A Virginia man who is not a United States citizen avoided deportation from the country on Monday despite committing heinous crimes during the summer of 2020.
According to Fox News, 25-year-old Moroccan immigrant Ayoub Tabri was sentenced to just 364 days in prison for setting police cars on fire in Philadelphia.
The crimes occurred during riots in the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd.
Tabri originally faced arson charges that carried a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. This could also have triggered deportation proceedings, Fox News reported.
However, federal prosecutors negotiated a plea deal that ultimately helped reduce prison time drastically.
Tabri is a green card holder who has been in the U.S. since he was six years old, and the once-conservative Fox News attempted to suggest this somehow meant he deserved to remain in the country.
The outlet said if the original charges against Tabri were upheld, the sentence “could have sent him to a country where he knew no one and didn’t speak the language.”
Try as they might, Fox News cannot make Americans feel bad Tabri. He is not a citizen, and if he commits heinous crimes, he forfeits his right to remain here. The number of years he had previously been in the country should not change that fact.
Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain said he would fight for harsher arson charges for Tabri and the five other people who were arrested, but he left office last year.
Should Ayoub Tabri be deported?
After his departure, federal prosecutors softened their approach and agreed to plea deals with “a handful of those defendants,” including Tabri, Fox News reported.
In the end, Tabri only pleaded guilty to one count of obstructing law enforcement during civil disorder. Nancy MacEoin, a federal public defender representing Tabri, said the judge was reasonable in his sentence.
“The judge took into consideration the appropriate factors and imposed a just sentence,” MacEoin said.
The suggestion that the rioters represented some sort of “racial reckoning” in America and therefore should not be prosecuted as harshly is ridiculous, but it is one repeated by attorney Paul Hetznecker, who is representing another defendant from the Philadelphia riots named Lore-Elizabeth Blumenthal.
“This reflects an evolution in the thinking of prosecutors in the justice department about these cases and putting them in the appropriate context,” Hetznecker said.
“These cases occurred at an important flashpoint in our history, and they should be viewed that way.”
A crime is a crime, no matter what misguided motivations the criminals had at the time. The fact that a lawyer cannot understand this basic fact is incredibly troubling.
Fox News also reported many civil rights advocates were angry because police used photos from the riots on social media to identify Blumenthal.
You see, when this practice was used to track down people who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, it was perfectly fine. Yet when it was used to identify radical leftists, it was apparently a problem.
Both Tabri and Blumenthal are criminals who should be prosecuted to the fullest of the law. Instead, lawyers have arranged special treatment for them in the name of wokeness.
