“We’ve been in contact with the court so many times asking them to at least adjudicate the stay,” Perez-Casillas said, explaining that he eventually had to play a strange game of telephone with a half-dozen other legal officials in the Texas border town just to get the judge’s assistant to email him back with a vague refusal to act on the motions.
Gutierrez Lopez missed one early court appearance in 2006, after ICE ordered her to bring her asylum claims before a judge close to the Texas-Mexico border. She’d moved to the East Coast, and communication between the government and the fleeing woman broke down. She didn’t realize what had happened until most of a decade later, her lawyer said, when she got word ICE was looking for her and voluntarily went into an office in Virginia where she’d then lived for years.
