SARAH GILLMAN AND Gregory Copeland were half way through a six-hour drive from Rochester to New York City last week when they got word that Baba Sillah, a father of five from the Bronx, was at John F. Kennedy International Airport, about to be deported to Gambia, a country he had left in the early 1990s.
It had been a long two days for the lawyers. On their way upstate, they had stopped by the Bergen County Jail, in New Jersey, to meet a Bangladeshi father facing imminent deportation. They had then driven to Buffalo, New York, where they trained a 21-year-old law student to argue the case of an Albany man, Kinimo Ngoran, held at the Batavia Federal Detention Facility. It was their second drive upstate in just over three weeks. The first time, they had temporarily stopped Ngoran’s deportation; this time, they were trying to get him out of detention and back to his American wife.