New York Cathedral Shooter Had Been Given Immigration Relief
The 'zombie' section 212(c) of the INA, and unanswered questions
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 23, 2020
On Sunday, December 13, Luis Manuel Vasquez-Gomez, a 52-year-old Dominican national with a green card, was killed by police after he discharged a weapon outside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan following a Christmas carol concert there. It was not his first encounter with the law, raising the question as to why he was in the United States — let alone New York — to begin with.
The New York Times reports that the shooter came to this country in 1976 as an immigrant, and by the age of 22 had at least three arrests — one for shooting at a woman and police officers, one for cutting a man's hand, and one for selling drugs to an undercover cop. By 1991, he had been convicted of possession of a weapon, harassment, and sale of a controlled substance, and ended up serving a prison sentence.
He came to the attention of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1994, and was ordered deported by an immigration judge (IJ) in 1995. But for some reason that is unclear from reporting, he was not in fact deported. ICE locked Vasquez-Gomez up after an unspecified parole violation in 2007.
That is where the case gets legal — and weird. Logically, he could have applied for a waiver under former section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), during his deportation proceedings in the 1990s.
https://cis.org/Arthur/New-York-Cathedral-Shooter-Had-Been-Given-Immigration-Relief
