A huge WA immigration law firm rises and falls: The inside story

He's a proud American citizen who traces his family back to the Union side in the Civil War. She's a Mexican immigrant who came to the U.S. on a tourist visa and overstayed. Married in 2020, they went to Alexandra Lozano for legal help.

The woman heard about Lozano, then a Tukwila-based immigration attorney, from church friends in Seattle who were already clients of the self-proclaimed lawyer of miracles" - drawing in tens of thousands of mostly Hispanic clients with marketing featuring images of the Virgen de Guadalupe, an apparition of the Virgin Mary said to have appeared in Mexico in the 1500s.

The couple wanted to fix the woman's legal status so they could travel to Mexico. It was important for her family to see them standing in church as a married couple.

Lozano, an author and mentor to other attorneys, was at the helm of a multimillion-dollar operation with major offices in the Chicago, San Antonio, Houston and Los Angeles areas, as well as Tukwila, and back offices in Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.

The massive operation imploded in stunning fashion this spring, casting a spotlight on practices the couple say exponentially worsened their situation and causing widespread confusion among suddenly lawyerless immigrants across the country. The wife landed in deportation proceedings, and the couple still feels shock at what they came to learn was in her immigration application: Her supposedly controlling and wrathful husband had forced her to have sex.

The couple, declining to be named for privacy reasons and fear of speaking out against a figure widely viewed as powerful, said the claims are completely false.

"I have a really good marriage," she said. "I will pick him again if I have another life." Her husband calls her "the best thing that ever happened in my life."

He cried when his wife's new lawyer, Susan Pai, read aloud the application in her Des Moines office. "How could this be real?" he thought.

The rise and fall of Alexandra Lozano Immigration Law, renamed Luz Legal or La Luz del Camino Legal in April, helps answer that question. It's a tale offering a window into the desperation for legal status among an estimated 11 million to 14 million immigrants in the U.S. Their position has become even more perilous under the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda.

Dozens of interviews with onetime staffers, former clients and immigration attorneys who said they have consulted collectively on more than 100 Lozano cases paint a picture of methods that have come under fire.

In May, nine former clients sued Lozano, saying her firm delivered "illusory, negligent, and even fraudulent" services. Two weeks later, Lozano gave up her law license rather than face a disciplinary hearing from the state bar over alleged misconduct.

In June, the firm she founded shut down. A host of questions remains about why authorities didn't act sooner and what will happen to Lozano's many clients. Nearly 54,000 immigration applications signed by her were pending as of March, according to the bar.

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating Lozano, according to an email reviewed by The Seattle Times and to five people who have interacted with federal officials.

Some immigration attorneys say Lozano was part of a cottage industry of lawyers with questionable practices, much to the chagrin of many of their peers.

"This is a fraud scheme that should be important to everyone, no matter which side of the political spectrum you're on," said Pai, who has represented six former Lozano clients. The alleged scheme, she said, entails submitting applications for humanitarian visas and green cards with exaggerated or false information.

Lozano specialized in humanitarian visas, especially the kind sought on behalf of the woman whose application contained a rape allegation. The visa is open to people abused by a spouse who's a U.S. citizen or green card holder, meant to ensure people aren't reliant on their abusers to obtain legal status. Parents abused by a U.S. citizen child 21 or older also qualify under the act.

Lozano's firm applied on behalf of clients for green cards they were likely never eligible for in the first place, documents show.

False allegations taint the entire application pool, Pai said, narrowing the chances of those with legitimate abuse claims. The federal government in December signaled it is cracking down on what it called "rampant fraud" in a sharply increased number of applications for immigration benefits based on domestic violence.

Lozano and her attorney, Angelo Calfo, did not answer detailed questions about her firm's practices, but Calfo defended her in a written statement.

"Over the course of her career, Alexandra has served thousands of immigrant clients, helping them obtain legal status so that they and their families can work in and contribute to their communities," Calfo said. "Her practice has always been to fight for her clients, zealously pursue every lawful option available to them, and support their efforts to build lives in this country. The results speak for themselves."

"Alexandra denies the allegations that have been raised by a small number of individuals," the statement continued. "She will address them fully in court. Until that process has played out, we would encourage withholding judgment based on allegations alone."

The statement went on to note President Donald Trump's sweeping changes to immigration policies and blamed them for many of the problems people face while applying for legal status.

Lozano's troubles extend beyond the actions of the Trump administration, as evidenced by the state bar's allegations. The Washington attorney general's office was, as of July of last year, also conducting a "pre-litigation investigation" of the firm.

"Based on my investigation to date, Lozano's unlawful business practices are akin to fraud," wrote state Assistant Attorney General Alfredo González Benitez in an email obtained through public disclosure.

Many of Lozano's former clients, some now in deportation proceedings, said they felt betrayed. Guilt was prevalent among onetime staffers. Two said they had nightmares.

"What hurt the most was that I was seeing people that looked like my parents," said Ivonne Rodriguez, who was born in Puerto Rico and worked in Lozano's Tukwila office. Rodriguez signed clients onto contracts committing them to thousands of dollars she knew they were hard-pressed to afford. The results, she began to feel, were uncertain.

'Selling and selling and selling'

In 2014, Lozano relocated her law firm to Washington from Mexico, where she lived for a time.

The business took off when she began thinking like a CEO, aggressively marketing on social media and ridding herself of the prevalent tendency among female lawyers to undercharge, according to a 2021 Washington Super Lawyers magazine article quoting Lozano.

She would come to charge between $10,000 and $15,000 a case, according to the state bar's May statement of allegations and contracts shared by former clients. By 2022, her firm's reported income totaled $55 million, according to a tax filing obtained by The Times.

Lozano had also, as of 2021, earned $1.7 million through an outfit educating other immigration lawyers, Lozano's attorneys wrote in 2024 Texas litigation over trade secrets she said were taken from her.

That litigation and two other lawsuits, both filed in May on behalf of clients, claim other attorneys copied Lozano's practices.

Lozano's rocketing fortunes reflected the astonishing volume of cases handled by her firm. At the time she resigned, her firm had 35,000 clients, according to the bar.

Lozano pushed staffers hard to sign contracts, according to many of nearly a dozen former employees interviewed. Laura Benítez, who worked in the Chicago-area office, said staffers selling contracts worked on commission and were offered bonuses if they signed clients on the spot or hit a certain number of contracts.

"Everybody around me was just, like, selling and selling and selling, and they didn't even know what they were selling," Benítez said. There was little time to review information taken from clients, she said.

"I felt like I couldn't sleep anymore," said a Tukwila staffer who signed a nondisclosure agreement. The volume of sales was "never enough" for Lozano, the employee said. "It just felt very predatory."

The staffers often doing the selling, along with consulting with clients and discussing legal strategies, were not attorneys, according to former employees and the bar's allegations. Many were called "licenciadas" or "licenciados," staffers said.

The title, as commonly understood in Mexico, implies someone has passed the bar when used in a legal setting, said Héctor Iván Godoy Priske, the former Mexican consul in Seattle.

Lozano, in a 2021 letter to the state attorney general's office responding to a client complaint, said all her firm's consultations were reviewed by an attorney.

But Elodia Torres, who held an administrative position in a mortgage company before becoming a Chicago-area licenciada for Lozano, says she was bothered by her own title and lack of training. "I felt like we were lying to the customers," she said.

Part of what nonlawyer staff often did, according to former employees, was explain to clients how they could apply for work permits and green cards under the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA.

Crucially, this route does not necessarily require immigrants who entered the country illegally to leave the U.S. to gain a green card. Most other avenues do, raising fears of being stuck outside the country for years if not forever.

Lozano trademarked a slogan: "Arreglar sin salir," or, "fix without leaving."

"It is our firm's policy to educate every client about VAWA," Lozano wrote in her 2021 letter to the attorney general's office. "Through my work doing thousands of VAWA cases, I have found that the majority of my clients do not understand that they are victims."

That raises the question: What does it mean to be a victim? For the purposes of VAWA, the government says a qualifying individual must have suffered "battery or extreme cruelty."

"I don't think there is a litmus test for extreme cruelty," said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, adding that the criteria is open to interpretation by federal officers. He says, however, that something "extraordinary" is required as opposed to, say, normal marital problems.

Yet, a script some Lozano staffers were supposed to read to clients, shared by one former employee and confirmed by another, explains VAWA as helping people with "things that are normally seen among all married couples, like your partner checking your phone all the time, or checking your social media," according to an English translation.

The law also helps people with normal "family situations," the script says, "like talking back, answering rudely or arriving home later after going out with their friends."

Clients responded by sharing a range of experiences, from beatings and rapes to the more ordinary problems alluded to in sales pitches, according to former staffers and clients.

The woman shocked to learn her application contained a rape allegation, for example, said she had told Lozano's firm about her husband balking at her buying an expensive box of strawberries and snapping when she interrupted a conversation to ask for advice while cooking a Thanksgiving dinner.

Other former Lozano clients told similar stories of statements appearing in their applications they never said, echoing claims in state bar allegations, in the lawsuit against Lozano and from lawyers who have consulted with numerous Lozano clients over the years.

One man said he didn't tell Lozano's firm that his wife forces him to have sex and treats him like a servant, as written in his application. Another onetime Lozano client said her son never tried to hit her or threatened to call police to have her deported, as her application claimed.

One May day, former Lozano client Brenda Alcaraz Deniz went over her application with her new lawyer, Chelan Crutcher-Herrejon. With Alcaraz Deniz was her 26-year-old daughter - a supposed abuser, according to the documents.

Sitting in Crutcher-Herrejon's Seattle office, they started with a mental health evaluation. Such an assessment, meant to demonstrate the toll of abuse, is best performed by an "independent, objective expert," said Michele Carney, an immigration lawyer who serves on state and national legal ethics committees.

Alcaraz Deniz's evaluation was done by a since-dissolved company called En Solidaridad, whose address on the document was the same as Lozano's law firm. A co-defendant in the suit against Lozano, En Solidaridad was formed by Lozano and a man she later married, and it was run by him, according to Washington secretary of state filings. Manuel Lozano Rodriguez, who separated from Lozano several years ago, declined to talk about the business when reached by phone.

As Crutcher-Herrejon read aloud the documents, Alcaraz Deniz and her daughter frequently looked at each other, laughed or shook their heads over statements that claimed, for instance, Alcaraz Deniz was "petrified all the time" by her daughter. The young woman, according to both the evaluation and declaration, would move her arms "wildly" and her eyes would "pierce" into her mom.

"Mentiras, mentiras, mentiras," Alcaraz Deniz repeatedly said. Lies, lies lies.

One of the 'sketchiest things'

None of the former staffers interviewed said they made up information about clients. Other people wrote the declarations.

Lozano's firm "revolutionized the operational structure of an immigration law firm" by dividing it into departments, each handling a different aspect of a case, according to her lawyers' filing in the trade secrets litigation. One former staffer likened the structure to an "assembly line."

If declarations were inaccurate, how come they bore the signatures of clients?

It's hard to say what happened in every case. The client who said her declaration contained a false rape allegation recalled signing documents in English she didn't fully understand.

The lawsuit against Lozano says her firm sometimes asked people to sign blank pieces of paper or empty signature boxes and later attached those signatures to documents clients had not reviewed. The bar's allegations did not mention those methods specifically but said Lozano, in at least one case, submitted documents to authorities that a client had not reviewed.

The bar and the lawsuit also say Lozano submitted applications with digitized signatures on forms where a "wet ink" signature was required.

The government gave that as the reason when in September it denied the application of Pai's client with the questionable rape allegation. She stays mostly at home now, scared of being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Adding to her distress: Pai told her she had no need for an application based on abuse. She had a straightforward path to a green card due to her marriage to a U.S. citizen and legal arrival in the country.

The government denied at least 270 other Lozano applications because of signature problems, according to a since-dropped Vermont lawsuit she filed in January, arguing the denials went against the agency's rules at the time.

Many of the applications handled by Lozano's firm had another major problem: They were submitted for clients who were never eligible, according to the bar, the lawsuit and interviews with lawyers who subsequently worked on cases handled by her office.

Often, that was because they had illegally entered the U.S. more than once and lived here without authorization for more than a year - in most cases, a disqualifying factor for a green card that can only be waived after leaving the country for 10 years.

"Many times this person would have to leave to go back home because mom or dad were sick, or maybe somebody passed away in the family. And so they would have to leave the U.S. and then come back again," said Tacoma immigration attorney Gustavo Cueva.

Cueva consulted on the case of one man whose contract with Lozano acknowledged he is subject to the disqualifying factor, called a "permanent bar" - evidence Lozano knew the green card application would likely be denied, Cueva said.

Another Lozano contract, in a case now handled by Crutcher-Herrejon, said, according to an English translation: "We are NOT going to be able to win residency. We are applying only to get you the work permit faster." People who apply for green cards typically get work permits in about six months, but those are only temporary until the government reaches a decision on the application.

"I don't know any reputable immigration attorney who would do that," said Carney, the member of legal ethics committees. Applying for a green card on behalf of an ineligible client puts the person at risk of being placed in removal proceedings, Carney said.

"I think that was one of the most sketchiest things in the law firm," said a former Lozano licenciado who worked in the Bogotá office and later in the U.S., speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Staffers believed clients would likely back out of contracts when such clauses were read to them, and so "we used to do it soft," he said. Don't worry, they'd say to clients. "This is abogada de los milagros, the miracle lawyer, she's going to do whatever it takes to get you the best benefit."

Clients lit up upon hearing they could get help. Some had previously gone to lawyer after lawyer who had told them nothing could be done.

Their optimism was reinforced when they got temporary work permits, and many spread the word about Lozano. If a reckoning was in the offing, in the form of a green card denial, it wouldn't come for years.

Lozano faced a different kind of reckoning in May, when she permanently gave up her Washington law license and acknowledged the resignation could be treated as a disbarment by every other state. The next morning, the mood was sober in the packed Tukwila waiting room of the firm that once bore her name - and which continued to operate "as usual," according to a statement that week.

Luz Legal's closure this month didn't put an end to the uncertainty faced by former clients. The firm's announcement said clients could transfer their cases to "a team of attorneys who may have worked on your case previously."

"Who they are, we don't know. Who they work for, we don't know," said Cueva, the Tacoma attorney.

Crutcher-Herrejon said she is concerned they might still be associated with Lozano and following the resigned lawyer's practices.

A website about the lawsuit against her lists 30 attorneys willing to discuss options with clients. Many have been flooded with calls.

Immigration lawyers say crucial next steps include changing the address on immigration files from Luz Legal's to those of clients. (The government has how-to information for humanitarian cases on its website, as does immigration court on its.)

The state bar, while putting up its resource page for Lozano clients, initially gave no sign it is monitoring the situation, saying it acts on grievances and can no longer take any about Lozano since she gave up her license.

Asked if the bar is doing anything more to help, spokesperson Sara Niegowski said in mid-June the bar is "moving into a convening role," adding "it is clear that Lozano's clients are in need of a bigger support system, involving coordination, information-sharing, and resources from the immigration-law community at large." No details were available yet.

"My parents are panicking," said Jessica the morning after Lozano's resignation. She asked to be identified by her first name only so as not to endanger them.

From Mexico, her parents had both lived in the U.S. since they were about 15. Her mom was now 48, her dad 52.

They finally thought their dream of legal status was about to come true, Jessica said. "Now, it's crumbling under them.

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