1/I returned from Tijuana on Tuesday. Yesterday the sadness hit me. The thing about experiencing human despair, generosity, weakness, beauty, cruelty, hope, and courage all tangled up together in almost every interaction for a week is that I find it hard to put it all into words. 2/One interaction that I keep thinking about lasted less than a minute: on one of the days we were providing last minute advice and encouragement to the asylum seekers, who were about to go present themselves to CBP, I talked to a woman, who was traveling with her three sons.

The majority of asylum seekers I've represented in the past 10 years have been women, who fled to the US to escape relentless violence and psychological terror inflicted on them by men, who brutalized "their" women to the point my clients felt their choices were: flee or die. 1/ Once you've heard several stories of domestic abuse, you realize: Most of them are variations on a theme. Whether they beat their women in Mexico, Jordan, or China, men will justify it by saying "I'm the man of the house. I can do to you whatever I want. You exist to serve me."2/

R has been my client since 2009. He's Mexican, has been here since 1991, has a family, has worked for the same landscaping company for 19 years, helps his neighbors. He's the kind of guy, who asks the cashier at the store how her/his day is going and genuinely wants to know. We lost his case four years ago, he has had a deportation order since. Every year, he has gone to check in with ICE and has asked to stay another year - and because he really has nothing bad and a lot of good things to show for himself, they have said yes.

More bad news for immigrants: In 2015, in Rodriguez v. Holder, the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed its interpretation that civil immigration detention without a chance to request bond from an immigration judge is unconstitutional if it exceeds 6 months. The Ninth Circuit explained the backdrop: "Prolonged detention imposes severe hardship on class members and their families... While in detention, class members have missed their children’s births and their parents’ funerals. ...their children have dropped out of college."

The Supreme Court DACA decision is a victory, but must be viewed for what it is: a not very surprising refusal to circumvent appellate review of the CA District Court's decision to enjoin the Trump admin's "winding down" of DACA based on the justification provided by the gov't. It means:

1) The District Court's order remains in place for now; people, who already had DACA can renew. New DACA applications by people, who never had DACA previously, will not be accepted.

In the US, I often hear people say: "Our ancestors immigrated to this country, so we should not judge those, who try to immigrate now." Others say "Our ancestors immigrated here legally. People, who immigrate without permission, are law breakers. They must be deported." I think the problem with these lines of reasoning is that they are based primarily on morals. But people are not driven to migrate by morals; they migrate for practical reasons.

Two days after my grandparents married, pursuant to Executive Order 9066, they were evacuated to the Tulare Assembly Center and then interned at Gila River Relocation Center. My mother, the eldest of four siblings, was one of the first babies born at Gila River Relocation Center. From my grandfather's FBI file - he was luckier than my grandmother's father, also a Buddhist priest, who was considered so dangerous by the FBI that he was arrested the morning of February 18, 1942 and imprisoned in an "alien enemy" camp on suspicion of espionage.

As an immigration lawyer, I am frustrated with the lack of nuance in the public conversation about immigration. For example: people say “Immigrants that came here illegally broke the law. Now they have to pay the price- deport them.” Do those people know anything about “the law?” The mere fact that a person entered the US without permission and got caught by ICE, does not mean s/he will be deported. “The law” provides the framework for deciding who gets deported and who gets to stay. If you are going to talk about THE LAW, know what you are talking about.

1/The day of my 9 year old client's immigration court hearing, as we were riding the elevator down from my office, a man got in and smiled and asked my client if he was going to school. "No, I'm not going to school," he said. 2/"Well then are you going to do something fun?" asked the man. "Yeah!" said my client, and smiled. On the elevator ride up to the immigration court on the 25th floor, he giggled at how fast we were going.