Amy Meselson

Crusading lawyer who defended immigrants from deportation

In 2006, an east harlem high school’s upset victory in a New York City-wide robot-building contest proved to be bittersweet for Amadou Ly, a member of the winning team. Not only couldn’t he board a plane to Atlanta for the national finals with the rest of his team because he lacked any government identification, but he was also facing deportation as an illegal immigrant.

Ly had immigrated from Senegal, West Africa, with his mother in 2001. A year later, after his visitor’s visa expired, she abandoned him.

In 2004, when a car he was riding in got into an accident, police reported him to immigration authorities, an encounter that, after a series of frustrating court appearances, fortuitously delivered him to Amy Meselson, a Yale-educated Legal Aid Society lawyer.

Meselson had dedicated her career to defending hundreds of vulnerable immigrants from deportation and helping them navigate the gaps between the child welfare and nation- al security bureaucracies. She recruited volunteers from corporate law firms to represent foster children in immigration cases and successfully lobbied for a special juvenile section in immigration court.

Meselson helped bring Ly’s plight to public attention, namely providing information for a front-page profile in The New York Times, which produced an outpouring of legal, public and political support.

Federal officials were persuaded to drop the deportation proceedings and grant him a foreign student visa.

Meselson died on 22 July at her home in Manhattan. She was 46. The cause was suicide, her mother, Sarah Meselson, said.

Meselson worked in the immigration law unit of the Legal Aid Society in New York from 2002 until 2016, focusing on unaccompanied migrant children. She recently became the managing attorney of the Immigrant Justice Corps, a volunteer program to provide free counsel.

Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, who was instrumental in founding the Immigrant Justice Corps, described Meselson as “a life saver and life giver”.

“What Amy did was to give hope to immigrants and their families, to make it possible for dreams for a better life to be realised, for despair to be transformed into hope,” Katzmann said.

Amy Valor Meselson was born on 4 December, 1971, in Boston to Matthew Meselson, a molecular biology professor at Harvard, and Sarah Page Meselson, who researched human rights conditions in Latin America and the Caribbean for the political asylum division of the US immigration service.

She earned a bachelor’s from Brown and a master’s from Harvard, both in philosophy and a law degree from Yale.

In addition to her mother, she is survived by her father, sister, stepmother, stepfather, stepsisters and stepbrothers. New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.