By JODI SOKOLOWSKI
Buffalo Law Journal

With the help of a volunteer attorney, a Chad native was granted asylum in an order by Hon. John Reid of the U.S. Immigration Court in Batavia Wednesday.

Thanks to a prosecutor's scheduling conflict, the immigrant's asylum hearing was delayed from May to July 18 last year.

Those few months may have spared Laurent Kouladoumgar from death upon return to his native country, said Damon & Morey LLP lawyer Jesse Baldwin, who handled Kouladoumgar's case without a fee through the Bar Association of Erie County's ECBA Volunteer Lawyers Project Inc. (VLP). Baldwin said his client, who had been arrested and beaten after supporting an opposition-party candidate in a presidential election, might have been kidnapped, perhaps executed, if he had been sent back to Chad.

"He said, ‘They know who I am and will be waiting for (me),' " Baldwin said.

The outcome of an unrelated case, the Matter of R-D, decided by the federal Board of Immigration Appeals July 3, 2007, allowed Kouladoumgar's date of entry to be changed from 1998 to 2003. He arrived in the United States in 1998 under a student visa, but couldn't legally stay because his brother, living in Canada, could no longer financially support him. Kouladoumgar sought refugee status there, but was denied.

When he was escorted back to the U.S. border in April 2003, he was taken into custody and detained. His application for asylum was denied based on lack of timeliness because it was based on his 1998 entry.

He had to file a withholding-of-removal application, which comes with a higher burden of proof. Although that was denied, Kouladoumgar won an appeal after representing himself before the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and was permitted to remain in the country.

But that left him without legal immigration status, and he was held in the federal detention center in Batavia from April 2003 to August 2006, when VLP Supervising Immigration Attorney Sophie Feal took on his case.

Out on a $2,500 bond that was raised by area African immigrants, Kouladoumgar could only wait for the trial, which was originally scheduled for May 2007 but rescheduled for later in July. That's when the Matter of R-D established case law that "reawakened his asylum case," Baldwin said. He briefly had to return to custody in December 2007.

"It broke my heart that I had to turn him into Customs and Border Protection, but he had a chance to apply for asylum now," Feal said.

Wednesday's decision was a relief for Kouladoumgar, "who thanks God first and foremost," Feal said, as well as for Feal and Baldwin.

"If he was sent back, it would have been a big emotional blow for me - not because I lost, but the ramifications of the case were very large on a personal level" for Kouladoumgar, Baldwin said. "Laurent is a good man, and he deserves this outcome."

Feal said the length and complexity of Kouladoumgar's situation shows that the federal government should provide assigned counsel for detained immigrants in civil proceedings, not just in criminal cases.

"If he had counsel from the beginning, maybe he would have avoided four years of detention ... and the costs associated from every perspective - the courts' time, taxpayers' money," she said. "As a society, we have to commit to finding a more effective and efficient process."