Ledezma-Galicia

Opinion by Judge BERZON; Dissent by Judge Bybee.

Ramon Ledezma-Galicia, a lawful permanent resident alien, was convicted in an Oregon state court in September 1988 of sodomy, for sexually molesting a minor. Current law provides that “sexual abuse of a minor” is an “aggravated felony” as defined by 8 U.S.C. § 1101 (a)(43)(A), and therefore grounds for removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1227 (a)(2)(A)(iii). 1 Ledezma-Galicia does not dispute that his crime is an aggravated felony. Instead, the question before us is whether Ledezma-Galicia may now be removed from the country based on his 1988 conviction, even though he would not have been deportable for that crime — or for any aggravated felony — at the time of his conviction. We conclude that he may not be removed, because (1) the 1988 law that made aliens deportable for aggravated felony convictions did not apply to convictions prior to November 18, 1988; and (2) neither Congress’s overhaul of the grounds for deportation in 1990 nor its rewrite of the definition of aggravated felony in 1996 erased that temporal limitation.

*1058 I. BACKGROUND

A. Overview

Ledezma-Galicia entered the United States in 1979 and became a lawful permanent…

dissenting:

There is no polite way to say this: The statutory scheme we are required to parse in this case is a mess. It is a model of ambiguity and misdirection. That fact, of course, does not give us license to impose our own reading on the statute, but means that we must accept an agency’s construction of the statute so long as it is reasonable. Chevron, USA, Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842-43 , 104 S.Ct. 2778 , 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984). The majority declines to accept the BIA’s reading and imposes its own. Whether the majority has improved on the BIA’s analysis is debatable — although for the reasons I explain, I quite doubt it — but we do not have to be confident of our analysis, we only have to be confident that the BIA’s is reasonable. And of that, I am 100 percent confident. Indeed, so twisted and complex are the provisions at issue here that — short of spitting in a bucket — the BIA could have concluded almost anything in this case and been reasonable. If Chevron means anything, this is a classic case for deferring to the agency.

In September 1988, an Oregon state court convicted Ramon Ledezma-Galicia of sodomy for sexually molesting a minor. The…