By April Xu

Mohan, a 55-year-old Nepali immigrant, woke up one morning this past December expecting a resolution to two decades of uncertainty about his life in the U.S. following an old asylum denial. He had submitted a marriage-based application for adjustment of status, and walked into immigration court for what he believed would be a routine interview.

Instead, Mohan, who requested to use only his first name for privacy concerns, left in handcuffs. A few days later, he was deported to Nepal.

Only afterwards did his family learn that a 2009 removal order had rendered him ineligible to adjust status before U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unless his immigration case was first reopened in immigration court, a critical step his first attorney never took. A second attorney made another mistake, filing a motion seeking a bond hearing, a legally questionable request for someone subject to a final removal order and ineligible for bond, three days after Mohan had already been deported.

“The last four months have been like a nightmare,” Mohan told Documented in a statement translated and shared through Adhikaar, a nonprofit community organization serving Nepali immigrants in New York City. “If I had just gotten good legal advice on time in both instances, I wouldn’t be separated from my family right now.”

Mohan’s case, detailed in a new report released Wednesday by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is not an outlier. Advocates say it reflects a broader crisis: Asian immigrants in New York City are routinely shut out of meaningful access to immigration legal services, even as they make up roughly a quarter of the city’s undocumented population.

Mohan said that because there were no free or low-cost attorneys available, he turned to private lawyers who “took his money and gave him wrong information.”

To read the entire article: https://documentedny.com/2026/04/01/asian-immigrants-legal-help-immigration-courts-lawyers-aaldef-report/

Photo credit: Charles-McClintock Wilson/Shutterstock