T&T woman escapes U.S. deportation

TIMES INT'L

A woman with dual citizenship of T&T and Guyana is among six people whose deportation orders were reversed in New York last week. On Monday, December 6th, Governor David Patterson pardoned the immigrants, among them four Caribbean nationals: Mario Benitez from the Dominican Republic, Marlon Oscar Powell from Jamaica, and Darshini Ramsaran who holds dual citizenship in Guyana and T&T. 

In granting the revocations, Patterson said his actions addressed shortcomings in the US federal immigration laws relating to deportation. “Our review of more than 1,100 pardon applications reveals that federal immigration laws are often inflexible, arbitrarily applied, and excessively harsh, resulting in the deportation of individuals who have paid the price for their crimes and are now making positive contributions to our society,” he said. 

“These pardons represent an attempt to achieve fairness and justice for deserving individuals caught in the web of these laws.” A release on the governor’s website said that, in May 2010, Patterson convened a special Immigration Pardon Panel to gather information and recommend deserving individuals for pardons, to assist them in avoiding deportation.

The initiative was designed to address several aspects of the immigration laws that may result in inflexible and unjust decisions to remove legal immigrants from the US, often tearing them away from their children or spouses who were U.S. citizens. The release said that one harshness of the federal law resulted from retroactive changes made in the mid-1990s, where crimes that did not previously carry the consequence of deportation were made deportable. In many other cases, individuals previously had pleaded guilty without being aware that their pleas might subject them to mandatory deportation. 

As a result, many individuals who were convicted many years ago are now facing deportation, often after they apply for citizenship or seek to renew their permanent resident status. In many of these cases, the individual’s efforts toward rehabilitation, their years of living law-abiding lives in the communities and their positive contributions to society have not been considered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the decision to deport them. (Trinidad Guardian)

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