Young Zheng Sullivan was only 14 years old when his father sent him away, alone, to the United States. Born a second child in the Fujian Province of China, where the government heavily taxes families with more than one child, Young was seen as a burden. After his mother died, his father and stepmother paid a group of human traffickers, the “Snakeheads,” to smuggle Young to the United States. Unbeknownst to Young, his family only paid the Snakeheads a few thousand dollars. They expected Young to work around the clock to pay off the remainder of the smuggling fee—$65,000.

We met Young after he had been apprehended by immigration officials while entering the country. Though his deportation to China—where the Snakeheads threatened his and his family’s life—seemed inevitable, we found an attorney to help Young fight his case. For years, Young and his legal team battled in courts from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to Texas family court. In 2008, the government finally granted Young Special Immigrant Juvenile status, allowing him to remain in the United States. He went to college, then graduate school, and became a U.S. citizen. Today, Young serves as a member the Advisory Board of our Houston office. 

After Young’s family sent him to the United States in the hands of human traffickers, he was caught with a counterfeit green card at Newark Airport. Immigration officials sent him to a juvenile detention facility in Pennsylvania, where he spent 18 months—and, with the help of shelter workers, began to learn English. Eventually, Young was transferred to a shelter in Chicago. That’s where he met Maria Woltjen, the Young Center’s Founder and Executive Director.

It was 2004—and only a matter of months since the Young Center (then the Immigrant Child Advocacy Program) had begun working with unaccompanied immigrant children in Chicago. The project was so new that the shelter didn’t even think to introduce Maria to Young, and he had no idea what a Child Advocate was. Left alone in a room together, Maria recalls that “the look on Young’s face was one of sheer terror.” 

“You can just tell when someone has a heart to help you.”

“Over time, I realized who Maria was and why she was there,” Young remembers. “You can just tell when someone has a heart to help you.” The two began to meet every week. Maria learned Young’s story and worked tirelessly to ensure his release from detention. Finally, in 2005, Young was allowed to go live with his uncle in Akron, Ohio.

In Akron, Young started attending high school, where he thrived, earning a 4.0 GPA and making new friends. He dreamed of going to college to study biology. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life just hiding,” he said. But his past was never far away. It wasn’t long before the Snakeheads began calling his uncle and demanding money, threatening Young and his family if they didn’t pay. 

Young was also still facing deportation. Every month, he would travel by bus to the closest ICE office for a check-in. During one visit, he was told that because he had been reporting so diligently, he now only had to come every three months. After another month went by, however, Young got a phone call from ICE. They accused him of missing his last check-in, disavowing the guidance he’d been given the month before. Young went to their office as requested, only to be immediately taken into custody. He was going to be deported.

A week later, Young was being escorted to the gate at O’Hare International Airport to board a flight to China when he broke free. He bashed his head against the nearest wall and lost consciousness. “I would rather die in the United States than be murdered by the Snakeheads back home,” he later said. 

Young was transferred to a detention facility in Houston while he was recovering from his head injury. Though it was long before the Young Center opened its Houston office, Maria was able to convince local attorney John Sullivan, a partner at Fulbright & Jarowski, to take Young’s case and fight against his seemingly inevitable deportation.

“I told him, ‘This is not an easy case, this is going to be really hard,’” Maria recalls. “But he just didn’t care.” John was enthusiastic from the outset. “To me, it was the very thing I wanted to be doing.” But he was tested immediately. Not long after he accepted the case, the Young Center learned that immigration officials planned to sedate Young and put him on a flight back to China. 

John called the head of ICE in Houston, trying to explain that the facts of Young’s case were more egregious than immigration officials had previously been aware, and that Young and his family could be killed if he were returned to China. “There was a long pause,” John remembers. “Then he said, ‘I don’t think you understand, Mr. Sullivan. My only job is to get him out of this country as quickly as I can.’ Right then, I knew the war was on.” 

Along with associate Hannah Sibiski and a team of summer interns, John filed a slew of emergency motions in the courts to halt Young’s deportation. And they won: Young was permitted to stay in the country while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard his asylum case. 

“The first thing Young wanted to know was if we could get him more science books to read.”

Soon, Young was transferred to a shelter where he could see John and Hannah regularly and continue his education. “The first thing Young wanted to know was if we could get him more science books to read,” Hannah recalls. “He wanted us to get in touch with his teachers in Ohio to give him more schoolwork. They sent him boxes of work. He just wanted to learn and they wanted to teach him.”

John and Hannah built a strong bond with Young. “I hadn’t been treated all that well by the people around me before, whether it was immigration officials or even some people I got to know while I had been released,” Young remembers. “Knowing people like Maria gave me hope, whether things turned out good or bad. You know that people aren’t always just out to get you.” Then, as Hannah puts it, “Maria was able to give him the rest of us–to say, here’s the rest of your team, they’re going to be reliable, they’re going to put your interests first.”

Though that team had achieved an initial victory, they still had a lot to do to keep Young in the United States.  The government contended that Young did not qualify for asylum because his life had not been threatened by the Chinese government, but by a group of criminals for which he himself had allegedly agreed to work. John’s team fought back, but soon also realized that Young had a strong case for another type of immigration relief: Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status. 

SIJ provides a pathway to a green card for young people who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected by one or both of their parents. Young had a compelling case: not only had his family sent him away in the hands of human traffickers, but they had since refused to have anything to do with him, blaming him for putting their lives in danger by refusing to work for the Snakeheads.

Getting SIJ in 2005 was neither an easy nor straightforward task, however. It required first filing an application with immigration officials, who then had to give the green light for the case to be heard by a state family court. That court would determine whether the child had in fact been abused, abandoned, or neglected. Only then would the case go back to immigration officials to make a final decision. 

While John and his team filed Young’s SIJ application immediately, the officials did nothing, refusing to grant the consent needed for the case to move forward. “From the very beginning of the case they just dug their heels in,” John recalls. Meanwhile, Young was approaching his 18th birthday—when he would no longer be eligible for SIJ. This left John with no choice but to again appeal to a federal court, which ordered the immigration officials to give their consent for Young’s case to go to state family court. 

In its decision, the federal court found not only that the officials had abused their discretion in withholding consent, but that it was critical for Young’s case to be heard: “While the Court agrees the United States cannot single-handedly right all wrongs, it determines that the public has an interest in ensuring that the laws designed to protect children are applied in cases such as Zheng’s, where such protection from abandonment, neglect and an international smuggling ring is needed most.”

“Obviously, that was a turning point,” says John. “The opinion completely validated our position.” Then, at long last, a Texas family court officially found Young to have been neglected and abandoned by his family. Even the immigration officials finally admitted that this essentially left them no choice but to grant Young SIJ.

While he was awaiting a final decision, however, Young turned 18. This did not impact his pending SIJ case, but it did mean that immigration officials were now threatening to transfer him from juvenile shelter to adult prison. At midnight on his 18th birthday, Young walked out of the shelter with a box of his belongings. John and Hannah were waiting with a chocolate cake. They had been able to convince the head of ICE in Houston to allow Young to be released to John’s custody while his SIJ case was pending. 

Not long after, Young learned that his SIJ application had been successful: after four years of fighting, he was finally getting a green card. “It was amazing,” he remembers.

John and his family welcomed Young into their home. There, he graduated from high school, where he was voted “Best Young Man.” John’s youngest daughter later wrote an essay about Young’s first day of school, which had also been hers: “I sat in my room at home nervously pondering how others would perceive me, how I should look, speak, and act. In contrast, Young was eagerly pacing the floor downstairs, waiting to enter this new stage of his life and take hold of all the opportunities that it had to offer. Clearly, Young refused to be limited by fear which would inhibit his ability to enjoy the present. I recall how I had thought I would be the one teaching Young a thing or two, but in retrospect he has taught me so much more.” 

Young went on to finish college, then graduate school, at Texas A&M, where he received a Masters in Biotechnology with certification in Management and Entrepreneurship. He became a U.S. citizen in 2012. Hannah remembers his citizenship ceremony with pride. “We just gave him an opportunity and look what he’s done with it.  And it’s not just about the achievements and accolades, but the person he is, the people he’s touched and affected.” 

For Young, it was the end of a very long journey. “That chapter of my life had closed. I had finally come full circle.”

Today, Young Zheng Sullivan lives in North Carolina, where he works as a Senior Clinical Research Associate. Young has served on the Advisory Board for the Young Center’s Houston office since 2017. 

We are thankful to the Sullivan family for allowing us to share the photos featured above.