U.S. Deportation & Removal Proceedings
If you have ever been detained in the United States and leave voluntarily, upon attempting to return the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will detain you and initiate deportation proceedings against you. This could happen even if your criminal case was closed and/or you complied with all the Court-imposed conditions.
Similarly, if you are not a citizen of the United States and have ever been arrested, detained, or charged with a crime or any other type of violation, the government can try to deport you from the United States even if you were not convicted or served time in jail and even if you complied with all the court-imposed conditions.
If you are deported from the United States or leave voluntarily, you might may barred for ten or twenty years from entering the U.S., and if you return to the United States after a deportation without the authorization of the United States government, you can spend several years in a federal jail.
In addition, if you are a permanent resident and leave the United States pursuant to a deportation order and/or a voluntary departure order, you might lose your Social Security benefits for life. That means that if you have worked and paid taxes in the United States, you will lose all the money you paid in social security and will have no retirement benefits in the United States, whether you paid taxes for one year, ten years, or 50 years.
Depending on your circumstances, there are several forms for relief that may be available to you, they include but not limited to the following:
* Cancellation of Deportation for permanent residents and for non-permanent residents;
* Legalization through family petitions, such as petitions by a family member;
* Waivers specific to different situations;
* Naturalization (becoming a United States Citizen)
* Derivative citizenship, such as when one of your parents was a United States Citizen when you were born;
* Automatic citizenship, such as when one of your parents became United States Citizen and you were under 18 years of age;
* Asylum;
* Withholding of deportation;
* NACARA (Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act);
* Registry for people who continuously lived in the United States since 1972;
* Legalization as a victim of spousal abuse;
* Temporary Protected Status (TPS);
* Visas for victims of crimes;
* Visas for government informants;
* Specific visas for natives of different countries and their families, such as under the Cuban Adjustment Act.
If you are a permanent resident facing criminal charges, the government must prove that the crime you allegedly committed makes you deportable. So you might be able to fight your deportation by simply contesting the immigration charges.
If you are facing criminal charges, we might be able to assist your criminal defense attorney or public defender in entering a plea that will not negatively affect your immigration status.
Please contact our office today to learn about how our experienced deportation defense attorney can represent and defend your case. We can make the difference.