Thread: Lawsuit: Obama Officials Pressured Prosecutors To Release Convicted Criminal Illegal

Lawsuit: Obama Officials Pressured Prosecutors To Release Convicted Criminal Illegal Aliens

by Jonathan Strong 10 Nov 2014, 4:48 PM PDT

An award-winning, career prosecutor at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alleged in a blistering new lawsuit she was punished for resisting orders to release convicted criminal illegal aliens from custody.

The allegations from Patricia M. Vroom, 59, implicate Peter Vincent, the recently-resigned top lawyer at the agency.

Vroom said in an Nov. 6 filing with the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Arizona District she was ordered to drop prosecutions of illegal aliens with prior DUI convictions because, in the alleged words of senior ICE official Jim Stolley, “We don’t give a shit about that. Let it go.”

She also details pressure from supervisors to drop prosecutions of illegal aliens with identify theft convictions, including one who registered to vote “not once, but twice, both times falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen,” according to the filing.

Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for ICE, said the agency does not respond to pending litigation. Department of Homeland Sec. Jeh Johnson is named in the suit. DHS houses ICE.

Vincent, according to the filing, led a ruthless campaign to purge long-serving officials across the agency to replace with friends and allies.

After President Obama issued the executive “DREAM Act” order in 2012, providing legal status to individuals brought to the U.S. illegally as children, senior officials including Vincent coordinated to prevent the deportation of a DACA recipient convicted of ID theft in Arizona.

Following conflict over that decision and others, Vroom was given poor performance remarks in an annual review at odds with previous reviews, hostile and demeaning emails from superiors, and sexist attitudes.

In February 2013, the filing said, Vroom was instructed by supervisors to release aliens convicted of ID theft felonies in Arizona, at odds with previous ICE policy memoranda on the topic.

Sarah Hartnett, another senior ICE official “explained that as these were 'low-level' offenders...since the typical alien defendant convicted under these provisions of Arizona criminal law had simply been using a fake I.D. to get and keep employment.

Vroom was instructed to drop the cases and later mocked for considering the decision a serious legal precedent, the filing said.

Regarding the alien found to have registered to vote twice illegally, Vroom recounts how she was pressured to drop removal proceedings.

According to the filing, ICE official Matt Downer asked Vroom how she planned to handle the situation. Vroom said she would agree to cancel the alien's deportation, but Downer wrote back, “think again.”

“Realizing she had not arrived at the “correct” answer as to how she should apply 'prosecutorial discretion,' Plaintiff then suggested the case be dismissed without prejudice, to which Mr. Downer replied, 'Agreed,'”

However, a short time later, Downer wrote back to urge an even more lenient course of action.

“Re reading this – dismiss with prejudice,” Downer wrote, according to the filing.

Dismissing the case with prejudice would leave the government unable to prosecute the individual for the crime in the future if he was subsequently detained for another reason.

“This instruction was legally unjustifiable and arguably unethical. No reasonable government attorney would unnecessarily prejudice his or her prosecuting client’s interests by requesting that a court dismiss a matter with prejudice when it could be, and normally would be, dismissed without prejudice,” the filing said.

Vroom also detailed alleged ageism and sexism in the complaint and said Vincent made unwanted advances on female employees, making them feel uncomfortable. In one case, Vroom counseled a young woman to tell the then-married Vincent in an e-mail, “Please leave me alone, Peter. You are old enough to be my father,” which seemed to resolve the situation.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...riminal-Aliens

Lawsuit: Obama Immigration Officials Pressured Attorney To Overlook Illegal Alien DUIs And ID Theft


Lawsuit: Obama Immigration Officials Pressured Attorney To Overlook Illegal Alien DUIs And ID Theft

A career attorney with top ratings at Immigration and Customs Enforcement says that she faced retaliation from superiors for refusing to drop cases pending against illegal aliens guilty of DUI, identity theft, and other crimes.

Patricia Vroom, 59, made the claims in a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court of Appeals in Arizona against Department of Homeland Security Sec. Jeh Johnson.

The Daily Caller obtained a copy of the complaint.

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.”

But Hartnett explained to Vroom that convictions for low-level offenders “could be converted from a felony to a misdemeanor after the defendant successfully completed probation.”

Hartnett’s argument to Vroom, according to the suit, was that “since the typical alien defendant convicted under these provisions of Arizona criminal law had simply been using a fake I.D. to get and keep employment, [Vroom] and her attorneys should look carefully at the individual’s equities and consider their cases for ‘administrative closure.’”

The administrative closure designation would allow Vroom to take such cases off of the docket altogether.

Vroom cited another incident concerning an alien who falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen and registered to vote on two occasions.
As Vroom was pursuing the case, Stoller wrote of her in a Sept. 24, 2013 email to an ICE staffer: “[Vroom] is so wrong on so many levels that I don’t have a response right now…It is abundantly clear that, notwithstanding two years of discussing [prosecutorial discretion], priorities, and efficiencies with the field, Tucson needs comprehensive correction.”

An ICE official named Matt Downer asked Vroom how she would handle the case. She said that she would grant relief by issuing a cancellation for removal.

But Downer issued a ruling even more favorable to the alien: “dismiss with prejudice.”

That designation is significant, the lawsuit claims.

If the subject of the crime were to be charged with a crime in the future “the Department of Homeland Security would have been forever precluded from bringing the removal case against [the subject] again in immigration court on the same, legally sound, charges.”

Vroom also claims that on Nov. 5, 2013, Downer emailed her concerning the case of an individual who was found ineligible for relief under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was started by President Obama, because of an ID theft conviction.

Unknown to Vroom at the time, top ICE and DHS officials had discussed that individual case on a conference call in Aug. 2013.

An angry Downer emailed Vroom on Nov. 5, 2013, demanding to know why she had been unable to convince her Field Office Director to cancel the Notice to Appear order for the alien.

Vroom also alleges in the suit that on Sept. 17 of this year, an ICE official named Jim Stolley told attorneys with the agency’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor at a training session that “they should favorably exercise prosecutorial discretion in some cases involving low-level criminal aliens, including those who had ‘old’ DUI convictions, if they had enough equities.”

When some of the attorneys at the session pushed back against Stolley’s suggestions, he allegedly said “we don’t give a shit about that. Let it go.”

Vroom alleges that she faced sexual and age discrimination from her superiors. And during a mid-year review conducted in May 2013, ICE official Sarah Hartness told her that some had complained that Vroom was giving “a lot of push-back.”

Prior to her recent struggles, Vroom received glowing reviews and won numerous awards, including two for “District Counsel of the Year.”

Vroom’s performance rating for the year 2010-2011 was the highest — a 4.94 on a five-point scale — out of all 26 chief counsels working at ICE.

By Nov. 2013, Vroom had fallen to the bottom of the pack in terms of performance rating. She was scored a 3.53.
(h/t Breitbart News)

http://news.yahoo.com/lawsuit-obama-...032036569.html