Four months after US Immigration officials detained Ecuador immigrant, Pablo Villavicencio, as he delivered pizza to the military base Fort Hamilton and failed to produce identification, the deportation case against him has been dismissed at the federal level.
The Legal Aid Society now intends to help Villavicencio, who was held in detention for 53 days, to gain legal residency in the US, although he had applied for a green card before he was taken into custody. Lawyers from the private legal firm, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, will continue to join the Legal Aid Society in its representation of the pizza deliveryman.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said that the federal government’s decision to drop the appeal of a court order that freed the currently undocumented immigrant is an admission that there was no good reason to remove him from his family and take away his freedom in the first place. A spokesman for the Southern District of New York’s US Attorney’s Office announced the decision to drop the case on 5 October.
The Office originally filed an appeal on 2 October against the ruling made in July by US District Judge Paul Crotty to have Villavicencio released from detention and preventing his deportation back to Ecuador, the New York Law Journal states. It is not known why the federal government decided to withdraw the appeal three days after lodging it.