She handles the hate crime reports from AALDEF community organizer Krittika Ghosh with as cool a head. Recent violence against South Asians in New York, including two documented killings, worries them both. But Ling advises Ghosh to be scientific. Get specific quotes and details from the South Asian family claiming biased harassment by their white neighbors, she says, to see whether theirs is not merely a personal dispute. If South Asian business owners think they are being unfairly ticketed by city inspectors, survey neighboring businesses to see how their experiences compare.
In the afternoon Ling is back on the phone doing damage control with the men who must decide within days whether to register with the INS. "You are at risk," she tells some. Those men face a difficult choice: comply with registration and risk deportation now, or skip registration and pay for it down the line if they are caught. Says Ling, "Even for those who are clean—no immigration violations themselves—they might have family members who are out of status. If they lie, they're fucked. If they don't lie, they screw their parents." The best she can do short of personally accompanying hundreds of men into the INS—and it is rumored lawyers are being barred from the interrogation stage—is to arm them with knowledge.
photo: Keith Bedford
Immigration attorney Sin Yen Ling: "At this point, I'm motivated by anger."
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"They might ask you very uncomfortable questions," she tells them. "About your wife, why she married you. They might ask what mosque you go to. If you feel uncomfortable, don't say you're uncomfortable. Be straightforward, but don't give them too much information." She is not teaching them to lie, but alerting them to the misunderstandings, often due to culture or language differences, that she believes have landed some immigrants behind bars.
The calls continue many hours past the close of business, leaving her with half a voice and only the pre-dawn hours to prepare for a Muslim deportation case the next day in York, Pennsylvania.
Indeed, if September 11 created a general thirst for insight into America's Muslim immigrants, it gave those immigrants a desperate hunger for information themselves. The INS keeps creating new rules and severely punishing those who flout them, knowingly or not. So on some nights and most weekends, Ling heads out to the South Asian and Arab neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Jersey City, meeting the demand for information at its source with walk-in legal clinics she sets up in local groups' offices. On weekends last summer, she and two colleagues held know-your-rights sessions on street corners and at cultural festivals in 18 neighborhoods.
Last Friday night, about 100 men and a few women crammed into the storefront office of a Pakistani organization on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn to hear her advice. The January 10 registration had just wrapped up, and reports were coming in that some men had been detained. Immigration lawyers have been predicting chaos for the February 21 deadline, when men from New York's large Pakistani community will have to register. The room buzzes with anxiety.
Ling is cornered by one man who demands to know why visa holders must register, while the government fails to track the truly undocumented. "I know it doesn't make sense. But it's the law," says Ling.
Another man thinks he is exempt from registering because his lawyer once said she was submitting a political asylum claim on his behalf. Ling asks if his lawyer followed through. The man has no idea. Then there is the man who entered the U.S. years ago with a fake name but applied for a green card under his real one. "Should I go or not?" he asks. Another man wants to know if he's in trouble because he has married a different woman than the one who sponsored his visa. A woman who has been weeping hangs at the back of the crowd, perhaps waiting to ask advice on behalf of a loved one.
Ling hands out business cards, inviting people with complicated cases to call later for confidential counseling. She says, "God forbid you get detained—and I'm not saying that's going to happen—call me collect."
