Flourishing

Wrapped in a serape, Leonardo DiCaprio sits quietly in Carlos Quintana’s plant-filled San Antonio law office. His gaze is unblinking, as Quintana explains how they met when Leonardo was just a few months old.

The snow-white Chihuahua, still a puppy, is named for the actor—specifically for the character Arnie Grape in the 1993 drama What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. “Doesn’t he look like him?” Quintana asks, gesturing to the beige circles under the dog’s small eyes.

When DiCaprio’s canine namesake is not sitting quietly in Quintana’s arms, the puppy passes the time in a pet carrier on the floor near his desk. Leonardo’s presence in the office offers a distraction, and even comfort, during the busy and occasionally chaotic days in Quintana’s immigration practice.

On this particular fall afternoon, the 42-year-old attorney is answering phone calls related to his current docket of asylum cases. It is a Wednesday, the one day of the week when the 15-member Quintana Barajas firm tries to catch up in a practice that continues to see its client and cases increase. “We do work, we take phone calls, but clients don’t come into the office on Wednesdays,” Quintana says. “It’s really stressful work for everybody, so when we can do little things like this, and still get work done and make our associates happier, we have to try.”

Quintana puts Leonardo DiCaprio back into his carrier in the corner. Dressed in a grey suit accented with a royal blue tie and light blue patterned socks, Quintana sits behind a remarkably clutter-free desk. For the record, he says, it’s usually not that clean. But it is obvious that order and organization appeal to him, especially since the cases he handles tend to be complex and even messy at times. Cutting through the confusion is one of the ways Quintana strives to help his clients. “It’s a complicated process for a lot of these people who usually don’t have enough education or resources to understand it,” he says.

Having felt like an outsider himself, Quintana can relate. While he is the co-founding attorney of a law office in the nation’s seventh-largest city, Quintana grew up in Kirtland, a remote town in northern New Mexico. His parents, Arturo and Bertha, had emigrated from Mexico in the 1970s, and he and his older brother Cervando grew up in a community that was mostly Native American.

Quintana felt isolated. It wasn’t until he went to college that he realized that Native Americans then comprised less than 2% of the overall population of the United States. “There was maybe one other person in my high school who could speak Spanish,” he says of being in the minority as a Mexican American.

Today, Quintana recognizes the beauty in the vast landscape and big sky of his home state. But at the time, the barren surroundings could be overwhelming. “I remember the view from my home—there was a power plant in the distance, and dirt and mesa. It all just seemed so brown, beige and desolate. Growing up in that environment, I needed to get out.”

In elementary school, Quintana realized that education could expand his world. “I always dreamt of being somewhere bigger,” he says. “Somewhere I would fit, with more people who were like me—more people who were interested in seeing the world and having more experiences.”

Quintana found some of these people at the University of New Mexico in 2000, where he majored in political science and psychology. The political science courses, which assigned long reading lists and many papers, would help him read faster and write better. As for the psychology classes, the intent was more personal. “I always thought I was a little bit of a weirdo,” he says. “I tried to understand that through psychology, and I found out I’m not so weird.”

College also introduced Quintana to Spanish literature, and he fell in love with the works of writers like Miguel de Cervantes and Federico García Lorca. After graduating in 2004, while working in the health care industry, a friend told Quintana about a program that was recruiting English-language speakers to teach in Spain’s bilingual school system. Quintana became one of the program’s first recruits, teaching and living in the country for more than three years.

“I have such respect for teachers and the kind of organization and dedication you have to have, and the energy levels,” Quintana says. “I was working with first, second, and third graders, and it’s a lot of work—difficult, but rewarding.”

Upon his return, he moved to Phoenix, where his father Arturo was living after he and Quintana’s mother divorced. He felt directionless, working at a corporate call center. Then a friend in medical school suggested Quintana take a few college courses to get back on track, so he enrolled at ASU.

Quintana’s rediscovered love of learning, along with his parents’ immigrant experiences, sparked his decision to apply to law school. Both Arturo and Bertha were out of status for a time, but through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, they became lawful permanent residents. “Luckily, they had that avenue. Today, so many people don’t,” he says. “I thought this would be the easiest way to help the population that looks like me.’”

After receiving a full scholarship to the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, Quintana moved to the East Coast in 2010 and quickly fell in love with the city. But he struggled to find his footing in school. “A lot of kids had gone to Ivy League schools and had a more rigorous early education than I did,” he says. “They could zoom through a lot of the material and comprehend it, but it took me a while.”

Classmate and future roommate Hugo Arenas helped ease the transition. Arenas recalls how the pair’s mutual interests in immigration and constitutional law brought them together. “From the moment I met him, Carlos knew he wanted to practice immigration law,” says Arenas, now a New York-based government attorney. “He was laser focused on developing into the best immigration lawyer he could possibly be. If there was a class, a litigation clinic, or an internship that he believed would further that goal, he would do it. That passion is the through line in his legal career.”

So is public service, which Arenas calls “the core that allows [Quintana] to care and passionately advocate for all of his clients.”

After earning his J.D. in 2013, Quintana worked for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, where he handled immigration cases. Attorney Emiko Furuya-Cortes, who handled hiring, remembers Quintana’s resume. “I saw the summa cum laude [distinction] and that he worked in Spain, which is unusual. I thought that international experience would be good, and I could tell he was a very hard worker.”

Furuya-Cortes was equally impressed with her mentee’s appreciation for immigrant families and the unique struggles they experience. At the time, Quintana hadn’t been admitted to the Bar. But, Furuya-Cortes says, “he was already a lawyer. He had such presence and the capacity to help clients.”

From there, Quintana volunteered on domestic violence cases at the Essex County Family Justice Center in New Jersey, before working at a commercial litigation firm in Midtown Manhattan. Within a few months, Quintana knew commercial litigation wasn’t the right fit. “I always wanted to work with people, and I knew that immigration was probably the best area for me,” he says. “It was very near and dear to my heart.”

Although Quintana wanted to remain in New York, a job beckoned in Texas—a move he hoped would put him on the front lines of immigration law. Arriving in June 2014, Quintana was tasked with working at the San Antonio office for immigration attorney Paul Esquivel, whose billboards lined the city’s highways. “I arrived with no supervisor in sight, and I began reviewing the immigration court cases in the office, with no idea what was about to hit me,” says Quintana.

He started with the affirmative asylum cases, the details of which were filed in separate yellow folders for each client. As inexperienced as Quintana was, even he knew the cases were doomed: Most had been filed after the clients’ first year of entry, likely making them legally unviable. He began to think of the files as the “‘yellow plague’—this wave of failing cases where Esquivel guided hundreds of people to their own legal demise.”

The many demises led to several complaints, which in turn caught the eye of the Bar. In short, Quintana unknowingly walked into a legal disaster that led to Esquivel surrendering his license in lieu of disciplinary action amid charges of unlawful and deceptive practices. Quintana’s employment ended as he was assisting two clients in lodging complaints against the firm; the office’s new owners escorted him out. “Carlos was understandably concerned,” says Arenas. “He was somewhat new to the practice of law and moved from New York to Texas for the position. The experience impressed upon Carlos the importance of doing things by the book.”

Within one week, Quintana established his own office and reached out to former clients from Esquivel’s firm. “It was a relief to finally be free,” he says. “I was determined not to let the bloodshed continue.”

Necessity then became his mother of invention. In 2015 Quintana researched prior cases involving the stop-time rules, which can cancel removal cases. He discovered a series of cases beginning with Bridges v. Wixon, a case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1945. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the court’s majority opinion, observing in part that “meticulous care must be exercised lest the procedure by which he is deprived of that liberty not meet the essential standards of fairness.”

“I looked at how the law developed after Wixon, and felt reasonably comfortable that no prejudice was required—and that it was not a jurisdictional question,” Quintana says. “I filed the argument and motion to reconsider repeatedly with every new case that supported this conclusion.”

It was a strategy that, at best, annoyed some judges. At worst, it compelled one to yell, “There’s nothing there!” Quintana continued to disagree and, in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Pereira v. Sessions. The case answered whether an incomplete notice to appear (NTA)—the charging document that initiates removal proceedings and gives notice to someone to retain an attorney and prepare their case—would stop the clock.

“After the decision, you could only lead to one logical conclusion: The NTA was insufficient to initiate proceedings,” Quintana says, noting that it then became possible to reconsider the Esquivel-era cases due to their time of filing and the notification process concerning the clients’ potential deportation.

“I found a way to reset the cases of those clients who had been left without help—even though it took years and several Supreme Court decisions for my strategy to be vindicated legally and provide that relief for my clients,” he says of the 2021 Niz-Chavez v. Garland ruling. “I would not recommend this way of starting a career, but sometimes one is forged by fire.

“At my firm now,” he adds, “I have worked to prevent that sort of thing from ever happening again. We have a mission and vision for our work and practice, and even competent, well-trained attorneys have not met our standards of client representation.”

As the fall afternoon winds down, Quintana turns his focus to the plants in his office. Gardening and bonsai, the East Asian practice of growing and training miniature trees, are two of his favorite hobbies; a small grouping of succulents sits on his desk, while a collection of Ficus and philodendron plants flourish along a back wall. “Things move so quickly, all the time, and there are always emergencies with immigration law,” Quintana says. “But plants move at the right speed. They make me calm.”