News of her client’s release sent attorney Melanie Kim scrambling to find clothes. Her client hadn’t known freedom since 2003. She needed something to wear when she left detention for the first time in 16 years.

So Kim rushed to a discount department store and grabbed what she hoped would fit: a pair of joggers and a T-shirt.

But when Kim arrived at the Yuba County Jail in Marysville, California, the problem became clear. Kim had only ever seen her client from across glass panels, seated during brief, 30-minute visits. The clothes Kim had picked were far too big for the petite, 4-foot-11.5-inch woman with the long dark hair who now stood free before her.

“In my mind, physically she was much bigger than she actually was,” Kim recalls. It felt like a “mismatch”: how someone as small and unassuming as Ny Nourn could have had such immense effect.

The story of how Nourn, 41, first came to be imprisoned is the story of her emergence as an advocate. As the co-director of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee — and an organiser for the domestic violence advocacy group Survived and Punished — Nourn has rapidly gained a reputation as one of the most high-profile voices in the fight to end what activists in the United States call the “prison-to-deportation pipeline”.

But Nourn doesn’t just speak out about that pipeline. She has lived it herself. And in sharing her story again and again — on panels, in interviews, even for a TEDx Talk — Nourn often finds herself confronting the horrors of her past as she works to educate others about the US criminal justice system.

Read more about Ny Nourn on Al Jazeera’s website.