Immigration clients deserted by attorney

By Lornet Turnbull
Seattle Times staff reporter

	JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES Belky Castro, sitting in her mother's Redmond home, was a client of Michael Johnson-Ortiz, an immigration lawyer who returned to Chile.
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A Seattle immigration attorney has apparently left the country to return to his native Chile, leaving about 400 clients scrambling to meet crucial legal deadlines and find new attorneys.

Clients and colleagues say Michael Johnson-Ortiz's failure to return to his Pioneer Square office from what was supposed to be a vacation is especially troubling. Because of the highly time-sensitive nature of immigration cases, a missed deadline on a green-card application or asylum petition can result in deportation.

"As an organization, we feel horrible for the people who have been harmed by this," said Paul Soreff, chairman of the Seattle chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, of which Johnson-Ortiz was a member.

"That's why many of our members on their own are trying to do what they can to help his clients."

When he left on vacation Jan. 6, Johnson-Ortiz told his staff that he'd be gone for about a month. But a moving company contacted the law office shortly after he left to inquire about transporting his car and household possessions to Chile. And staffers recall hearing him talk on the phone with his wife in December, arranging for the sale of their Seattle home.

Johnson-Ortiz did not return an e-mail message sent to his home in Chile seeking comment.

The Washington State Bar Association has taken over Johnson-Ortiz' files in cases that have not already been reassigned to other attorneys and is contacting those clients to return their files to them.

Attorneys say immigration clients can be especially vulnerable to problems with legal representation because of the complicated and perpetually changing nature of immigration laws. The clients, many of them with low incomes and in the country illegally, often are unwilling to report problems, fearful of drawing unwanted attention.

	JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES Belky Castro, 15, holds a family photograph taken in 1998 in her former home in Honduras.

"In immigration cases, failure to act is huge," said Carol Edward, a Seattle immigration attorney. "It could mean the difference between a person getting necessary paperwork processed or not."

For Belky Castro, who was being represented by Johnson-Ortiz, a Feb. 9 court appearance for her asylum petition loomed. The 15-year-old's mother had cobbled together $1,750 in savings from her house-painting job to pay Johnson-Ortiz to handle Castro's asylum request.

The girl said she fled Honduras and her abusive father last June, joining her mother in the Seattle area. They learned about Johnson-Ortiz from an ad in a local Spanish language publication and agreed to pay him $3,000 to handle the case.

"I thought I had a good chance" of winning asylum, the Redmond teenager said. "He'd done a lot of work. I had a lot of confidence in him. I had a lot of hope." Castro had already appeared in court with Johnson-Ortiz in September.

"They called from his office saying he'd be back February 7," Castro's mother said, worried he might be cutting it close.

When Johnson-Ortiz didn't return, she panicked: "I wondered what was going to happen," she said. "It was like someone threw a bucket of cold water on my face."

Castro's case, which attorneys at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project have assumed, was one of the first of Johnson-Ortiz' cases to be rescheduled by the immigration court in his absence. The family was granted a three-week extension.

Last month, Johnson-Ortiz failed to respond to an inquiry sent to his home in Chile by Christine Gray, senior disciplinary counsel of the bar association. Gray asked Johnson-Ortiz to make clear his intentions about the future of his law practice here.

"If we do not hear from you," she wrote in a Jan. 13 e-mail, "we will consider your silence to be additional evidence that you have abandoned your practice of law."

Johnson-Ortiz was admitted to the state bar in 1994 and handled a range of immigration cases, including deportations, citizenship petitions and green-card and asylum applications.

He had been earlier admonished by the bar association for his representation in a citizenship case but agreed to a settlement in December.

According to documents filed with the state bar's disciplinary board, Ortiz appeared to be having financial problems before he left for Chile.

On Jan. 6, his firm was $5,000 in the red. Rent had not been paid, and the building's owner had demanded that office keys be turned over by the middle of the month. Medical-, dental- and business-insurance premiums had not been paid. Qwest was preparing to turn off the phones.

In an e-mail to Johnson-Ortiz days after he left the country, Haydee Vargas, who joined the formerly solo practice as an associate after passing the bar in November, pleaded with him to give her guidance and direction on how to proceed with client cases in his absence.

"I would like to remind you that I've been practicing immigration law for approximately one month; that fact alone shows how unprepared I am to competently handle the immigration cases on my own," she wrote.

She told state bar officials that he did not respond to her repeated telephone calls or to e-mail messages.

Seattle Times staff reporter Florangela Davila contributed to this report. Lornet Turnbull: 206-464-2420 or lturnbull@seattletimes.com.

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