United States v. Casasola, No. 10-50376 (9th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CasePetitioner, a Guatemalan citizen, appealed his conviction and sentence for illegal reentry into the United States after removal. Petitioner challenged the validation of his underlying removal, contending that he automatically derived U.S. citizenship upon his father's naturalization when he was 14 years old. At the time, the controlling statute, 8 U.S.C. 1432(a), granted automatic derivative citizenship to foreign-born children of married parents only when both parents naturalized before the foreign-born child's 18th birthday. Petitioner's mother did not naturalize until he was 21 years old. Therefore, the district court correctly ruled that petitioner was not a citizen. The court also held that, under Barthelemy v. Ashcroft, the distinction between married and legally separated parents had a rational basis in protecting the parental rights of a non-citizen, custodial parent. The court also held that the sentence in this case was neither substantively nor procedurally unreasonable.
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