The Sad Deportation of LPR Who Entered at Age 5

As I’ve written in Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006) and Detention to Deportation—Rethinking the Removal of Cambodian Refugees, 38 U.C. DAVIS. L.REV. 891 (2005), we need reform to the deportation laws that at least reinstates discretion to immigration judges in cases of longtime lawful residents who have committed aggravated felonies. Many of these individuals are rehabilitated and deserve a second chance. Nina Bernstein writes for the NY Times:about another victim of our overly harsh laws:

The judge and the juvenile had grown up on the same mean streets, 40 years apart. And in fall 1996, they faced each other in a New York court where children are prosecuted as adults, but sentenced like candidates for redemption.

The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States. Clickhere for the rest of the story.

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