Court Spares Another Criminal From Deportation

An illegal immigrant convicted in the U.S. of two separate crimes has been spared deportation by a federal appellate court that determined the violations aren’t serious enough to send the man back to his native Mexico.

The ruling marks the second time in a week that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overrules both an immigration judge and the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals to rescue a criminally convicted thug from deportation. A few days ago the abhorrently liberal court ruled that a violent felon cannot be deported because tattooed criminals like him are often harassed by gangs and police in his native El Salvador.

An immigration judge and the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws, had both denied that illegal alien’s ridiculous tattoo petition, citing his failure to prove that he faced torture in his native country.

This latest case involves a Mexican illegal immigrant (Victor Ocegueda Nunez) in California who was actually deported years ago but never the less remained in the U.S. He has twice been convicted of crimes— theft in 1995 and indecent exposure in 2003—and has three U.S.-born children (“anchor babies”). Although he has lived in the country illegally since 1993, Nunez appealed his deportation saying it would cause “extreme hardship” for his wife and three kids.

In reversing the immigration court and Justice Department’s removal orders, the 9th Circuit essentially determined that the illegal alien’s crimes aren’t serious enough to warrant deportation, even though he’s not even supposed to be in the U.S. to begin with.  

Indecent exposure, the latest crime Nunez was convicted of, does not constitute a crime of moral turpitude or vile offensiveness, the court determined in its 41-page ruling. Under California law indecent exposure “is not categorically a crime involving moral turpitude,” the justices wrote. "There is simply no overall agreement on many issues of morality in contemporary society,"