Thread: PA - Dent joins effort to deport Mexican immigrant for DUI

Dent joins effort to deport Mexican immigrant for DUI
By Riley Yates
March 4, 2009

The Lehigh Valley's congressman has joined in the call for the deportation of a Mexican immigrant facing his sixth drunken driving charge.

U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, R-15th District, wrote Immigration and Customs Enforcement to urge action against Guadalupe N. Vasquez, whose case was spotlighted last month when Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli said he should be deported because of his record.

Vasquez, 43, of Easton is married to a U.S. citizen and holds valid alien registration and Social Security numbers. He has been a fugitive on his county charges since Feb. 23, when he skipped a court hearing in which Morganelli was seeking to have his bail revoked.

In pushing Monday for deportation proceedings, Dent repeated Morganelli's contention: that Vasquez's five prior offenses make him a danger. Also like Morganelli, Dent labeled Vasquez an illegal immigrant.



''As long as this individual is out on the streets, my constituents are not safe,'' Dent wrote to Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Assistant Secretary John Torres.

It is unclear whether the charges against Vasquez, all misdemeanors or summary offenses, are deportable offenses under federal law.

Vasquez was arrested Aug. 10 after he sideswiped a car at an Easton Wawa. He had a blood-alcohol level of 0.23 percent, nearly three times the legal limit for driving, authorities allege. He was also charged with possessing cocaine.

Vasquez has five prior drunken-driving convictions stretching from 1993 to 2007. The heftiest sentence was one to two years in prison.

Dent is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees ICE. He said he often intercedes in individual immigration cases in his district, as he has recently for George Bou Jaoudeh, a Lebanese national working for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq whose bid for citizenship has stalled because of his time abroad.

''I saw this as a public safety issue,'' Dent said in an interview Tuesday. ''When you have a wife and three young children, you think about things like this.''

Morganelli welcomed Dent's efforts.

''Immigration officials work for the federal government and the Congress votes on funding and their budgets, so this can put political pressure, so to speak,'' Morganelli said.

Immigration law only lists broad categories of crimes that can lead to deportation, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an online database of government records. Included are some controlled substance convictions, offenses of ''moral turpitude,'' and ''aggravated felonies'' -- which, despite the name, can include misdemeanors.

For example, an immigrant who stole Tylenol and cigarettes in Rhode Island was found by a federal appeals court in 2000 to have committed an ''aggravated felony,'' according to TRAC. Other rulings have upheld the designation for shoplifting and petty larceny.

ICE in Philadelphia has said it is too early to say whether Vasquez can be deported, but that it plans to work with Morganelli's office.

Spokesman Mark Medvesky said it is not unusual for the agency to receive correspondence from members of Congress. He wouldn't discuss specifics of Vasquez's case, citing privacy concerns.

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He should have already been gone! Married to an American or not, this many convictions prove this guy is never going to change... until he kills someone, goes to prison and "finds God".