Arias v. Lynch, No. 14-2839 (7th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseArias came to the U.S. without authorization in 2000. She has raised three children here and has consistently paid income tax. Her longtime employer calls her an “excellent employee.” Her sole criminal conviction, falsely using a social security number to work (42 U.S.C. 408(a)(7)(B)), was classified as a “crime involving moral turpitude” by the BIA, which disqualified Arias from seeking discretionary cancellation of removal under 8 U.S.C. 1229b(b)(1). The Seventh Circuit remanded for reconsideration. Many violations of the cited statute would amount to crimes involving moral turpitude, but for both legal and pragmatic reasons, it is unlikely that every violation of the statute necessarily qualifies as a crime involving moral turpitude. The BIA misapplied the framework for identifying crimes involving moral turpitude that it was bound to apply at the time of its decision; after the BIA’s decision, the Attorney General vacated that framework in its entirety. The court noted the current vacuum of authoritative guidance on how the Board should determine whether a crime involves moral turpitude.
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