A child goes home

October 27, 2026 · Español

On October 2, Senior U.S. District Judge Sim Lake of the Southern District of Texas granted an emergency motion we had filed days earlier and ordered the immediate release of a Honduran child from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The court found that his prolonged detention violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and ORR’s own policies. He had been facing transfer to ICE and likely deportation. On October 4 he walked out and went home to his family.

My firm published its account of the case yesterday. It names the team, and the team deserves naming: Richard Crudo, Lauren Watt, J.C. Rozendaal, Paige Cloud, Hadia Ahsan, and paralegals Michael Baca, Rien Groskopf, and Namhyun Kearns, who did the kind of work that doesn’t show up in a press release. I chair the firm’s pro bono committee, so I get to write this post. They did the heavy lifting.

A few things I want to say in my own voice.

This is what the law is for. The TVPRA is a statute Congress passed, with bipartisan votes, to protect children. ORR has its own written policies about how long a child can be held and under what conditions. A federal judge read the statute, read the policies, read the record, and concluded the government had not followed them. That is not an activist outcome. It’s the ordinary, unglamorous machinery of a court doing its job — and it’s the same machinery I rely on every week when I argue that a patent claim means what it says.

It should not take a law firm. We filed on a Friday and had an order the following Thursday. That speed was possible because a firm with 170 lawyers could drop a team on it. Most children in ORR custody don’t have that. The organizations that do this work every day — on budgets that would not cover one of our associates — are the ones who find the cases, know the law cold, and keep showing up. If this story moves you, they are the ones to support. Legal Aid Justice Center is where I serve; there are others doing equally serious work.

Why a patent lawyer. People ask. The honest answer is that the skills transfer almost completely: read the statute, read the regulation, build the record, write for a reader who is busy and skeptical, and don’t overclaim. The other honest answer is that I’m the son of an immigrant family from a Spanish-speaking country, and when I sit across from a parent who hasn’t seen their kid in months, I don’t need an interpreter. Some of my colleagues started doing this work because I asked. They kept doing it because of that conversation.

I’ll keep most of what I write here about patents. But I wanted this one on the record.