She traveled to Mexico to care for her ill father and was denied re-entry to the US: a victim of the ‘Miracle Lawyer’ speaks out

Nora Murillo has woken up several times praying to God that it’s all a nightmare. She has been trapped in Aguascalientes, the Mexican state where she was born, for six months. She arrived in February to care for her father, who has cancer, never imagining that she would be denied entry to the United States upon her return to Seattle, Washington, where she has lived for 27 years. It was on that day that she learned her application for permanent residency had been denied. “If I had known this was going to happen, I never would have gone to Mexico. Never. To lose everything, to lose my jobs, to be separated from my children,” she laments in an interview with EL PAÍS.

The ‘if only’ no longer exists for this 46-year-old Mexican who left her three children back in Seattle — all U.S. citizens aged between 21 and 24 — as well as two jobs. In one she worked with children with autism in a school district. “Out of everything that’s happened, the hardest part, regardless of the jobs and the situation, is being away from my children,” Nora says between sobs. A few days ago, her youngest son was able to travel to Mexico to visit her. It was a relief amid this period of uncertainty. The day she was detained at the airport, she was allowed to do nothing but wait for the flight that would return her to Aguascalientes. “I didn’t expect something like this,” she adds.

Nora is one of six immigrants who ended up deported to Mexico and who blame their situation on what they consider negligence by their legal representative, Alexandra Lozano, who turned the nickname ‘La abogada de los milagros’(The Miracle Lawyer) into part of her marketing strategy. Two class-action lawsuits allege that Lozano lied or exaggerated information in applications filed under a law that protects certain victims of violence and allows them to seek immigration relief. Dozens of cases her law firm handled were denied. Lozano recently surrendered her license to practice law and closed her offices, leaving about 54,000 cases in limbo. Some consider it one of the largest alleged immigration fraud scandals in the United States in recent decades.

Like so many others, Nora fell into Lozano’s web. She had seen her marketing videos on social media, in which the lawyer projected an almost providential image of herself, someone capable of winning even the most complicated immigration cases. Nora was struck by the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe — a depiction of the Virgin Mary that attracts great devotion in Mexico — that greeted visitors at Lozano’s Seattle office. “As a Catholic, you can be easily swayed by things like that,” she says.

They convinced her, she says, promising that within a few months she would get a work permit and later, the longed-for green card. They even offered to refund the $15,000 she would end up paying if they could not help her become a permanent resident. “She made it seem very easy,” this Mexican woman recounts. “She told me, ‘Don’t worry, we have the right program for you.’”

That program was the VAWA law, which in certain circumstances allows survivors of domestic violence and other crimes to apply for immigration relief. Lozano’s firm took Nora’s victim testimony by phone. More than half of the declaration they prepared and submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) contained false or exaggerated information, Nora says in her lawsuit. “I remember calling them to tell them that many of those things hadn’t happened,” she says. Despite that, no one at the law office asked her for evidence to support the claims included in her application.

“Of course it makes you angry”

Progress on her immigration case allowed Nora to request a travel permit, known as advance parole, to visit her father in Mexico, who was ill with cancer. She traveled to Aguascalientes about five times. Lozano’s office was supposed to keep her informed of her case. That is why Nora returned to her home country confident that her case was proceeding. Her last visit to Mexico was on February 12. Five days later, upon landing at Seattle airport, agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) took her to an isolated room while they checked an alert in their system. Later they told her she had missed a hearing before an immigration court and that her case had been denied on January 2. “I was not notified about either of those things,” she says.

In federal custody at the airport, Nora had two options: fight her case from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center or terminate the process and return to Mexico as soon as possible. She chose the second. The next day she took a flight to Aguascalientes. “I was in shock. For weeks, every time I woke up I would still say to myself, ‘Let this be a nightmare, let none of this be happening.’”

On February 18 she returned permanently to her parents’ home, which she had left in 1999. She left her entire life behind in Seattle. “It was devastating, it was a tragedy for her,” says her lawyer Vicente Barraza, adding that the Miracle Lawyer scandal reveals “a level of greed I have never seen before.”

In Mexico, Nora continues looking for a job that would let her use what she learned during her years in the United States, but she believes her age has become the main obstacle. “I have been applying for jobs and in most the age limit is 40 or 45 years. Of course there are manual labor jobs, doing things I no longer feel physically able to handle, that involve standing for many hours,” she laments.

From Mexico, Nora launched a legal battle against Lozano and became one of the first nine people to file a lawsuit in a federal court in Seattle. The case contributed to the Miracle Lawyer surrendering her license to the Washington State Bar. More plaintiffs later joined. There are now at least 35, including five other migrants who, like Nora, were deported to Mexico: Severo López, who now lives in Jalisco; Carlos Navarro and Ricardo Reynoso, who returned to Michoacán; Isidro Mendoza, who returned to the State of Mexico; and José Luis Ortiz, who went back to Hidalgo.

The lawsuits have also put under scrutiny the assets Lozano allegedly purchased with the high fees she charged clients, up to $25,000. According to the complaints, with that money she bought a private jet valued at $25 million, a mansion in Mexico City and two luxury condominiums in Seattle and Chicago, for which she allegedly paid $4 million. “Of course it makes you angry,” Nora says. “We were the ones who helped her make those purchases; with prices so high, with those broken promises.”

Nora hopes her lawsuit will allow her to recover at least part of the $15,000 she paid, although she knows her immigration case is lost. But above all she hopes her story will prevent others from falling into Lozano’s grasp. “Why did she make those kinds of promises?” Nora asks, addressing the lawyer who destroyed the life she had built in Washington. “Why did she make us dream if she knew this was a risk?”

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