Amy Meselson, Lawyer Who Defended Young Immigrants, Dies at 46

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 was Ly prevented from boarding a plane to Atlanta for the national finals with the rest of his team, because he lacked government identification; he was also facing deportation as an unauthorized immigrant.

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

In 2004, when a car he was riding in got into an accident, police reported him to immigration authorities. But that encounter, after a series of frustrating court appearances, ultimately delivered him, to his good fortune, to Amy Meselson, a Legal Aid Society lawyer in New York.

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

Ly had been pinning his hopes on the DREAM Act, the legislation that would have granted a path to citizenship to immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children through no fault of their own.

When that legislation stalled in Congress, though, Meselson suggested that Ly’s impressive performance on the Central Park East High School robotics team might elicit public support for his case.

“I was very scared at that time,” he recalled, “but I knew I could trust her.”

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

Federal officials were persuaded to drop the deportation proceedings and grant Ly a foreign student visa. He graduated from Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, became a citizen, embarked on an acting career and moved to Hollywood.

Meselson, who had struggled with depression since she was teenager, committed suicide on July 22 at her home in Manhattan, her mother, Sarah Meselson, said. She was 46.

Ly, now 30, said in a recorded tribute that he sent to Meselson’s family: “I was able to stay in this country, I was able to live my dream and grow up and feed my family and help out others because she helped me and she did it with open arms. She was my hero.”

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 had recently become the managing attorney of the Immigrant Justice Corps, a volunteer program to provide free counsel.

Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who was instrumental in founding the Immigrant Justice Corps, described Meselson in an email 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 realized, for despair to be transformed into hope,” Katzmann said.

Amy Valor Meselson was born on Dec. 4, 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 U.S. immigration service.

Meselson earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a master’s from Harvard, both in philosophy. (Her senior thesis at Brown was about free will and determinism.) She earned her law degree at Yale.

In addition to her mother, she is survived by her father; her sister, Zoe Forbes; her stepmother, Jeanne Guillemin Meselson; her stepfather, Arthur Podaras; her stepsisters, Paola and Isabel Emerson; and her stepbrothers, Rob and John Guillemin and William Emerson IV.

Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.

At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.

“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.

“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”