When Rosa Maria Ortega was a teenager, her mother was deported to her native Mexico after being arrested twice.
As she grew up, Ms. Ortega decided to take a different route. Lacking a high school diploma, she signed up for the Job Corps at age 18 and snagged a position at a state employment office.
In 2012, she registered to vote, and not only cast ballots in the next two elections but served as a poll worker. Divorced, she raised four children, now teenagers, sometimes working three jobs.
“When my mom was here, she did everything illegal,” Ms. Ortega, 37, said in an interview. “I wasn’t going to let that happen to me.”
She may not have a choice. Ms. Ortega, of Grand Prairie, Tex., a suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, is a permanent resident with a green card, but she is not an American citizen. In a case that made national headlines last month, she was found guilty, fined $5,000 and sentenced to eight years in prison because the ballots she cast in 2012 and 2014 were illegal. While green-card holders have many of the rights of citizens, they cannot vote.
If the verdict is upheld, she will serve her sentence and, in all likelihood, be deported to Mexico. For green-card holders, a criminal conviction is effectively a ticket for deportation.
Her punishment may be unprecedented for an offense that often draws a minimal sentence or probation. Ms. Ortega, who has a seventh-grade education and a sometimes shaky grasp on the complexities of her life, has steadfastly insisted that she did not know she was violating the law — that she is being imprisoned and probably deported for the crime of being confused.
“I thought I was doing something right,” Ms. Ortega said. “It wasn’t to hurt somebody, or the state, or the government. I even worked for the government.
“I voted like a U.S. citizen,” she said. “The only thing is, I didn’t know I couldn’t vote.”
The case resonates in a polarized political environment where some are convinced that immigrants threaten to upend the nation’s shared values more than they continue its long history of accepting and assimilating outsiders. Ms. Ortega’s lawyers say they believe the severity of the sentence stems from the furor over immigration and false claims about voter fraud raised by Donald J. Trump’s nationalistic presidential campaign.
One of Ms. Ortega’s lawyers, Domingo Garcia, said the case also raised questions about equality in the justice system. He cited a case three years ago in Fort Worth, in which a 16-year-old boy from a wealthy white family was sentenced to probation for a drunken-driving crash that killed four and seriously injured two. The boy’s lawyers argued that he was so spoiled that he did not realize that there were limits on his behavior, the now notorious “affluenza” defense.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who brought the fraud charges, has applauded Ms. Ortega’s sentence, saying that it “shows how serious Texas is about keeping its elections secure.”
Ms. Ortega said she had voted for Mr. Paxton as well as Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama’s Republican rival in 2012, after being persuaded by the conservative father of her fiancé, Oscar Sherman.
The outlines of Ms. Ortega’s offense are mostly undisputed. While living in neighboring Dallas County, she registered to vote before the 2012 election, checking a box on the registration form that certified that she was a United States citizen. After voting in 2012 and 2014, she moved to Fort Worth’s Tarrant County in 2015, where she registered to vote again — this time, ticking the box that indicated she was not a citizen.
When her registration was rejected, she called elections officials, telling them that she had voted in Dallas. Told that people who checked the noncitizen box were ineligible to vote, she reapplied, this time indicating that she was a citizen. An elections worker who remembered her earlier comment about voting in Dallas became suspicious, and forwarded the application to the authorities.
Ms. Ortega was jailed on charges of voting fraud, a felony, and false statements on a registration application, a misdemeanor. State prosecutors argued that her actions and statements showed that she had intended to break the law, although they offered no explanation of why she would have sought to vote illegally.
A jury of 10 women and two men convicted her of the fraud charges, but the misdemeanor has yet to be adjudicated. After a month in jail, she was released on bail. Her four children have been placed with an ex-husband with whom she has scant contact.
Ms. Ortega’s lawyers are casting her as a scapegoat. The case, they say, was manufactured to prop up Mr. Trump’s baseless voter-fraud claims and an anti-fraud law by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature that tightens qualifications for voting. Federal courts have ruled that the latest version of that law discriminates against Latinos and other groups that tend to favor Democratic candidates.
In the court of public opinion, they have had some success. Ms. Ortega’s conviction has drawn an outcry in editorials and from advocacy groups. Supporters contributed several thousand dollars to an online fund-raiser aimed at supporting her family while she was imprisoned.
Ms. Ortega’s fate rests not with the public but with a Texas appeals court. Should her lawyers fail to win a new trial, they have one more option: an appeal to the Fort Worth judge who oversaw her trial and conviction. The judge can reduce Ms. Ortega’s eight-year sentence to probation, a decision that would give federal immigration officials legal discretion to rescind her deportation, assuming no other problems crop up.
But that option may be closing. On Friday, the Tarrant County criminal district attorney, Sharen Wilson, a Republican who has worked with Mr. Paxton’s office on Ms. Ortega’s prosecution, notified defense lawyers of a meeting on the misdemeanor charge of falsely filing a registration application. A decision to prosecute her on that charge could complicate any effort to avoid her deportation, another of Ms. Ortega’s lawyers, Clark Birdsall, said.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Wilson, Samantha Jordan, declined to comment on Ms Ortega’s case, but said the meeting was a routine status conference.
By registering and voting, Mr. Birdsall said, Ms. Ortega hoped to give her children a course in citizenship.
“Her whole act of voting was an example to her kids,” he said. “She told them, ‘This is what you’re going to be doing. You have to have your voice heard.’ “
Ms. Oretga said they had come away with an entirely different lesson.
No comments:
Post a Comment