Lew Jan Olowski of the Immigration Reform Law Institute has this op-ed in the WSJ:
Federal law mandates deportation of aliens who are convicted of "aggravated felonies"--defined to include certain state misdemeanors carrying a sentence of a year or longer--whether or not they are in the country legally. But some judges, prosecutors and legislators are playing games to get around this law.
The "games" by judges he refers to are expungement and similar procedures. He is also alarmed that some state legislatures are moving to set the maximum sentence for misdemeanors at 364 days instead of the traditional one year because the federal immigration law's threshold for an "aggravated felony" is, in some parts, exactly one year. He calls on Congress to eliminate the threshold.
CJLF has not adopted a position on this issue, but personally I have a mixed reaction to this piece. I do agree that it is a misuse of the expungement process to grant an expungement in a case where a citizen would not receive it just to spare an alien the immigration consequences. Federal law does not necessarily have to recognize such expungements. "Progressive" prosecutors, such as Philadelphia's Larry Krasner, who offer aliens better deals than citizens receive are engaged in a travesty of justice, but it is up to the citizens to vote the bums out.
As I have mentioned on this blog before, the proposition that aliens who commit aggravated felonies should be deported is a sound one, but amendments to the definition of "aggravated felony," particularly in 1996, were often ill-considered. For a crime punished by exactly one year to be designated a "felony" at all, much less an aggravated one, is very strange. The traditional cut-off has long been that one year on the nose is a misdemeanor, and felonies begin at a year and a day.
The definition of "aggravated felony" in immigration law should be pruned back, not expanded. The term should mean what it seems to mean on its face -- crimes that are not only felonies but among the more heinous of the felonies.
Well said!