The next night, Santos was put in foster care. A month later he was allowed to move to Maryland with his father, though the U.S. government still intended to deport him.
His father, who hadn't seen him since he was 2, called a Washington nonprofit group for help but was told it lacked resources. Before running out of money, he paid a law firm a hefty $700 to shift his son's case to Baltimore. The nonprofit National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children contacted the Duane Morris firm, where Santos' case landed on Chowdhury's desk.
Ten months after he had crossed the Rio Grande, he and his father met with Chowdhury in the firm's hushed offices high above the Inner Harbor.
Looking back, Chowdhury admits he was not thrilled at first. A 2006 graduate of the University of Maryland Law School, he liked the idea of working pro bono. But he is used to representing pharmaceutical companies on Food and Drug Administration matters. He'd never handled an immigration case and didn't speak Spanish.
"I had no idea what I was doing," he said. The stakes were high: "This is somebody's life we're talking about, not just another corporate transaction."
He was not entirely on his own. Sara McDowell, a senior attorney at the center for refugee and immigrant children, advised him, as did Andres Benach, a Duane Morris immigration lawyer.
Still, the challenge was steep given two rulings by the Board of Immigration Appeals in July 2008 that Benach said "pretty much closed off" the arguments typically made in gang asylum cases.
In general, asylum can be granted when someone has a well-founded fear of persecution for one of five reasons: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. The last category has been tried in gang cases, but the appeals board said those resisting gang pressure do not make up a social group.
Chowdhury knew he had to thread the needle. Santos faced peril in El Salvador, the lawyer reasoned, not because he'd resisted the gang, but for a very basic reason: "Because he was his brother's brother." And a nuclear family has long been an accepted social group for asylum cases.
But as the asylum hearing approached, Chowdhury worried any gang claim might fail because of the apparent judicial skepticism. And there was a hiccup: If Santos fled because of threats to his family, why were his mother and brother still in El Salvador?
