Musings on Immigration

You should hire an immigration attorney who can actually find out what exactly it is the government (or ICE) is charging you with. This week, we had a client detained at his own house, before dawn, after ICE agents knocked on his door, and transferred him to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, GA (2.5 hours south of Atlanta). Our client’s wife promptly came to our office and hired us so we could investigate what charges the government was bringing against the client and to get a bond for him. ICE initially told us and our client’s wife that the client had an aggravated felony, which for the purposes of simplicity, is something really really bad (examples of aggravated felonies are child abuse and pornography, burglary, firearms offenses, drug trafficking, etc.).  Two days after we were notified of this, now ICE was claiming our client had a conviction for DUI from 1997 and that’s I why he was being detained. By this time, our client’s wife had already secured a certified disp...

In recent decades, America's immigration laws have changed to more closely resemble criminal ones. There are extreme burdens one must meet to stay in the U.S, regardless of family ties to the country or length of time spent here, and it is even harder to stay in the U.S. with a criminal record. Due to the extreme nature of our current laws, the Supreme Court in Padilla v. Kentucky , 559 U.S. 356 (2010), decided that criminal defense attorneys must advise their clients on the immigration consequences of their convictions in order to meet the standard of "effective assistance of counsel." This was a bold move for the Supreme Court; historically, defense attorneys did not have to advise of almost any consequences outside of the direct consequences of a conviction, such as your sentence and its terms. Immigration law is extremely complex and takes years for attorneys to learn.  As a result, even after the Padilla ruling, not all criminal defense attorneys have been advis...