Her murder conviction was overturned. US immigration still wants to deport her

But when the California courts overturned her conviction in July 2021, the 40-year-old Los Angeles woman did not walk free. Instead, she was picked up by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and taken to a federal detention center where she is now facing deportation to Mexico, a country she left at age nine.

Castaneda has been in Ice detention for nine months, trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare in which lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Ice, argue she should be deported due to the original murder charge even though the California courts and an immigration judge have said that her conviction was invalid.

The US has long deported immigrants based on their criminal records, routinely detaining people convicted of a wide range of offenses, leading people like Castaneda, who have legal status, to be threatened with removal.

But as the US justice system reckons with its past and various states have passed reform laws meant to right the wrongs of mass incarceration and unjust convictions, the immigration system has not caught up.

That means that across the US tens of thousands of people over the years have faced deportation even after courts have overturned their convictions, granted expungements and erased the offenses from their criminal records, legal experts estimate. And in recent years, the US government has actively thwarted new state reforms meant to fix this problem and stop deportations based on flawed convictions.

Castaneda, who came to the US with a green card in 1991, grew up in South Central LA, a neighborhood that struggled with gang violence. She had a difficult childhood, with her mother leaving her to live with relatives at a young age, but she stayed out of trouble until 10 May 2002.

Castaneda, then 20, was driving a group of friends to a restaurant that evening when one of them, who was affiliated with a local gang, fired without warning at a rival gang, injuring one person and killing another, her attorneys wrote in a recent filing. The passengers and shooter in the car all fled on foot, but Castaneda stopped a few blocks away, and was apprehended by police.

At age 21, Castaneda, who had no criminal record, was given a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The shooter was never charged.

Last year, for example, a New Jersey human trafficking survivor still faced deportation even after her convictions were dropped once she proved in state court that she was victimized.

California, New York and other states have passed laws in recent years to help people dismiss convictions and ensure they are protected from deportation, but the federal government has fought to circumvent them.

Immigrant advocates are pressuring the Biden administration and state officials to do more to stop deportations of people with dismissed convictions and old criminal records.

So far, the Biden administration has declined to change the rule or enact policies directing immigration officials to broadly recognize conviction dismissals.