Rosa Maria Ortega's eight-year sentence for illegal voting in Texas was decried as a political prosecution. She was paroled in December and faces deportation.
In 2017, Rosa Maria Ortega's eight-year prison sentence for illegal voting in Texas made her an unwitting poster child of an alleged voter fraud epidemic that dominated headlines and a newly-elected president's tweets-- despite no evidence that it existed.
Professor Jean Reisz of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law said a person in Ortega's position may remain in the USA for months or even years because of a court backlog but ultimately has steep odds at avoiding deportation. Federal law states: "Any alien who has voted in violation of any Federal, State, or local constitutional provision, statute, ordinance, or regulation is deportable.
Dallas-based attorney Clark Birdsall, who represented Ortega at trial, learned from a reporter about her parole and pending deportation. He asserted that her imprisonment and deportation was the result of "a totally inappropriate prosecution and a totally inappropriate sentence."Representatives for Paxton did not respond to messages seeking comment on Ortega's parole or pending deportation.
"I think her story has the potential of coming across very well in the current climate and putting her in a positive light that might help secure her immigration status more than anything we can do on paper," White wrote. Before the jurors decided Ortega's sentence, a prosecutor portrayed her as representative of a potential illegal voting invasion.
After moving from Dallas to neighboring Tarrant County in late 2014, she attempted to register to vote but indicated on her application that she was not an American citizen. When her application was rejected, she called election administrators and was told that the reason for the rejection was that she had checked the"no" box for citizenship. Ortega explained that she had been able to vote in Dallas County and resubmitted her voter registration, this time indicating she was a citizen.
His office, in coordination with Wilson's, was behind another harsh prison sentence concerning voter fraud. In 2018, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison in Tarrant County for casting a provisional ballot despite having been convicted of a felony. Mason claimed she did not know she wasn't allowed to vote, and she is appealing the conviction.
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