With Drive (and Without a Law Degree), a Texan Fights for Immigrants

[pampango]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/us/06deport.html?pagewanted=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Until a year ago, Mr. Nabeel, now 20, hardly thought of himself as an immigrant. He had been living in the United States since he was 3, when his father brought the family here because of threats from political adversaries in Bangladesh. Mr. Nabeel was studying electrical engineering on a full scholarship he won at the University of Texas, Arlington. But in 2001, his father’s petition for political asylum was denied. A separate application for resident status was approved, but then it stalled in visa backlogs. In November 2009, immigration authorities detained Mr. Nabeel’s father and ordered the whole family deported. Mr. Nabeel was expelled to Bangladesh in January 2010.

“This is not my job — it’s my mission,” Mr. Isenberg said after one recent coaching session with Mr. Nabeel, whom he has never met in person. “Saad may not be a citizen, but he’s as American as anybody else. He’s a product of this country,” Mr. Isenberg said, “and we have an obligation to protect our own.”

Mr. Isenberg has helped to free a Palestinian family with four children from a troubled immigration detention center in Taylor, Tex. Last year he won the release from a jail in Arizona of Hector Lopez, 21, a college student from Oregon who had been deported to Mexico. Mr. Lopez was detained after he returned to the border and turned himself in to apply for political asylum. Mr. Isenberg pressed officials relentlessly until they freed Mr. Lopez in time to join his mother in Oregon for Christmas.

“I’ve seen enough of these cases now to know that everyone has got a solution to it,” Mr. Isenberg said. His fervor rose. “I don’t want to tear the system apart,” he added. “But that’s one of the beautiful things about being a United States citizen. If that’s what it’s going to take to make these wrongs right, so be it.”