a career, and her family nearby, to losing it all from one day to the next. She started working cleaning bathrooms and offices. She also had to deal with Daniel’s rebellious behavior, as he deeply resented the sudden change in his life.

“I was always mad when I was a kid,” he explains. “At first I took it out on my mom, because I didn’t understand what was happening. I was angry with her for what I felt like she had done to me, what she had done to all of us—I had lost my toys, my friends, everything. Sometimes we would talk about it, and her answer was always, ‘Focus on your studies and be a good boy.’ I grew up in Phoenix like any other Latino kid, but I only started to understand what being undocumented meant in high school.”

This phenomenon—of not understanding the implications of lacking documentation to legally live in the country until one is about to apply to college or get a job—is a constant for young people who arrived in the US at a young age and grow up like any other American child, focusing on their schoolwork and being “good” boys and girls. Until one day they find that even though they have done just as their parents asked, the doors of opportunity are closed to them.

While in high school, Daniel went to his guidance counselor and asked what he had to do to go to college, because he was in a difficult situation: his mother had suffered a back injury at her new workplace, a meatpacking plant, and could not move. Daniel knew he had to do something to help out his mother, and of course, he remembered the message he and all the other kids had gotten: if you go to college, you can achieve the American Dream. When he told the counselor about his immigration status, however, she responded brusquely: “People like you can’t go to college.”

“I said, ‘Oh, well, okay.’ I was a sophomore in high school, and I decided then that I would get a job. There was a restaurant right next to the high school. I went in and said, ‘I need a job. Do you have anything?’ They said they needed a dishwasher, so I filled out an application. The manager interviewed me and asked for my Social Security number. I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You can start tomorrow.’” Daniel laughed. “It was no problem.”

Daniel started working and eventually decided he was going to drop out of high school. If his own guidance counselor had told him he couldn’t go to college, why stay in school? It would be better to work and help his family. At that point, in what he describes as a “divine intervention,” another guidance counselor at the school, Donna Bartz, came on the scene and changed his life. It was 2002.

“She told me she knew about our situation,” he says. “The DREAM Act . . . had been introduced over a year earlier, and the subject was getting more attention. She asked me if I wanted to go to college, and when I said yes, she offered to help come up with a plan. She told me to work on my school record and that I should get involved in all the extracurricular activities I could, and [that] I should do community service and volunteer work.”

Daniel started his junior year and followed Bartz’s advice. He was the president of MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán), a Mexican American student organization with local chapters in states across the country; he was the president of both the Latin American Club and the Black Student Union. He also began writing for the school newspaper. In one of his first stories, Daniel wrote about attending a session of the Arizona legislature in 2003 in his capacity as president of the Black Student Union. There he had the opportunity to interview Leah Landrum Taylor, the only African American representative in the state’s lower house. Landrum Taylor talked about a group of people who had been, as Daniel said, “tricked” into coming to the United States and were forced to work, who were mistreated all of their lives and were still fighting to be considered full citizens of the US with all of the rights of citizenship.

“I heard that story and I thought, ‘That’s my story, my family’s story, my people’s. It’s my story,’” Daniel tells me, emotional. “And that’s when I started to see my story as a Dreamer not through MEChA or the pro-immigrant movement; I discovered my story as a Dreamer through the history of African Americans in this country.”

Daniel kept on working while preparing to go to college, and he started getting involved in immigration issues. He remembers that, in 2004, Ernestina Reyes, the MEChA faculty advisor, told him he had to be prepared because hard times were coming to the undocumented community. “They need people like you, who are out there, involved, leaders,” she said. Daniel took her advice. He won a Fulbright scholarship and secured another private scholarship so he could afford college. In his first year at Arizona State University (ASU), the immigration issue was center stage: President George W. Bush had launched his campaign for reelection, and from Mexico, there was outrage over the epidemic of women murdered with impunity in Juárez City.

This was all preparation for what was to come in 2006. That year, Arizona passed Proposition 300, a measure prohibiting students who could not prove citizenship or legal residency in the US from receiving state or federal financial aid for college. What’s more, they would be required to pay the same exorbitant tuition rates as foreign students. On top of this, Daniel’s beloved teacher, Ernestina Reyes, died. When Daniel learned of his mentor’s death, the hurt and anger he felt as a child resurfaced, and he decided to channel it for a good cause.

Daniel started going to meetings of activists who already had years of experience organizing the community around immigration issues; he listened to everything but did not participate very much in the discussions. When he went to the meetings, he noticed he was the only person under thirty in the room and the only undocumented immigrant; no one else from his generation was involved. He also became involved with the Somos America Coalition, which organized the massive pro-immigrant marches in 2006 in major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Phoenix. But even there, he felt somewhat frustrated by the lack of colleagues his age. “I thought, ‘Where are my friends? Why aren’t they here?’ Then I decided I was going to organize students like me.”

Daniel had his chance when Proposition 300 went into effect and many undocumented ASU students lost their financial aid. Together with some of these students, in 2008 Daniel founded the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (ADAC), which is still active.

When ADAC first started holding regular meetings, Daniel noticed that participants were focused on the fight for comprehensive immigration reform. But it was clear to him from the beginning that they needed to build a movement of young people and start telling their story of struggle for the DREAM Act.

“So I began telling my story as a Dreamer at events, in interviews, saying that I was undocumented, and if they wanted to, they could come arrest me. We did ‘coming out’ events in the legislature. We created a platform to tell our story publicly and to recognize our history, something that had not been done very much before,” Daniel recalls. He refers to this movement as “coming out of the shadows,” in which undocumented youth publicly declare their immigration status to affirm their right to stay in the country legally and pressure legislators to pass a law to that effect.

In 2008, as the Dreamer movement got stronger, a contentious contest for the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidential election in November of that year was under way. Barack Obama, a junior senator from Illinois and the underdog candidate, faced off against political veteran Hillary Clinton, building his grassroots campaign around a theme of “change” and relying on enthusiastic young volunteers known as “Obama’s army.” It’s interesting to note that many of the Dreamers who began organizing to defend their right to an education also invested their energy in the winning campaign for the country’s first African American president.

Daniel was one of those Dreamers. A friend of his, a lawyer who worked for the Phoenix city government, invited Daniel to attend a meeting where presidential hopeful Obama was going to give a speech. Daniel was very impressed by Obama’s ability to communicate effectively and show empathy, emphasizing stories of real people he had met. Daniel joined his campaign through the university group Young Democrats.

That year, 2008, Daniel also entered law school, his dream since he was a little boy. But because of new laws passed by the state legislature and the economic crisis then roiling the nation, at the end of the first year, he lost his two scholarships. He would have to somehow scrape together more than $40,000 for annual tuition, living expenses, and his contribution to household expenses. Continuing law school became financially impossible. So Daniel decided to put his dream of being a lawyer on hold and devote his time and energy to activism and join the Dreamer movement.

The same year Daniel had to drop out of law school in Arizona, in California, a young man named Sergio García, thirty-two years old, took the bar exam, which law school graduates must pass in order to be licensed to practice law in their state. Sergio passed the exam on the first try; that year, only 49 percent of the aspiring lawyers taking the exam passed it.¹ But a few weeks later, that license was revoked because of his immigration status: Sergio was undocumented.

The García family emigrated from Mexico to the United States when Sergio was just one and a half years old and went back to Mexico when he was nine. When Sergio was seventeen, he returned to California. His father, a farmworker, applied for a green card—permanent resident status—on his son’s behalf in November 1994. The federal government approved the application in 1995, one year before a federal law was passed stipulating that state agencies cannot grant professional licenses to anyone in the country illegally.

That should not have applied to Sergio, since his application met all the requirements for permanent resident status. But it’s not that simple: given the enormous backlog of cases in US immigration court, the fact that Sergio was informed his citizenship application would not be approved until approximately 2019, ten years after his graduation, was unsurprising. So, along with thousands of others in the same situation, he was in a legal limbo that, among other things, prevented him from practicing the profession he had worked so hard to enter.

Sergio decided that if ever there was a time to put what he had learned in law school into practice, it was now. In early 2013, Sergio García, representing himself, appeared in the California Supreme Court in, literally, the case of his life: arguing for his right to keep his license to practice law.

Sergio’s case attracted the public’s attention. On the one hand, the academic institutions where he had studied, California State University at Chico and Cal Northern School of Law, as well as the State Bar of California, considered him competent to practice law. On the other hand, Sergio’s case highlighted the woeful deficiencies of the bureaucracy in managing US immigration and the injustice caused by applying legal criteria that have nothing to do with the individual realities of those living in the country. The case got my attention too. Over the days it was litigated, I got in touch with Sergio to find out more about his story.

Sergio talks like a lawyer, choosing his words with care. “I’m at a very dramatic point,” was the first thing he said as we began talking. “Unfortunately, the court acted in a very cowardly way when it said they could not do anything unless the California legislature opens the door. Okay, God willing, the legislators will support us.”

Sergio was referring to the response he got from California’s Supreme Court when he presented his case. When he passed the bar exam in 2009, the State Bar of California submitted an application for a license to the court on his behalf, as a matter of routine procedure. But once they identified his immigration status, the authorities in charge of granting licenses decided to review it further.

The federal law that explicitly prohibits granting licenses to anyone without legal immigration status meant that he would not get a favorable ruling, Sergio was told during court proceedings. The only way to bring about a different outcome would be a state law specifically establishing the legality of granting a professional license to someone regardless of immigration status. Court adjourned, and a verdict in his case was to be delivered within ninety days.

Sergio was driving in his car as we talked on the phone. He was on his way to a California assemblyman’s office to continue the work he had been doing before arguing his case in court: mobilizing as many state politicians as possible to make the legal changes necessary to win his case, before the court rendered its verdict.

The young lawyer had already demonstrated his effective negotiating skills when, on September 6, 2009, a few hours after his appearance in court, Democratic assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez presented measure AB 1024 to the state legislature, with the support of all the Latino representatives. If passed, the measure would amend Section 6064 of the Business and Professions Code relating to attorneys, allowing the state supreme court to admit an applicant not lawfully present in the United States as an attorney-at-law in all the courts of the state, “upon certification by an examining committee that the applicant has fulfilled the requirements for admission to practice law.” A few hours before the measure came up for a vote, Sergio was busy convincing the legislators.

“I’ve explained to them that I only have a year to get this resolved, because the results of the bar exam are valid for just five years. I explained this was an emergency for me, and it’s practically a miracle they’ve responded so quickly. In just a few hours, the initiative will be ready to be voted on, to defend my American Dream,” he said.

On September 12, the initiative was passed, with sixty-two votes in favor, four votes opposed, and two abstentions. It next landed on the desk of California governor Jerry Brown, who signed the measure into law on October 5. The law went into effect on January 1, 2014, clearing away any obstacle for the court to grant Sergio his license to practice law. A month later, Sergio became the first undocumented attorney allowed to officially practice in the United States.

Until then, a case similar to Sergio García’s had never come up in any other state court, making the resolution a precedent for other cases in years to come. Sergio had several teams of lawyers around the state fighting for him, around 150 people in total. The days after his case was decided were a whirlwind for Sergio. While messages of congratulations and solidarity poured in from colleagues and friends, he fielded interview requests from the press, and was even invited to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. When I talked to him, Sergio said around half of his supporters were non-Hispanic white citizens.

“I think the first thing this case shows is that immigrants aren’t just groundskeepers, cooks, or construction workers—which are all honorable, fine professions—but we’re also professionals who want to work. We are qualified and have a dream to fulfill,” Sergio said. “We don’t know how many more young people have graduated law school or medical school with no possibility of practicing. It is hypocritical on the federal government’s part to praise young undocumented immigrants who want to pursue an education but then prevent them from getting a license,” he added in a reference to President Obama, who expressed his support for a law granting undocumented youth legal status throughout his eight years in office. “They should let us know what they really intend to do with us.”

After three years of activist work, Daniel Rodríguez started thinking about how he could go back to law school. According to the school’s regulations, if he did not reenroll that year, 2012, the one year of law school he had completed would no longer be valid. The challenge was still getting enough money together to pay for it. Then he got an idea: since it was an election year, dozens of candidates for office were holding campaign fund-raisers, asking for contributions with the promise to serve their community once elected. Daniel thought, “If I have a dream, and part of my dream is to support my community, why can’t I have a fund-raiser for my education?” He talked it over with his friend Luis Ávila, who he had worked with for several years in social activism.

“I said to Luis, ‘I’ve wanted to be a lawyer ever since I was seven years old,’ and he said, ‘That will be the name of your campaign: Ever Since I Was Seven.’ I started the campaign. I launched a website that is still online. I threw parties on the weekends. I got together with people my friends invited in cafés, just like a political campaign. It was structured just like a political campaign, but for my education. And at the same time, when I began my campaign, I got involved in Obama’s [reelection]. I noticed every time I wanted to go to school, Obama wanted to be president!” he says with a laugh.

In 2008, immigrant rights activists had supported Obama’s campaign in the hopes that he could get favorable immigration reforms passed. In 2012, the motivation was to ensure the defeat of his opponent, Mitt Romney, who not only would make no progress in this area but whose election could mean a serious setback. Even though in his first term in office Obama was unable to fulfill his promise to the immigrant community of passing immigration reform, or at least the DREAM Act, people like Daniel rejoined his campaign to make sure the few protections undocumented families had would stay in place.

On November 6, Election Day, Daniel was busy studying for his final exams, so he could not participate in any campaign events that day. But he remembers the moment the results were announced and Obama was declared the winner. As polling places across the country closed, Obama’s campaign team, volunteers, and supporters in Arizona waited for the results to come in at a hotel in downtown Phoenix. Daniel headed to the hotel that night, taking a bus downtown and listening to the election results on the radio.

“They were announcing the states, and only Ohio was left, the state that would decide the election. It was just the bus driver, me, and a young African American guy on the bus. I was listening; they were about to announce the results, and I wanted to cry—I’m such a political nerd,” he says, laughing. “I was alone; all my friends were at the hotel already. So I went over to the other guy on the bus, because I didn’t want to be alone in that moment, and I said, ‘Hey, do you want to listen to what’s happening with the election?’ He gave me a weird look, but I said, ‘Listen, they’re going to say who won for president!’ Then I gave him one of my earphones, and the two of us heard them say Obama had won. When I got to the hotel, everybody was crying.”

Daniel graduated from law school in 2014, and then the battle to get a license to practice began. Along the way, because this has always been his approach, he formed a group of Dreamers at his law school, calling themselves the Dream Bar Association. They were all prepared to fight for their licenses in their respective states.

“I thought, ‘I’m in Arizona; they’re not going to give me one.’ But I graduated, and I had my legal team ready to go to court and argue for my license, and in October I got the approval notice in the mail. I don’t know how, that’s just what happened. The great irony is, they gave me a license to practice law, but I still could not get a driver’s license, so I would go to court looking very professional but without a driver’s license,” he says with a laugh. As of now, Daniel is the only undocumented lawyer in the state.

In 2015, together with his business partner Otilia Díaz, Daniel opened a law office that employs three other people and has created two free legal clinics to counsel immigrants. Daniel left the volunteer work to other organizations—over the course of the ten years since he first began his activist work, community and activist groups have multiplied. Daniel did not see himself as indispensable. Still, he wanted to find his place in the pro-immigrant movement.

He discovered his place in the movement in November 2016. On Election Day, not only would the race for president be decided but voters would also go to the polls across the country to elect congressmen, governors, mayors, and sheriffs—including the feared sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona: Joe Arpaio.

For twenty years, Arpaio, who liked to call himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” waged a campaign against undocumented immigrants in the county, which includes the state capital of Phoenix, with the goal of driving them out. Arpaio loved publicity and proudly promoted a campaign of relentless persecution, even appearing on three episodes of a Fox TV reality show called Smile . . . You’re Under Arrest, in which he was shown (of course) arresting immigrants.

Because of Maricopa County’s location near the Mexican border and Arizona’s large immigrant population—representing 15 percent of the state, and mostly from Mexico—it is easy see why Arpaio would be extremely popular with anti-immigrant groups like the Minutemen vigilante group and with powerful conservative politicians, mostly white. These supporters justified the relentless human rights violations committed by Arpaio’s officers when they arrested people who had committed no crime but were in the country undocumented—a function that is the responsibility of the federal government, not the Sheriff’s Office.²

That support was reflected at the polls for a long time. Arpaio was reelected again and again, always winning around 60 percent of the vote. With that endorsement from the public, he trained his officers in harassing immigrant communities, without respect for legal procedures designed to protect everyone in the country and ensure that local authorities do not function as federal immigration agents. In Arpaio’s domain, people walking or driving around who looked Latino could be stopped for any reason—for a broken taillight or “suspicious behavior”—and asked for documentation proving legal US residency. If they could not provide it, they would be arrested and put into deportation proceedings.

But in the later years of his tenure, support for Arpaio declined. Between 2004 and 2007, almost 2,700 lawsuits were filed against him, in courts in Maricopa County as well as federal courts, for civil rights violations and for unlawful stops and arrests based on racial profiling, among other charges. In April 2008, Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon asked the US Justice Department and the FBI to formally investigate Arpaio, and in 2011 the Justice Department and a federal court revoked the sheriff’s authority to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants. In 2012, the Justice Department filed its own lawsuit against Arpaio for continuing to practice racial profiling and unlawful discrimination—he had not altered his department’s methods in the slightest.

In this context, the election on November 8, 2016, was very important for Maricopa residents. Though Donald Trump won his bid for the White House, Joe Arpaio, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, lost his reelection bid to an intense activist campaign, bringing a twenty-four-year reign of fomenting terror among immigrants to an end.

“That night, which should have been a celebration for us in Arizona for winning, for getting rid of Arpaio, I cried,” Daniel tells me, remembering the sense of helplessness he felt. “We were watching results come in from the presidential election, and it was so sad. . . . But in that moment, all of the unrest, that passion I felt since I was a little kid, since 2005, since 2010, came back, and I said to myself, ‘We have to do something.’ It was frustrating because everyone I talked to after the election didn’t know what to do, but to me it was obvious we had to change things. I think some people are still organizing and thinking as if we’re still under the Obama administration, but no, everything’s changed.”

A few days later, Daniel met his friend Luis at the Fair Trade Cafe. It was early in the morning, because Daniel had to be at court at eight o’clock. They got together to talk about their plans for the future. They had to try to stop the policies Trump would probably enact, using a resistance strategy similar to what Arizona had done to resist them. In Daniel’s mind, Trump was the country’s Arpaio. They remembered one of their biggest activist successes, the “Boycott Arizona” campaign, and began planning how to launch something similar but on a national level and involving Mexico, the state’s vilified next-door neighbor.

But that’s another story.