Two Professors, One Immigration Law, and a Complicated Path Forward

Joanne Palmer, Jan. 19, 2017 - "Imagine a group of families, including parents and kids. You know how there’s almost always one child off in a corner, reading? Engrossed in a book? Deaf to everything else? Doesn’t come when called? Doesn’t speak when spoken to? Occasionally walks into walls? Dan-el Padilla Peralta was one of those kids, enraptured by a textbook about ancient Greece and Rome. He was lucky — he found a lifelong passion, a field that so captured his imagination that he went on to earn a Ph.D. from Stanford University studying it, and now he’s teaching. But he was not so lucky in other ways. ... After he finished his work at Princeton, Dan-el went on to Stanford University, emerging from Palo Alto as Dr. Padilla Peralta. His dissertation, on religion in Rome’s Middle Republic, is being turned into a book, and will be published by Princeton University Press. At the same time, he wrote a memoir, “Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League,” published by Penguin. He got married, to Melissa Padilla, and the two are rapturously happy. During this time, and continuing to now, Dr. Padilla has been represented by a lawyer, Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Cornell’s law school and who he says is responsible for his continued presence in this country. But despite Mr. Yale-Loehr, despite his being married to an American, despite the fact that should the 10-year ban have been effective, it would be over by now, his status still is in question. “My legal status now is very complicated,” he understated."