Criminal Collateral Consequences

Hello everyone. Yifei He, your criminal and immigration lawyer and today I want to talk to you more about immigrants being charged with crimes and the potential consequences. The criminal justice system is especially harsh on immigrants because as an immigrant, if you were convicted of a crime, you face consequence such as deportation and a bar from ever obtaining a green card, citizenship or even stripping you of your green card or citizenship. So today I want to outline two categories of crimes that as a immigrant you should be especially wary of. The first category is crimes of moral turpitude or C. M. T. S. These are crimes that’s amorphously defined as vicious and immoral crimes, and I say amorphously defined because they’re not codified by statute, but generally they entail an intent to commit a crime, for example an intent to steal or intent to rob and intend to murder as opposed to carelessly recklessly accidentally negligently. Those wouldn’t be crimes of moral turpitude . So with these crimes, if you were convicted of two these crimes, you would be inadmissible to the United States. That means you cannot come to the U. S. If you were outside of the U. S. And you can also be removed from the U. S. Deportable from the U. S. So for example, if you are a green card holder, if you’re the government can institute deportation proceedings removing you from this country that was saying the fact that you legally are allowed to stay here. So that’s the first category. The second category is the more serious category, these are aggravated felonies or AFs aggravated felonies are codified by statute, that means that the federal statute states specifically what constitutes from aggravated felonies, for example, murder, rape, child pornography, weapons possessions. So if you were convicted of one of these crimes, you could be permanently barred from obtaining citizenship from obtaining a green card. And if you were, if you were a green card holder, you the government will , with most certainty take away your Green card, institute deportation proceedings against you. And I’ve represented individuals who have been convicted of aggravated felonies who were green card holders and served out their sentences but were put in ICE lock up and held in legal limbo being taken away from this country. So with an experienced immigration lawyer and an experienced criminal defense lawyer, you can negotiate your way to taking away these collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. As an example , in New York state a class a misdemeanor was recently changed from 365 days imprisonment to 364 days imprisonment. And the reason that change was made is because with less than one year of imprisonment, you will be not subject to either a crime of moral turpitude, CM T or an A. F. So this is just a direction that the new york state legislature has been heading towards protecting immigrants through the advocacy of immigration lawyers such as myself. So again, my name is Yifei he, I’m an immigration and criminal defense player, and I look forward to helping you with solving your problems. Thank you very much.