Teen Faces Deportation After Selling Pot Brownies to Buy Prom Dress

A California teenager faces deportation after selling pot brownies to raise money to buy a prom dress, CBS Sacramento reports.

Last year, Saira Munoz baked pot-laced brownies with the hopes of selling them to classmates to help pay for her prom attire. Munoz, who was 18 at the time, enlisted an underage classmate to help with the sales. Police learned about the fundraising scheme when one of her customers got sick and had to go to the hospital.

On Monday, Munoz was sentenced to four years of probation and nine months in jail, The Huffington Post reported. She also learned that she could be deported to her native Mexico, since she entered the country on a temporary visa in 2000.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is “reviewing the circumstances of this case to determine the appropriate course of action,” according to a spokesperson.

Deportations have soared under the Obama administration and the number of removals has likely reached two million during the president’s time in office. A recent analysis by The New York Times found that more than two-thirds of those deportations were of people convicted of minor crimes, like traffic infractions, or no crime at all.

With slim odds that an immigration reform bill will pass in Congress this year, activist demands have shifted to the president. Fellow Democrats and prominent Hispanic leaders have called on Obama to halt deportations until lawmakers can come up with a broader fix.

Munoz case touches on the unique intersection of immigration and drug-law policy, particularly related to marijuana.

A majority of Americans — 54 percent — believe that marijuana should be legal for sale and consumption.

The Obama administration hasn’t totally ignored that shift in public opinion. The Justice Department has stated that it won’t interfere with states that have legalized pot and has issued guidelines meant to help banks provide services for marijuana-based businesses.

Yet marijuana is still classified as a dangerous drug with “no currently accepted medical use” in the eyes of the U.S. government. And Attorney General Eric Holder hasn’t acted to change that.

Meanwhile, cases like that of Munoz continue to question whether the government can continue to ignore public opinion. One of her high school friends, Carlos Robles, spoke to CBS Sacramento about the case.

“There’s people that deserve to be deported, and she just wasn’t one of them,” he said. “There’s people that do way worse.”

Ted Hesson was formerly the immigration editor at Fusion, covering the issue from Washington, D.C. He also writes about drug laws and (occasionally) baseball. On the side: guitars, urban biking, and fiction.