The duty to advise a non-citizen client before a plea, the conviction definition that counts even when a state court says otherwise, the aggravated felony categories and how a sentence length triggers them, crimes involving moral turpitude and the petty offense exception, controlled substance grounds and the single marijuana exception, vacating a conviction for a legal defect rather than for hardship, and bond while a case is pending.
Criminal bail terminates only the jail's authority to hold on the pending charge. Where an immigration hold has been lodged, meeting the bail conditions produces a transfer rather than liberty, and the funds spent are gone from the custody fight that will actually decide whether the client goes home. Counsel should confirm whether a request exists, what the local jurisdiction does with it, and whether the charge makes later detention non-discretionary before advising a family to post.
A criminal disposition affects status in two separate ways: it can make a client removable, and it can bar an application the client was counting on. Some bars are absolute and cannot be argued around, while others only make an application harder to win. Waiver provisions exist for a limited set of grounds and do not reach most controlled substance convictions or an aggravated felony conviction after admission as a resident.
The deportability ground for multiple turpitude offenses reaches a client convicted of two or more such crimes not arising out of a single scheme of criminal misconduct, and it applies whether or not the convictions were entered in one trial. The agency reads the single scheme clause to cover one uninterrupted episode. Several circuits read it to cover offenses planned together and carried out under a common plan, so the same disposition can produce different answers.
A state may schedule substances the federal schedules do not, so a conviction under a broader state statute does not by itself establish a federally controlled substance offense. Whether that mismatch is available later depends on whether the substance was named in the charging document, in the written agreement, or in the factual basis. The choice is made during the criminal case, and courts differ on how much a defendant must show about the breadth of the state list.
The deportability and inadmissibility grounds for drug offenses reach any conviction relating to a controlled substance, which has been read to include possession of paraphernalia, being under the influence, and presence where drugs are used. The narrow marijuana exception is written around a single offense of simple possession of a small quantity and does not obviously extend to those charges. No sentence figure and no fine-only disposition removes the ground.
The aggravated felony definition is a catalog of enumerated categories in the immigration definitions statute. Each entry works in one of three ways: some are triggered by conduct alone, some by a loss figure above a threshold, and some by a term of imprisonment of at least one year. Because the categories track neither the word felony nor state severity, a state misdemeanor resolved with a one-year term can qualify while many state felonies do not.
A conviction exists for federal immigration purposes when a court enters a formal judgment of guilt, or when a plea, a verdict or an admission of sufficient facts is followed by any punishment, penalty or restraint on liberty. Both parts of the second branch must be present. A pre-plea diversion in which nothing is admitted, a dismissal, an acquittal and an infraction resolved without a plea therefore remain outside the definition regardless of what the file is later called.
The petty offense exception applies where the client has committed only one crime involving moral turpitude, the maximum penalty possible for that offense does not exceed one year of imprisonment, and the sentence imposed was six months or less. The first ceiling is a property of the statute, not of the disposition, so a charge carrying a longer maximum fails even where the term imposed is trivial. The second counts a suspended sentence at its pronounced length.
Several immigration categories turn on figures fixed at sentencing rather than on the offense of conviction: the term of imprisonment ordered including any suspended portion, the number of counts and how they are grouped, the restitution amount, and any finding the court makes beyond the elements. Each is a legitimate subject of ordinary sentencing advocacy, and each is far harder to change once judgment enters.
Benefit applications are adjudicated on the facts existing at decision, and applicants are questioned again at interview about arrests and convictions. A disposition entered while the request is pending can convert an accurate answer into an inaccurate one, can trigger a duty to update, and can move an applicant from eligible to barred. The lever available to defense counsel is not the agency's calendar but the criminal court's, which is why a continuance is the practical tool.
Booking prints travel to federal databases, a match generates a request to the holding facility, and the facility is asked to maintain custody for a short additional period after criminal authority ends so a transfer can be arranged. Whether that sequence runs depends on the facility's own policy, but the offense of conviction largely determines whether the request issues at all. Controlled substance, firearm, domestic violence and aggravated felony categories make it close to certain.
The documents that carry weight in a later immigration matter are certified copies of the charging instrument and disposition, the transcript of the plea and sentencing hearing, the signed plea agreement, the judgment showing the exact term ordered, contemporaneous evidence of residence and family ties, and a file memorandum recording the advice given. Each is cheap to obtain while the case is live and difficult or impossible to reconstruct once the file has closed.
