Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilippkumar | Hacker News Reader

As an immigrant, this stood out to me:

> ... I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., do hereby grant a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents who ...

> ... This pardon does not apply to individuals who were non-citizens not lawfully present in the United States at the time of their offense.

In the first of the above, it specifically states that it applies to citizens and lawful permanent residents. In the second, it says it does not apply to people who didn't have valid immigration status.

So, what happens to someone who had a valid immigration status, but was not a lawful permanent resident? For example, someone on a student or a tourist visa?

Can anyone with legal expertise shed some light on how such things are usually resolved? My naive expectation would be that it still would only apply to citizens and lawful permanent residents. But then, why specifically call out that it doesn't apply to this specific group out of many other groups that aren't covered under "citizens or lawful permanent residents"?

Not a lawyer or other credentialed legal expert, but used to closely reading legal documents:

> So, what happens to someone who had a valid immigration status, but was not a lawful permanent resident?

If they are a currently a citizen or lawful permanent resident (the first piece you quote is about the status you have to have to receive the pardon now) and they were a citizen or a lawfully-present non-citizen at the time of the offense (the second part is explicitly about status at the time of offense) they are pardoned.

If they are not a citizen or lawful permanent resident now (even if they are in legal status now and at the time of the offense), no pardon.

If they were a non-citizen that was not legally present at the time of the offense, but are a citizen or lawful permanent resident now (because of the interaction between immigration and law enforcement, that's difficult but not entirely impossible), also no pardon.

You have to both have been in the right status at the time of the offense and the narrower right status at the time of the pardon to qualify.

>So, what happens to someone who had a valid immigration status, but was not a lawful permanent resident? For example, someone on a student or a tourist visa?

I brought my wife over on the 90 day fiancee visa well before there was a TV show about it, and mostly because it was the only way we could hang out. Thankfully we lucked out, and celebrated our 20th anniversary earlier this year.

But to the point: When you're dealing with DHS and immigration, it's made absolutely clear that if you screw anything up, you're kicked out of the country and it's going to be a ballache to get back in. It's not surprising that they were not included in the blanket pardon, and I think that's actually pretty reasonable, even though I also think that incarceration over marijuana possession is absurd and has been pretty devastating to the lives of millions of people and the communities they live in.

The amount of work you have to do to qualify for a visa, and to move between the different statuses (there are fun periods where your status is just... pending. When we went through this, there was nothing you have to show for this except for a generic looking letter from DHS. All your fancy documentation is sitting in a US Gov't inbox somewhere while they make sure you're not a terrorist) and, frankly, if you manage to get arrested for smoking weed while you're on a visa, you're kind of an idiot.

We didn't even travel outside the country until my wife got her full-fledged citizenship. And when she applied for that, they gave her a hard time over the speeding tickets she'd gotten while here.

Whether you agree with the concept or not, visitors to the country are told pretty clearly that the rules apply extra hard to them, and the consequences of not following very basic rules are going to be extra inconvenient. You get caught breaking the law, you risk losing your visa status and losing the ability to ever visit the country again.

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