By: Derek Hawkins//January 16, 2017//
7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Case Name: Antonio Robledo-Soto v. Loretta E. Lynch
Case No.: 16-2954
Officials: POSNER, KANNE, and SYKES, Circuit Judges.
Focus: Immigration – Deportation – Removal Proceedings
Robledo‐Soto, the petitioner, a Mexican citizen facing removal (deportation) to Mexico, sought to postpone his removal proceeding so that he could expunge a drunk‐driving conviction and if he succeeded in doing that try to persuade the Department of Homeland Security to drop its efforts to seek his removal. The Department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division (ICE) prosecutes removal cases (technically removal casesare civil, realistically they are closer to being criminal); and if ICE decides not to prosecute, the alien goes scot‐free. Al‐ though Robledo‐Soto’s drunk‐driving conviction had not been the basis for the Department’s seeking to remove him— the basis was that he’d entered the United States without being authorized to do so, see 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(A)(i)—it did make him a priority for removal, and he hoped that if the conviction was expunged from his record he could convince the Department to exercise its prosecutorial discretion not to seek his removal. For what is true is that in recognition of the limited resources of most government agencies, the agencies are authorized to decide “whether agency re‐ sources are best spent on this violation or another, whether the agency is likely to succeed if it acts, whether the particular enforcement action requested best fits the agency’s over‐ all policies, and, indeed, whether the agency has enough re‐ sources to undertake the action at all.” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U.S. 821, 831 (1985); see also Arizona v. United States, 132 S. Ct. 2492, 2499 (2012); Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, “The History of Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Law,” 64 American University Law Review 1285, 1291–93 (2015).
Petition dismissed