An illegal immigrant will not be deported for having engaged in a crime of moral turpitude after pleading guilty to participating in a cockfighting crime.

I bring this up because the original immigration judge ordered Augustin Ortega-Lopez deported because, the judge ruled, acting as a driver to the cockfight was akin to harming children. From the LA Times story:

Ortega-Lopez pleaded guilty to cockfighting in 2008 after he was advised by his lawyer that it was not a crime of moral turpitude, Shamloo said.

But the immigration judge who first heard Ortega-Lopez’s case called animal fighting “base and depraved” and noted that all 50 states outlaw cockfighting. Cruelty to children amounts to moral turpitude, the judge reasoned, and animals are defenseless living beings “akin to children,” the 9th Circuit said.

“Unlike hunting or racing, animal fighting is a spectacle, the entire purpose of which is the intentional infliction of harm or pain on sentient beings that are compelled to fight, often to the death,” the immigration judge wrote.

No. Animal abuse is wrong because it causes gratuitous pain to the animals involved. That is enough in and of itself.

But it is not akin to child abuse! We should avoid such wrong-headed comparisons of human to animals in every venue because it subverts human exceptionalism, blurring the crucial moral distinction between us and fauna.

The Ninth Circuit appears to get that:

“Congress has declared cockfighting a scourge that warrants prosecution, and we have no quarrel with that,” the 9th Circuit said. “Yet that is not our inquiry here — rather, we must determine whether the conviction” involved moral turpitude.

“In answering this question, the government urges us to hold that cockfighting is a vile and depraved practice, which in its view ends the story,” the panel said. “It does not.”
“The fact that cockfighting is outlawed throughout the nation is not enough to justify categorizing it as a crime of moral turpitude,” the 9th Circuit said. “More is required,” the panel said.

It seems to me that animal abuse can certainly involve moral turpitude. But, unlike child abuse — which is ipso facto moral turpitude — the ruling seems to be saying that the question depends on the facts involved in the animal abuse. I think that is right.

Photo credit: azkia_am via Pixabay.
Cross-posted at The Corner.