It's about damn time. You may remember this judge as one of Clinton's failed nominees for Attorney General back in 1993, part of that whole "illegal nanny" scandal.
One and a half years after "Slick Rick" Walters was jailed for immigrations violations, the rapper's release was ordered by a U.S. District Court Judge and his deportation was halted.
Judge Kimba Wood reinstated a 1995 waiver that allowed Walters to remain in the country despite having been convicted of a felony (an attempted murder charge from 1991, for which he served more than three years in prison). U.S. law specifies that foreign nationals who commit crimes must be deported, but due to Walters' family, business and career -- all rooted in the U.S. rather than England (where he was born) -- the ruling permitted him to stay. The Bureau of Immigration Affairs tried to overrule that ruling in 1997, a decision which Judge Wood said denied Walters due process.
Walters had been on a Caribbean cruise in the summer of 2002. Upon his return on June 1st of that year, he was arrested for illegally re-entering the country. He made four requests for bail, but INS declared him a flight risk and he spent the next eighteen months in a Bradenton, Florida, jail. Last December, he was to be deported, but Wood intervened.
"I am grateful that the judge stopped my deportation," Walters said just last week. "I totally understand that homeland security is going through changes. But this back and forth with INS is unfair..."
