Miami Criminal Immigration Defense Attorney

One Charge, Two Cases Against You

When a green card holder, a visa holder, or someone without status gets charged with a crime in Miami-Dade, the criminal case is only half the story. The other half is what that charge does to your ability to stay in this country. Those two things move on separate tracks, but they’re tied together — what happens in the courtroom can decide whether you keep your home, your job, and your family, or lose all of it.

We defend non-citizens facing criminal charges with the goal of protecting your legal status and avoiding deportation from the start. That means we don’t treat the immigration side as somebody else’s problem to sort out later. We factor the consequences of a criminal conviction into every decision — how we handle the charge, how we treat any plea, and what we’re willing to accept from a prosecutor. To be clear, our work is your criminal defense, built and argued with your status in mind.

How a Conviction Becomes a Removal Trigger

Not every charge threatens your status, and not every conviction ends in removal. But some do, and the reasons why can catch people completely off guard. Under immigration law, certain convictions — and sometimes even a plea or an admission — can create grounds for deportability. When that happens, the government can start removal proceedings, which is the immigration-court process where those consequences actually play out. It’s a separate system from the criminal court where your case is being decided, but the criminal outcome is what feeds it.

Two categories come up more than any others, and you’ll probably hear both terms if you talk to enough people. Knowing what they mean helps you understand why a “small” plea can carry weight far beyond the courtroom.

Crimes Involving Moral Turpitude

This is an immigration concept, not a Florida charge. Broadly, it covers offenses that involve dishonesty, fraud, or conduct considered morally wrong. Theft-type crimes are the classic examples. Whether a particular charge counts depends on the specifics, which is exactly why the details of how a case is resolved matter so much.

Aggravated Felonies Under Immigration Law

The word “felony” here can mislead you. An “aggravated felony” is an immigration classification — a label federal immigration law applies to certain offenses. It doesn’t line up neatly with how Florida names or grades its charges. Some offenses that don’t sound severe under state law can still fall into this category, and the consequences on the immigration side are among the harshest there are.

Charges That Put Your Status at Risk

People always want to know the same thing: is my charge one of the dangerous ones? A big part of the answer depends on the type of offense.

Theft is the one to watch on the moral turpitude side. We handle the full range — petty theft all the way up through first, second, and third degree grand theft, plus identity theft. These are precisely the kinds of charges that get pulled into that analysis, and even a low-level theft plea can matter more than the criminal penalty suggests.

On the aggravated felony side, the offenses that draw the most attention tend to line up with our federal criminal defense work — drug trafficking, wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and cybercrimes, including cases involving IRS investigations in federal court. If you’re facing something in that range, the stakes for your status climb fast.

Your immigration situation shapes the risk too. A green card holder, a visa holder, and someone who’s undocumented each face different exposure from the same charge. We don’t pretend one answer fits everyone. What we do is look hard at your specific charge and your specific status before anyone makes a move.

If your situation involves any of this, the smartest thing you can do is talk it through with someone who sees both cases at once. Call us at (305) 315-5147 and we’ll walk through where you actually stand.

Why a Quick Plea Is Dangerous Here

Prosecutors offer deals. Sometimes they sound like a gift — plead to something small, walk out, put it behind you. For a citizen, that math might make sense. For a non-citizen, that same “easy” plea can be the trigger that starts removal proceedings, because the plea itself can count as the conviction that immigration law cares about.

This is why we don’t rush anyone toward a deal just to close a file. We prepare cases to be fought and won, and when a plea is on the table, we look at what it does to your status before we ever recommend it. The right resolution for your criminal case has to be a resolution you can live with — literally, here, with your family. Robert Erickson has handled both state and federal criminal defense since 2014, so whether your case sits in Miami-Dade state court or moves to federal court, the same attorney stays on it. There’s no handoff at the exact moment the stakes change.