23
votes
Miami grandma targeted as US takes aim at naturalized immigrants with prior offenses
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- Title
- U.S. push to remove immigrants targets Miami, FL grandma | Miami Herald
- Word count
- 2384 words
This is unforgivable. What kind of harm is a grandmother doing that justifies stripping her of citizenship and deporting her?
Yeah.
This is what increased enforcement looks like. The question mentioned in the article ("Have you EVER committed, assisted in committing, or attempted to commit, a crime or offense for which you were NOT arrested?") is so broad that one could argue any naturalized citizen lied if they chose "no." It's not a reasonable argument to make, but you could make it.
Being a naturalized citizen isn't the comfort that it used to be. "At least I can no longer be deported for a traffic offense," I thought after taking the oath. Guess maybe not, if they keep taking things further.
Even a native born citizen would be lying if they said "no." We commit an average of 3 felonies a day, and by saying "no" to an NIS/ICE agent, you can add "lying to a federal agent" to your daily violations. The only thing you should do in a situation like this is to assert your right to an attorney. Even worse, she was punished for the crimes she assisted in:
Not only was she cooperative with the FBI, but she also served time for a crime her boss committed AND paid restitution. And now she's to have her citizenship revoked over this? This is inexcusable. Although technically it's not double jeopardy since these are separate crimes, it certainly is in the spirit of it.
Edit: I have to wonder-what happens to people who renounced citizenship in their home countries, whether voluntary (have to jump through a bunch of hoops for dual citizenship) or forced (the home country does not allow dual citizenship)? You can't just force another country to re-naturalize former citizens, especially if their home country would not accept them (I don't imagine China would be too keen on taking back ex-pat democracy advocates, for example).
Edit 2: As an addendum to my remarks about you commit 3 felonies a day:
What offences are "material" is now up to the conservative-stacked courts. And felonies are definitely material, even if you were not aware you were committing them.
That is a scary thought, yeah.
The article gets into the Supreme Court ruling and “material offenses” being required to be disclosed. It’s still a really shitty thing, one that makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t speed up that emigration process myself.
Is there a general legal standard of what counts as a material offense? It sorta seemed from the article that to a certain extent it's up to interpretation.
I don't have quick and easy access to Westlaw or Lexis Nexus or else I'd have answered this question in a few minutes. But "material offense" is a term that has specific meaning to it. It's a bit fuzzy, but it isn't meaningless. Unfortunately, it's legal meaning is lost to the databases of precedent that I can't currently access.
The justices have explicitly dismissed minor driving offenses as potentially meaning "material offense," and no court will uphold any such attempt. A grey area case like this though? That's a lot more likely to succeed, as painful as it is for me to admit it.
Who would answer "yes" to such a question? Hell, even if I had been arrested I woudn't admit it; I'd only cop to outright convictions.
Well, by answering "no," you risk what's happening to this woman. But in practice, I'm guessing most people answer "no," because either they can't remember something or they don't consider that things like running a stop sign might count.
When it comes to arrests, it's definitely a good idea to admit to them because, more likely than not, records exist. You might need a lawyer to help you navigate it (definitely if you were convicted), but lying is worse than telling the truth, because if you lie... see the article above.
An addendum: I couldn't remember the exact questions and wording since it's been a while since I filled out the form, but it's very clear that you have to disclose everything (and not just arrests-- being simply detained counts).
This is actually insane, right? First world, non-totalitarian states don't just revoke peoples' citizenship. This is existentially alarming.
Well, that's the most disturbing part about all of this to me; we do revoke people's citizenship, and have been for a long time. It's just that, as the article describes, the process used to be reserved for naturalized citizens who turned out to be war criminals and such.
A lot of the changes we've been seeing in immigration involve broadening priorities and increasing the level of enforcement. These policies are up to the people in charge, so the laws don't actually need to change for this stuff to start being applied to more people. (My understanding of everything is pretty surface-level and only from the perspective of a naturalized citizen, not as a lawyer or anything, but that's what I've gathered from news coverage.)
List of people the US has previous denaturalized and the reason why:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_denaturalized_former_citizens_of_the_United_States
It really is a very rare occurrence, with the latest happening on 2015 due to active involvement in two terrorist bombings. No idea what they're doing going after a 63 year old secretary.
It's not that rare; or at least, it's not quite as rare as the Wikipedia list would suggest on its own, since the list doesn't include all cases:
And the original article gives numbers for recent years, past 2015:
So it looks like efforts are ramping up a bit.
They're going after her because they've determined she lied on her naturalization form by neglecting to mention a crime for which she later took a plea deal. That's all the reason they need. (Personally it sounds like a mistake on her part, not a deliberate lie.)
The US is not looking good from the outside, dear American tildonauts. To me, she looks a bit hostile. And she looks quite a bit like what my lovely country Turkey looked like in earlier '00s, where bad maths older generations did w.r.t. elections gave way to the present day. In Turkey it was the fact that if you have a 10% threshold, it may be the case that too many parties can get ~9% that the one that got 34% of the votes can end up getting >60% of the seats. And in the US, turns out that you don't need more than half the votes of the people to make a cardboard-face molester the president, if you have the most draconian of election systems.
Doesn't feel so great from the inside either. Many sympathies about the status of politics in Turkey. Europe did you wrong.