A prosecutor from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was sentenced on Wednesday to serve 30 days in jail due to forgery. He counterfeited a document to make it appear like a Mexican who wanted to remain in the United States was not qualified to do so.
Atty. Jonathan M. Love was also ordered to do community service of 100 hours, must surrender his law license and have to pay Ignacio Lanuza $12,000 in indemnification. The accused pleaded guilty to a federal bereavement of rights misdemeanor charge, aware that he used his position to remove Lanuza of due process. As abc News reported, Lanuza was stopped by an ICE officer in 2008 and began removal proceedings says the U.S. Attorney's Office.
In 2008, the prosecutor was assigned to Lanuza's deportation case. Lanuza kept his stand of being eligible for resident status because he was married to an American citizen and is living in the country for more than 10 consecutive years.
In a 2009 hearing, Love informed the immigration office that Lanuza had signed a waiver when he was halted at the border in Nogales in 2000, which would have made him not qualified to ask that his removal to Mexico be rejected. Love showed the court with a copy of the waiver, called I-826 form but Lanuza could not remember signing it, according to The Seattle Times.
Lanuza should have been eligible struggle for his deportation because he lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, shown good moral character and had a family composed of U.S. citizens. Love's committed forgery made it appear that Lanuza didn't reside in the U.S. for 10 years and was therefore eligible for deportation, seattlepi.com reports.
"Mr. Lanuza and his family suffered greatly as a result of these egregious actions, undergoing a lengthy and expensive legal process that spanned some five and a half years and took an extreme toll not just on their finances but also on their emotional and physical well-being," the Washington man's attorneys with the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project attorneys said in court papers.
It was not until after Lanuza appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the form was discovered of forgery prompting him to seek another immigration hearing. Until now there is no clear reason why Love did that and since he was charge, he is free on bond while authorities of the Bureau of Prisons expect him to surrender in the coming weeks.
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