A Bremerton man was being held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, where he was detained in March.
Buonpone Morisath, who goes by Buon, pronounced “Boon,” was detained after arriving for a regular check-in appointment on March 11 with immigration authorities in Seattle, according to his wife, Emily Hassakonburee, and his attorney, Nicolas Olano of Anchorage, Alaska. Morisath, who was born in Laos and immigrated to the United States with his family from a refugee camp in Thailand as a 5-year-old child in 1980, has made regular visits to federal immigration offices for years, part of a complicated legal arrangement that stems from a 1994 arrest in Alaska, when he was just 18.
That criminal case, in which Morisath pleaded guilty to two charges, a third-degree assault and mishandling of a firearm, is now part of a legal motion filed by Olano prior to Morisath’s recent detention, seeking to reopen the 32-year-old case. Olano said several options could be available to Morisath legally if the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration Board of Appeals, based in Virginia, allows the case to be reopened, which is what the motion requests. Part of the legal argument, which makes several claims, includes that changes in immigration law that followed Morisath’s guilty plea in 1994 should not apply to him, as the law when he was sentenced to about two years in jail (he served six months, with the rest suspended) also classified his charge as “non-deportable.”…