A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a Mexican citizen’s state misdemeanor conviction for child neglect makes her ineligible to avoid deportation, finding that the state offense qualifies as a federal crime of child abuse.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied a petition for review filed by Maria Reynoso-Salgado, who entered the United States in 1997 and has lived in the country since. Reynoso-Salgado had challenged a determination by the Board of Immigration Appeals that rejected her application for cancellation of removal.
Court records show Reynoso-Salgado pleaded guilty in 2012 to misdemeanor child neglect under Wisconsin law. The Department of Homeland Security placed her in removal proceedings the following year for being present in the country without admission or parole.
An immigration judge later ruled that her guilty plea disqualified her from relief under federal immigration law, and the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld that decision.
The case was heard before Circuit Judges Frank Easterbrook, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, and John Z. Lee.
Writing for the panel, Jackson-Akiwumi stated that the court applied independent judgment to interpret the federal statute rather than deferring to the agency, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which established that “courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”
The court held that under federal law, the phrase “crime of child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment” functions as a single generic offense requiring a culpable mental state of at least criminal negligence, along with “an act or omission that causes harm or creates a reasonable probability of harm” to a child.
Because Wisconsin’s statute required intentional conduct that contributes to child neglect, the panel determined that the state law matches the requirements of the federal statute.
“The Wisconsin child-neglect statute at issue in this case is a categorical match to a crime of child abuse as defined under federal law,” the court concluded. “Accordingly, we deny Reynoso-Salgado’s petition for review.”
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