Erin Meyer was working in her downtown San Francisco law office when the receptionist called to say there was a man crying in the lobby. Meyer, who spoke Spanish, stepped out to meet the man, who didn’t speak English. Meyer recalled that the man told her his sister, a Colombian asylum-seeker, had been arrested after attending her immigration hearing at the courthouse across the street. “They’re going to deport her,” he said. Desperate, he’d come to the firm’s glass-walled lobby asking for help.
Meyer, who provides pro bono legal representation to immigrants, didn’t hesitate to take on the case. She relied on a legal procedure known as “habeas corpus,” which has roots almost 1,000 years ago in English law, to win the woman’s release.
Meyer’s law firm — Keker, Van Nest & Peters, a boutique litigation firm that’s ranked among the nation’s best in commercial litigation and intellectual property disputes — backed her “wholeheartedly,” she said.
Meyer’s client is one of an estimated 80 people in San Francisco who have been arrested at their hearings since May, when the practice of courthouse arrests began, according to Milli Atkinson, director of the Immigrant Legal Defense Program at the Bar Association of San Francisco…