New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul has intervened in a case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court by officially pardoning an illegal alien who was convicted of a felony to keep him from being deported by the Trump administration. Many across the country are up in arms over the situation, saying that it shows Democrats care more about illegal aliens than they do the citizens they are supposed to be serving.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Keisy Guerrero Mariano, a national from the Dominican Republic, who was the central focus of an argument concerning bond rights for noncitizens being detained for lengthy periods of time. In 2015, Mariano was convicted of second-degree assault and served time behind bars for the crime.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him in 2020 and marked him for deportation for being an illegal alien with a dangerous assault conviction, which is a clear violation of immigration rules. However, in 2024, the Second Circuit Court ruled that prolonged detention entitles a migrant to claim a constitutional right to a bond hearing.
According to a report from Breitbart News, the Trump administration then appealed the court’s ruling that allowed Mariano to seek bond, going on to make the case that noncitizens, even individuals with green cards, do not have a legal right to a bond hearing simply due to a prolonged detention if they have committed crimes that are considered grounds for mandatory deportation.
Hochul, apparently fearing that Mariano would lose the case and be kicked out of the country, jumped into the middle of the situation and took action to protect the dangerous migrant convict from being shipped back to his country of origin. Hochul then issued Mariano a full state pardon, which squashes the Supreme Court case and protects him from being deported.
Eric Wessan, the solicitor general for Iowa, tore into Hochul for setting free a violent prisoner back on the streets. “I wonder how many non-American felons Governors like Hochul will choose to fully pardon and free to avoid them facing consequences for their actions,” Wessan went on to say in another post. Since Mariano’s violations have been erased from the record, SOCTUS will no longer hear the case.
This means that the federal government has to seek another migrant to stand in for its argument that illegals are not protected under the same bond hearing rules as U.S. citizens. Hochul has caused quite a bit of controversy in recent weeks thanks to other controversial moves she’s made, one of the most prominent being signing a bill into law that prohibits local and state police from cooperating with ICE to enforce immigration law.
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A sheriff in her home state is so sick of the shenanigans that he has filed a lawsuit against the governor for the law, but she has remained defiant, even going so far as to say, “bring it on.” When the law went into effect, Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin said, “Today, Kathy Hochul escalated her administration’s war on the policies and she expanded policies to put criminals before the citizens of New York.”
Watch Trump unload on Hochul’s crime and sanctuary policies here: