One night, a little more than a decade ago, Chicago immigration attorney Mary Sfasciotti received a desperate call from a nun in the Milwaukee area.

Sister Josephe Marie Flynn asked Sfasciotti to help defend a former Congolese political activist in her parish who had been jailed. Regina Bakala faced deportation and was seeking asylum in the United States. The case was complicated, and it was a race against the clock. "Seven lawyers had already turned me down, before I called Mary," Sister Flynn said of the 2005 call.