Immigration lawyer's plan to help client leads to prison
DETROIT — For 35 years, immigration attorney David Wenger witnessed the gut-wrenching tales of the deported: fathers and mothers being torn apart from their children, ordered to leave the country.
Over and over again, Wenger says he saw the same story play out in court. Parents begged to stay. Their lawyers pleaded on their behalf. But the answer was almost always no. And the children sobbed.
After more than three decades of watching this desperation play out in front of him, the 70-year-old Wenger, of Grosse Pointe, Mich., says he finally caved. He broke the law to spare a client from deportation by telling his client not to reveal a decades-old criminal sexual conduct conviction from his teenage years.
The case cost Wenger his career and his freedom — he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on Feb. 5 — but it also triggered an outcry of support from immigration lawyers who say the heartache and struggles they face defending immigrants in no-win situations is sometimes too much to bear.
“I knew what was going to happen. ... When these people get deported, they’re gone for good. He would never get back to the United States,” Wenger said of his client. “I wasn’t as concerned about him as I was his daughter. ... The daughter just set me off.”
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Wenger, though, admits he messed up.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “As experienced as I am, I didn’t even understand why I did what I did. ... I really screwed this up.”
Meanwhile, Wenger’s client — a 45-year-old Albanian immigrant who has been in the U.S. since he was 6 months old — is still in the country and may not get deported, despite having convictions for crimes involving criminal sexual conduct, domestic violence, prescription pain pills and obstruction of justice.
A deportation order was issued for him in 2013 after a controlled-substance conviction in Macomb County, Mich. But immigration authorities said there are no imminent plans to deport the man, who has managed to keep his life in the U.S. largely because of the lawyer who admittedly crossed the line to help him.
Wenger said he knew all too well that if the courts knew about his client’s criminal sexual conduct conviction — on top of the others — he’d be doomed.
So Wenger hid his client’s decades-old criminal sex conviction from the immigration court, on both an application and in court proceedings. He also told his client — who got probation for the sex crime — “Don’t admit it, unless you are asked.”
His client went along with it; so did his client’s family. But only Wenger was criminally charged.
“I’m not a vindictive person,” Wenger said, of his former client. “But he should have been charged.”
Just vs. unjust
U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement deported 235,400 immigrants nationwide last year — almost half had no criminal convictions. The agency would not comment on specifics about Wenger’s client, citing privacy and safety issues, though federal prosecutors noted in court documents that the criminal sexual conduct conviction “would likely be fatal” to his case.
Immigration Customs and Enforcement officials would only say that the man is still in the country, free on bond, and his deportation order is still pending.
They said that in general, many factors can impact deportations, including a person’s right to appeal removal orders and the issuance of required travel documents by the destination country. But agency officials would not say for sure whether the Albanian man will be deported, or be allowed to remain in the U.S.
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The Detroit Free Press is not naming the defendant for security reasons.
At issue in the case is the man’s criminal record and the steps that were taken to hide his criminal sexual conduct conviction from the court. The man ended up disclosing the conviction during cross-examination in an immigration hearing, telling prosecutors that Wenger had instructed him to lie.
This has become a sticking point for Wenger, who maintains that he told his client to hide the conviction “unless he’s asked.” He also argues that he’s not the only one who deceived the courts, but that his client and his client’s family were in on it, too, yet never got charged.
“Mr. Wenger is technically correct. His client and his client’s family knew that they were providing false testimony, so they were ‘knowing participants,’ ” federal prosecutors have argued in court documents. But that didn’t warrant charging the family because, prosecutors wrote, they “completely relied on the counsel Mr. Wenger gave them.”
Prosecutors also cited recorded jailhouse conversations and emails, in which Wenger encouraged his client to stay hush about the criminal sexual conduct conviction, even when the man expressed a reluctance to lie to the court.
“Mr. Wenger is right that only he has been prosecuted. However, that is no reason to give him a break,” prosecutors wrote. “It would have been unjust to prosecute Mr. Wenger’s clients for relying on the instructions he gave from his position of authority as their counselor.”
Prosecutors also cited Wenger’s past disciplinary troubles, noting he had been admonished at least 10 times by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission, and reprimanded twice by the Michigan Attorney Discipline Board.
Blame his ‘big heart’
Wenger’s downfall stunned many in the immigration law community, where he was known as a witty and compassionate attorney who took on the toughest cases and became emotionally invested in his clients.
“I have long said that David’s downfall would be his big heart,” immigration attorney Melanie Goldberg, vice chair of the Michigan chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, wrote in a letter on Wenger’s behalf. “I never dreamt, in my worst nightmare, that he would go down this hard. It is very painful to watch a mentor, colleague and friend have to weather this kind of storm.”
Goldberg is one of more than 25 lawyers who wrote letters to U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland, urging him to show mercy to Wenger, given his decades of work helping immigrants.
“He was the one to whom other attorneys would refer their most difficult cases,” Goldberg wrote. “I watched as one client after another, each more desperate than the last, would walk through (Wenger’s) door … David would take on the fight because he believed in families being together.”
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Despite the pleas for mercy, Cleland couldn’t justify not sending Wenger to prison, calling his actions “outrageous behavior” and among “the most serious crimes a lawyer can commit.”
Wenger’s prison sentence brought Sharon Todd to tears.
Wenger represented her Canadian husband, Brian Todd, in a six-year immigration ordeal that ended with her husband being granted permanent residency in the U.S.
“He has totally changed our lives. I adore him. My husband adores him. My son thinks he walks on water,” said Sharon Todd, who found out just days ago that Wenger is going to prison. “I was balling my eyes out. We consider him our friend. He’s funny and witty, and he always made a bad situation better.”
She added: “I just can’t fathom that this has happened to him.”
Follow Tresa Baldas on Twitter: @TBaldas