JULY 2006: FEATURE
Buried in the law
As the immigration debate heats up and the caseload grows,
lawyer Stephen Manning finds purpose in helping families.
By Dan Sadowsky
Stephen Manning wishes that U.S. immigration law was simple to
understand, easy to obey and fairly applied. Until then,
he’ll just keep taking the government to court.
The 35-year-old lawyer is considered one of the brightest and
boldest of the hundred or so immigration attorneys in Oregon.
He hauls the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S.
Department of Justice into court with uncommon regularity,
challenging what he considers “capricious and
arbitrary” immigration laws and the often nonsensical way
they’re applied.
“We have no immigration law. We have immigration
politics,” Manning says. “You shouldn’t play
politics with people’s lives. It shouldn’t be so
hard to comply.”
Manning’s three-person firm, which operates out of a
minimally furnished office in downtown Portland, opened 230
cases last year — 21 more than in 2004, an increase he
attributes to what he thinks are increasingly harsh laws that
would-be residents must navigate. In the last nine months,
Manning’s firm bested the government in two closely
watched cases, each of which challenged the removal of a
Mexican national who applied for permanent residence based on
his marriage to a U.S. citizen.
Federal appellate courts in Portland and Denver both decided
that a 2000 law to promote family unity permits the men to
become permanent residents if they pay a $1,000 fine and takes
precedent over an earlier law that authorizes the government to
banish anyone who enters the U.S. illegally and stays for more
than a year. Government attorneys are appealing the decisions,
which potentially impact thousands of green-card seekers
nationwide.
ONLY A HANDFUL OF PRIVATE ATTORNEYS pursue this sort of
“impact litigation,” says Nadine Wettstein of the
American Immigration Law Foundation in Washington, D.C. Since
Manning launched the Immigrant Law Group in 2002 with Jessica
Boell, a law-school classmate (they hired a third lawyer,
Jennifer Rotman, a year later), the team has filed 30 such
suits in federal district court and appealed another 30
immigration-board decisions to the U.S. Court of Appeals. They
have lost only four.
Peers attribute Manning’s courtroom success to the same
combination of intellect and commitment that enabled him to
graduate with honors from Lewis & Clark Law School’s
evening program while working full-time as an immigration
caseworker with a local nonprofit. “Some lawyers, they
talk but they don’t do the hard work, the research to
bring the legal force behind their arguments,” says
Philip Smith, past chair of the Oregon chapter of the American
Immigration Lawyers Association. “Stephen does
that.”
Manning grew up in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Although he started out as an international business major at
Gannon University, a 3,500-student Catholic school in Erie,
Pa., a lively “peace and justice” class redirected
his career interest toward social services, he says.
After graduation, Manning didn’t so much choose Portland
as Portland chose him. Seeking to go west for the first time in
his life, he opened a U.S. atlas, closed his eyes and laid his
finger on the left side of the map. It landed on Medford.
“I’d never heard of Medford, but I’d heard of
Portland,” he says.
He credits his current profession to similar happenstance.
While working as an overnight counselor at a Portland teen
shelter, he began mentoring immigrant students at a North
Portland elementary school and helping their parents understand
the homework assignments. Three children in an El Salvadoran
family weren’t cooperating. “They’d say,
‘Why should we study if we’re going to be
deported?’”
So Manning did something that now seems incredibly naive. He
loaded three generations of the family into his two-door Toyota
Tercel and drove to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service in downtown Portland. “I thought they’d
give us a form to fill out, I’d kind of vouch for them,
and they’d get whatever they needed to become
legal.”
Instead, an INS employee quietly steered them to the nearby
Immigration Counseling Service, a nonprofit that offers legal
advice and help to low-income immigrants. There, Manning
learned that American immigration law was more Byzantine that
he could ever imagine. Fascinated by the law’s
complexity, and galvanized by the organization’s needs,
he became a volunteer and later an “accredited
representative” authorized to represent people before the
U.S. Immigration Court.
“Immigration law can be pretty convoluted. Stephen took
on some rather complex matters, some that might have been
better off referred to a lawyer,” recalls Teresa Statler,
a local immigration attorney and longtime board member of
Immigration Counseling Service. “The guy is very, very
smart.”
MANNING SOON DECIDED A LAW DEGREE would help him meet what he
saw as a “huge need” to challenge the basis for the
immigration rulings harming his clients. “There was no
accountability,” he says. “By suing, you can get
some accountability. Even when it’s the government being
sued, you can get their attention, wake them up.”
Manning’s beliefs are often out of step with not only
Washington politicians, but also groups such as Oregonians for
Immigration Reform. Organizer Jim Ludwick, a McMinnville
retiree, says his group’s roughly 800 members believe the
influx of poor, non-English-speaking immigrants threatens to
overwhelm schools, health care and natural resources. He has
little sympathy for those who enter the country illegally or
the lawyers who defend them. “The fact that a group of
attorneys want to finagle the law and reward people who break
it is a slap in the face” to law-abiding citizens, he
says.
Today, Manning, Boell and Rotman spend about half their time
on federal lawsuits and appeals. The rest of their time is
spent doing what most local immigration attorneys do —
challenging deportation orders, helping domestic-abuse victims
stay in the United States, advocating for families who might be
split and aiding people seeking asylum. These cases allow the
trio to pay the bills, spot trends and identify cases they can
use to advance a broader cause.
On a recent Friday morning in U.S. Immigration Court, Manning
and Rotman fight a removal order for a 29-year-old Salem
man, Victor Quevedo-Guzman, whose wife has permanent resident
status and whose two children are U.S. citizens. He entered the
U.S. without a visa, and to prevent him from being escorted
back to Mexico, they must prove it will cause an
“exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” on his
6-year-old autistic son.
In the small waiting room, Manning warmly greets
Quevedo-Guzman, his wife and four other relatives in fluent
Spanish. Once the judge appears, Manning is all business,
speaking solemnly and politely in a low voice as he
examines his client and tells the judge how deportation could
“cause severe and significant setbacks” in the
boy’s development. The hearing is brief; a decision is
expected in August.
“Being deported can be forever, and you can be separated
from everything you’ve ever known. It can be very
emotional,” Manning explains. “Being part of that
can be very depressing, but also exhilarating.”
Tom Day, the Portland-based deputy chief counsel for U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement — Manning’s
adversary in immigration court — defends his
agency’s duty.
“I think most government attorneys see their role as
doing the right thing,” Day says. “There is a legal
way to come to the U.S., and there are people who wait in line
to do that, and the people who come here illegally are
basically cutting in line. A lot of removal proceedings are
based on criminal convictions, and I don’t think this
country wants to keep people who commit crimes here.”
“MANNING IS A TRUE BELIEVER,” says Ed Reeves, a
prominent Portland labor lawyer who befriended Manning when
both worked on a gay-rights political campaign in the
mid-1990s. “What I mean by that is, he’s always had
a central philosophy about people and the world and how
it’s supposed to be that emanates from a sense of
fundamental fairness.”
Manning is gay, but says his sexual orientation is only
“one piece of the mosaic” that explains his drive.
Friends describe Manning as fun, engaging and passionate, and
say it’s no surprise he has chosen to make his mark in
one of law’s most complex subjects. His work feeds a
large intellectual appetite that in his personal life is sated
by things such as salon-style dinner parties hosted by his
partner of 11 years, architect Jim Wilson, and himself.
Manning’s legal peers praise his brains and his
willingness to collaborate and share his wisdom. But even those
who admire his work say he may too quickly resort to lawsuits.
In February 2005, for example, he sued the local branch of the
U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, a successor to the INS,
when the agency declared that people wanting to talk to an
immigration officer could do so only by first making an
appointment over the Internet. Manning lost the case, but won
the battle; within weeks, the agency installed an Internet
kiosk in its lobby and offered to help anyone use it.
“I’m not sure they had to go to court to insist on
the stuff they got,” says Smith, the past AILA chair,
“but on the other hand they made it happen. I know the
agency they’re dealing with, and you don’t get a
lot when you just nicely go and ask.”
Manning is unlikely to switch tactics. In late May, he filed
suit so children holding “V” visas, which allows
family members of green-card holders awaiting citizenship
rulings to stay in the U.S., won’t lose them
automatically when they turn 21. And he vows to sue the
government to enforce a 1991 settlement agreement that grants
asylum hearings to Guatemalans and El Salvadorans who fled
persecution during those countries’ civil wars.
“There’s never a dull moment,” Manning says,
“and I don’t think there could be because
you’re dealing with people’s lives.”
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