Crimmigration is an ugly word for a real thing. It names the place where criminal law and immigration law overlap, and where a result that is good in one system can be a disaster in the other.
The Piri Law Firm in Dallas–Fort Worth lists it as a practice area in its own right rather than tucking it under either heading. That is a small structural decision with a large point behind it: a client standing in the overlap is not well served by two lawyers who each handle one side and never speak.
What most clients end up with is worse than that. They have one lawyer, on the criminal side, because that is the emergency with a court date attached. The immigration consequence is handled by nobody, on the reasonable-sounding basis that there is no immigration case yet.
The mechanics are not complicated to describe. A non-citizen is charged with something. A defence lawyer negotiates. The negotiation goes well by the standards of criminal court, which are custody, fines and record. The client takes the deal and goes home.
The immigration consequence of that deal is determined by a separate body of federal law that categorises offences in its own way. A charge that sounds minor can fall into a category that makes a person deportable or inadmissible. A sentence length chosen for convenience can push an offence across a threshold that matters only to immigration.
Some of those thresholds are counterintuitive enough to surprise experienced criminal practitioners. The categories in federal immigration law were not drafted to track the way Texas grades offences, and the two systems use overlapping words to mean different things.
“Everything that happens in criminal court is being read later by a different system with different definitions. The plea is the sentence in both.”
In 2010 the Supreme Court held in Padilla v. Kentucky that a defence lawyer has a constitutional duty to advise a non-citizen client about the deportation consequences of a plea. That decision did not make the problem go away. It established a floor. Whether the advice given on any particular Tuesday in any particular county court is adequate is a separate question, and it is usually asked long after the plea has been entered.
Piri’s argument is that the two strategies have to be built together from the first week rather than reconciled at the end. That means the immigration analysis happens before the plea negotiation rather than after it, and it sometimes means preferring a criminal outcome that looks worse on its face because the alternative is removal.
“Sometimes the right answer is to take the longer probation. It is a terrible trade in criminal terms and the only survivable one in immigration terms.”
The practice also runs the other direction. Detention, bond, habeas corpus and removal defence are immigration matters that frequently begin with a criminal arrest, and the criminal file determines what relief is available. A firm that only sees the case from the immigration side arrives after the decisive choices have been made.
Michael Piri came to the field from international law. He read International Politics and International Law at the American University of Paris, graduating with honours, and interned at the International Court of Arbitration before taking his law degree at Saint Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio. He practises in English, Spanish and French from an office on Ross Avenue in downtown Dallas.
For clients, the practical test is easy to apply and rarely applied. If you are not a citizen and you are facing a criminal charge, ask your defence lawyer what the plea does to your status, and keep asking until the answer names a specific consequence. An answer along the lines of it should be fine is not an answer. It is the sound of a question that has not been looked into.
The Piri Law Firm offers a free 30-minute consultation across Dallas, Fort Worth and the surrounding North Texas cities.
