PHILADELPHIA — A Pennsylvania man spent 43 years in prison before his murder conviction was overturned — only to be taken away Directly to immigration detention – He was denied bail on Tuesday while fighting deportation.
Subramaniam Vedam, 64, will remain in detention until he appeals the 1999 deportation order. The Board of Immigration Appeals this month agreed to hear his appeal based on what it described as exceptional circumstances.
The Trump administration initially followed a Fast migration Vaidham was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana last fall Two separate courts intervened.
Vaidham’s lawyer said Tuesday that he likely would have escaped deportation and become a citizen if not for the murder case, given the immigration laws in place at the time. Vidham would have left prison on the drug charges by 1992, said attorney Ava Benach.
“The delivery of LSD was on a very small scale. This does not mean importing tons of cocaine,” Benach said on Tuesday. “He does not pose a danger to the community. We are talking about crimes that occurred more than 40 years ago.”
In August, a Pennsylvania judge overturned Vidham’s murder conviction in the 1980 death of a college friend, based on ballistics evidence that prosecutors did not uncover during his trial. Supporters who listened remotely to the bail hearing included the Center County prosecutor and the mayor of State College, where Vidham’s late father was a popular professor at Pennsylvania State University, Benach said.
Immigration Judge Tamar Wilson, who sits in Elizabeth, New Jersey, said she believes the detention is mandatory given his drug conviction. Instead, it agreed with Department of Homeland Security officials who said he still poses a safety risk.
“The fact that he was a model prisoner does not indicate that he would be safe in the general public,” Wilson said.
It is not yet clear whether Wilson or another judge will hear the merits of the deportation case. No date has been set for the hearings yet.
“Supu is nothing if not resilient, and we are determined to emulate the example he is setting for us by focusing on the next step in his freedom fight,” said his sister, Saraswathi Vedam, calling him by his family nickname. “We still believe his immigration case is strong and look forward to the day when we can be together again.”
She planned to bring him home when he was released from state prison on October 3, only to see him taken into federal immigration custody. Vidam came to the United States legally from India when he was 9 months old, when his parents returned to government college.
“He suffered great injustice,” Benach told The Associated Press last year. “Those 43 years are not a blank slate. He had a wonderful experience in prison.”
Vaidham is being held at a 1,800-bed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in central Pennsylvania.
“Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said of the case last year.