EDITORIAL: APPLY COMMON SENSE TO IMMIGRATION LAW

If Alberto Gonzales is confirmed as the Bush administration's new attorney
general, he ought to review how immigration officials handled the case of
Madison resident Mirwais Ali. Then he should mark Ali's file: This is NOT
how to enforce the law.

Ali, 25, is on his way to being deported to Afghanistan, even though he has
lived almost all his life on Madison's East Side and has almost no
connection to anything Afghan.

He ran afoul of a law declaring that alien residents of the United States
who are convicted of an aggravated felony can be deported. It's a
reasonable law, when enforced with common sense. But in the case of Ali,
who lost his final appeal this month, no one applied common sense to
produce a just result. Rather, the law was enforced merely for the sake of
enforcement.

There is no doubt that Ali's troubles started with his own behavior. His
record shows that as a younger man he was, at best, a hoodlum in training.
He has convictions for retail theft, marijuana possession, bail jumping and
receiving stolen property. And, in 1998, he pled guilty to possession of
marijuana with intent to sell after police found him carrying six
individually wrapped bags of marijuana on State Street.

At the time of the felony marijuana case, it appears that no one knew his
guilty plea could subject him to deportation. But, three years later, he
got into more trouble and a judge revoked his probation. Then, the federal
Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services started deportation proceedings.

Deporting an alien resident should, of course, involve sending him back to
the country he came from. For all practical purposes Ali is from the United
States. But he was born in Afghanistan. His parents fled that country to
escape Russian occupation and came to Madison when he was 3. His mother
later became a naturalized citizen, and his parents mistakenly thought the
naturalization would automatically cover their son. They never corrected
their error.

So, although he grew up as a Madisonian, graduating from East High School,
he was, by law, a resident alien.

In 2002 an immigration judge ordered that he be deported.

Then, seeing that justice was going awry, Dane County District Attorney
Brian Blanchard tried to do the right thing. He amended Ali's 1998
conviction to a misdemeanor, which is not a deportable offense. Blanchard's
action gave federal officials an opportunity to reverse the deportation
order. But nobody budged. This month the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
sealed Ali's fate by refusing to overturn the deportation.

So now Ali, who still lives and works in Madison, will be deported for a
conviction that is no longer a deportable offense, and he will be sent to a
country where he knows no one and can't speak the language. That is an
unjust result.

The new leadership at the Justice Department should make sure that in the
future somebody considers not just the letter of immigration law but the
spirit as well.