Discussion Points for Punto Legal –May 29, 2019

Discussion Points for Punto Legal –May 29, 2019

 

1. New Pro-Immigrant Laws.

The Governor has signed several new pro-immigrant laws. One of them concerns driver’s licenses for the undocumented. A new law will allow the DMV to expand to 10 offices to issue driver’s licenses. Maybe, the dreadful delays at DMV will go away. A second law has to do with state cooperation with ICE. Did you know that we have a probation officer in Rifle who has been helping ICE by allowing ICE to pick-up immigrants when they go to meeting with their probation officer! That stops now. The new law say probation matters, including your appointment with your P.O., are confidential and are not to be divulged to ICE.

2. Attacks on deferred judgments.

One of things we do at Ted Hess and Associates is attack old convictions so you can get immigration benefits. For example, suppose a person has a conviction for possession of one gram of cocaine. He marries a citizen and wants to fix his papers. Unfortunately, his spouse would never be able to fix his papers because he has a cocaine conviction. He needs to look into attacking that old conviction. Now let’s suppose that our person got a deferred judgment to the cocaine possession. Under this arrangement, the charge would be dismissed if he did all the things he was supposed to do. Let’s suppose further that his lawyer told him a deferred judgment is a wonderful deal but did not tell him it is treated as a straight conviction in immigration law. If he successfully completed the deferred judgment and the charge was dismissed, he could not attack the conviction because the charge was dismissed. This is what the Colorado Supreme Court has said. Now there is a new law that allows you to attack successfully completed deferred judgments. It is effective right now. You simply have to show that you completed a deferred judgment; that you will suffer a bad immigration consequence; and that you were not told about that bad immigration consequence. If a deferred judgment is standing in the way of your immigration, give us a call.

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