Does the Crime Fit the Punishment?: Recent Judicial Actions Expanding the Rights of Noncitizens

The following excerpt is the introduction to this paper. To read the entire essay, download the PDF above.

5:00 a.m., July 2010: Immigration agents arrive at the home of Farhan Ezad, a thirty-five-year-old Pakistani national who has been living in the United States since the age of five. Agents place Ezad in handcuffs in front of his wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, and inform him that he is being deported based on a 1995 conviction for a fifteen dollar drug sale in his college dorm room. Despite having had no further brushes with the law since serving five years of probation for his offense, Ezad faces the prospect of separation from his family and forced return to a land that he barely knows.