Bullets, Borders, and Bar Associations (Part III)
Well, I finally found some time to get back to this Substack. I apologize, but I have been doing legal work that I get paid to do, and I have been developing a local solo practice that has not only been very satisfying, it has better connected me to the rural community where I now live. But that is another story.
After the Sallaberry case had worked out so well, I saw an opening to pursue CRLA and put them on the defensive for once. My friend at ICE agreed to run whatever information I had on CRLA clients to see if CRLA was violating the funding rules by representing illegal aliens. And it worked. Whenever I had CRLA as the opposing party and I found out their client had no legal status, I was able to force them off the case.
This came to a head in the case of two guys named Flores and Cajero who were suing a dairy farm I represented. I knew Flores was ineligible, because by the time I got involved in the case (I replaced another lawyer), Flores was already permanently living back in Mexico. I knew this because his lawyers put it in writing as soon as I was on the case. When I was hired, there was an ongoing dispute about whether Flores would have to return from Mexico for his deposition, and there was plenty of documentation that he was there. CRLA cannot represent an alien living abroad, so I had grounds to disqualify them. I reported them to the Legal Services Corporation, and they had to withdraw from representing Flores.
No one could find anything on Cajero, so CRLA continued representing him and the case proceeded. But things got very testy.
Meanwhile, I broadened my use of immigration status as a defense. There is a U.S. Supreme Court case that says that illegal aliens cannot get back pay in wrongful termination cases for periods of time that they were not employed after a wrongful termination because they did not have the legal right to employment in the first place. This has been around for a long time, but most defense lawyers are too cowardly to use it, and most courts have cut off our ability to pursue discovery of immigration status. But I could get that information from ICE, and started doing so.
This came to a head a dairy that was involved in an extended labor dispute with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. I represented the dairy family in the dispute. At one point, they had two grievances pending, one for a wrongful suspension, one for a wrongful termination.
The first guy was suspended because of animal abuse against a calf and should have been fired. I was not the lawyer at the time, so the company went easy on him and gave him a 3 day suspension. As it turned out, the guy had been a legal resident but had lost his status when he went to prison for selling meth. He came back illegally under the same name using the same alien registration number that had been revoked. When I ran him through ICE, they were very interested. They staked out the arbitration hearing at my office, and ended up chasing him down the highway and arresting him when he showed up to testify.
The other case was a guy who claimed he was fired because he had cancer. It was a bullshit case, but the dairy did not have good documentation and we lost the hearing, despite my insistence that he could not be reinstated or paid back pay because he was an illegal alien. The broke the arbitration into a liability phase and a penalty phase, and we lost the liability phase. Then the case went dark, and they never pushed forward for any remedy. I found out later when we got emails in discovery from the State Bar that the union’s lawyer told them that I was right and there was no remedy the guy could get because he was an illegal alien. But the pushed the hearing to financially punish the dairy by making them spend money on me.
Things got really weird when the office of the Inspector General of the Legal Services Corporation called me and wanted me to help them prove that CRLA was violating the regulations. Things were about to escalate.