According to a lawsuit filed by top-rated U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney Patricia Vroom, multiple ICE officials pressured her to drop cases involving illegal immigrants charged with various low-level felonies, including DUIs and identity theft.
The Daily Caller, which obtained a copy of the complaint, reports that Vroom, 59, claims that she faced “retaliation from superiors” when she refused to drop various cases against illegal aliens. She filed the lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Sec. Jeh Johnson last week in Arizona U.S. District Court of Appeals. The DC reports:
Vroom, who has worked for ICE and its predecessor for 26 years, alleges that in Feb. 2013 she was contacted by ICE deputy director Sarah Hartnett and was “instructed to look favorably for prosecutorial discretion on immigration removal cases involving the lowest level of felony convictions for identity theft under Arizona law.”
"This was a very significant development,” the suit claims. Criminal aliens are generally considered “‘priority cases’ that should be aggressively pursued.”
Hartnett explained to Vroom that low-level offenses, like identity theft, could be converted from a felony to a misdemeanor. Particularly in regard to I.D. theft, since most illegal immigrants only got them for employment purposes, Hartnett said, Vroom and her team “should look carefully at the individual’s equities and consider their cases for ‘administrative closure’”— which would give Vroom the ability to drop the cases completely.
Vroom provides other instances of pressure, including a case involving an illegal immigrant who illegally registered to vote twice. She was blasted by one official for being “wrong on so many levels” on the case and eventually the suit was dismissed ICE official Matt Downer “with prejudice.”
In another incident, Vroom was reprimanded by Downer for refusing to drop an identity theft case which would block an immigrant from being protected by Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Read the full article here.