She's the first Black woman with her face on a Phoenix bus. Her story is so much more
When Lelia Adams gave birth to her first child in 2021, her husband agreed to give her a big present to celebrate the occasion. Adams said he was thinking of gifting her a fancy handbag or a new car. Instead, she asked him for an advertisement on the side of a Valley Metro bus.
Originally born in a Nigerian village where she had to walk a mile a day to get water, Adams is now the founding attorney at Essien Law Firm in Phoenix. As a solo practitioner, she specializes in immigration, family-based petitions and reunification, as well as deportation and asylum cases.
When she first had the idea to advertise with Valley Metro, Adams wasn’t sure women were allowed to have their faces on the side of buses. She had never seen one.
"She was, like, shocked that she was able to have her own picture on the bus because it's always just been men," said Renee duPlessis, a senior account executive at Lamar Transit of Arizona.
Adams reached out to duPlessis for her bus ad in 2022 and duPlessis was thrilled to help.
"I'm just so in awe of the way she handles her life," said duPlessis, who was present the day Lelia saw her bus ad for the first time.
For more than 20 years, Phoenix buses have allowed advertisements on their exterior panels. Adams, however, made history when she became the first Black woman to have her face featured on a Valley Metro bus.
Even still, she didn’t think it was that big of a deal until her parents came with her to the unveiling. Dressed in traditional Nigerian clothing, they participated in a prayer circle when they saw their daughter's face on the side of the bus.
“They kept touching it and their hands are shaking like 'this is real,’" she said. "You see my dad, you see him pray like ‘Oh God, thank God I’m seeing this day.'"
Their pride at how far their daughter had come as a lawyer was understandable — Adams' mother was her first immigration client.
From Nigeria to Phoenix
How do you go from living in Nigeria without electricity to having your face on the side of a bus in Phoenix?
Well, for starters, you win the lottery. The immigration lottery, that is.
Adams was just a teenager when her father asked her and her sister to fill out some forms. He told them they would be applying for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, commonly referred to as "the Green Card Lottery." The program makes visas to the U.S. available to citizens from countries with low immigration rates. Millions of applications are received each year but only 50,000 applicants are chosen at random.
The idea of winning that lottery and immigrating to the U.S. seemed farfetched to Adams, who had never even been on a plane at the time.
"I'd look up to the sky and just thought America was in heaven," she said. "I'd seen airplanes up there. I'd never seen them land, so I thought it stayed in the heavens as a child."
Adam's mother was actually the first to immigrate to the U.S. with her younger brother, seeking asylum after a political attack. Her mother settled in Rhode Island and tried to get her family into the country on her permanent asylum visa with no success.
Instead, the family applied for the lottery in 1996. Out of millions of applicants, they were chosen.
They had difficulty coming up with the airfare, but several months after receiving their visas, Adams, her father and sister arrived at Boston Logan International Airport, reuniting with her mother and brother.
The five of them ended up sharing a one-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in the "rundown side of town." She remembers that they slept on mattresses on the floor. Looking back, Adams said she could see the situation was less than ideal but at the moment she was just happy to be reunited with her mother.
"I was just happy that I didn't have to write my mom a letter back when there were no cell phones," she said. "So having access to her on a daily basis, that was good enough."
Unfortunately, the reunion wouldn't last.
Her mother, her client
U.S. immigration law can be confusing and ever-changing. There are differing rules and requirements for Dreamers, asylum seekers or people immigrating for work.
Some immigrants have had their cases endangered due to missteps and misunderstandings, including Adams' mother.
According to Adams, her mother was told by her lawyer that she didn't have to attend a scheduled court date. However, due to her absence, a judge ordered her deportation.
Her mother opted to voluntarily leave the country in 2003 for the sake of her case.
The day she left the U.S. for her native Nigeria, Adams and her sister packed her bags and drove her from their home in Connecticut to JFK airport.
"It was the most difficult drive of my life," she said.
Adams handed her mother her bags and watched her leave. She and her sister then drove home alone.
She signed up to take the LSAT that same day. "That was the breaking point," said Adams. "When I got home, that was it."
She'd planned on attending law school before her mother's deportation, even joining the pre-law society during her undergrad years at Southern Connecticut State University, but she never intended to specialize in immigration. Her original plan was to specialize in corporate law, like intellectual property.
Adams refers to law school as the "planting season" of her life, full of challenges and far from rewards.
A few weeks into her first class on immigration law, she told her professor about her plans to take on her mother's case and was told it would be difficult. Her professor wasn't the only one who was doubtful. Adams said she had little support in her attempt to reverse her mother's case. Her father filed twice so that her mother could return to the United States before eventually returning to Nigeria himself to be with her. Meanwhile, her brother and sister were in school and unable to provide assistance.
Adams graduated from Stetson University College of Law in 2009, was admitted to the Missouri State Bar the next year and by 2011 had married her husband and moved to Phoenix. All the while her mother remained in Nigeria. Sometimes she would go to visit her parents, even having her wedding in her home country so they could attend.
Every time she'd visit, her mother would wonder if she'd ever go back to the United States.
Adams remained undeterred. "I feel like there was no other hope. Who else was gonna go through that much for her?" she said.
She filed for her mother's case herself in 2012. In 2014, she arranged for her mother to have an interview at the U.S. embassy in Nigeria, but the embassy supervisor told her mother that she could never legally go back to the United States.
"At this point, my sister said, 'We've been fighting this thing for years. Just give up already.' I don't believe in giving up," Adams said.
Adams knew the law favored her mother. So she wrote a memo of law — a document that analyzes relevant laws and legal research to support a conclusion on a legal issue — and sent it in an email to the embassy supervisor.
Her husband warned her that she might've been a little too harsh to them in her email. "I told them that the officer didn't know the law and they should retrain him."
Less than a day later she received a reply from the embassy saying her mother could come to pick up her visa.
She still has the email to this day.
"After my mother’s application was accepted, I cried my eyes out. Although I had officially graduated and passed the bar, this personal success made it feel like I had finally completed law school," said Adams, in a press release earlier this year about her bus ad from earlier this year.
Spreading the word on TikTok
Adams began practicing law in 2012 and opened her own firm two years later.
For ten years, only her family knew the story behind her mother's return to the U.S., but after some encouragement from her brother, Adams shared it on her firm's TikTok page @LeliaTheLawyer.
The video she posted in December 2022, which also includes her revealing her bus ad to her parents, has reached more than 900,000 views.
Adams started the page, where she dispenses tips and information about the immigration process, to build a brand for her practice and credits her mother's story for the influx of clients that come to her firm seeking help for difficult immigration cases.
Most of her clients come from larger firms seeking a more personal approach from her as a solo practitioner and, same as her, most of them are of legal status and hoping to bring over a spouse or family member.
Today, Adams’ parents live with her in Phoenix, along with her husband and daughter. She said she carries their experience as a family into her work as an immigration attorney.
"Every time someone sits with me, I remember sitting on the other side with my mom and dad, trying to keep my mom here," she said.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How a Nigerian immigrant became a lawyer to fight for her mom
