Alina Das, of the New York University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, has published as paper entitled: The Immigration Penalties of Criminal Convictions: Resurrecting Categorical Analysis in Immigration Law.

Here is a portion of the abstract:

"Under a categorical analysis, an immigration official determines the penalties based on an assessment of the statutory definition of the offense, not the factual circumstances of the crime. However, recent Supreme Court, federal court, and agency decisions have ignored this longstanding analysis and have instead examined these issues through the lens of Taylor v. United States, a criminal sentencing case that adopts a categorical analysis in a different context. Distinguishing Taylor and its criminal sentencing rationales, recent decisions have invented a new approach for how past criminal convictions are assessed in the immigration context that now permits a circumstance-specific inquiry into facts beyond the criminal court’s findings in some immigration cases. Under these recent decisions, the immigration consequences of a criminal conviction no longer turn on the criminal court adjudication alone, but may also account for facts that were not proven or pleaded in the criminal court proceeding." Das, Alina, The Immigration Penalties of Criminal Convictions: Resurrecting Categorical Analysis in Immigration Law (October 15, 2010). NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 10-75.

Click here to read the full paper.  It is very much worth the read for any practitioner who deals with deportation defense.