What has Congress defined as a felony and an aggravated felony for immigration purposes?
Congress has defined “felony” as an offense for which the maximum term of imprisonment is “more than one year.” Moreover, the Sentencing Guidelines define “felony” to include “any federal, state, or local offense punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year One has to verify whether the particular conviction in fact truly constitutes an aggravated felony. Any reasonable doubts concerning the interpretation of the statutory definition must be resolved in favor of the non citizen. When considering whether a particular conviction constitutes an aggravated felony, it is useful to determine whether Congress has elsewhere used the same language it employed in the aggravated felony definition. Where one or more of these aggravating factors is not present, however, it would be possible to argue that the offense did not constitute an aggravated felony even though it fell within another federal statutory definition of the same terms used in the aggravated felony definition, since the
