In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 16-4204

MARICELA HERRERA-RAMIREZ,

Petitioner,

v.

JEFFERSON B. SESSIONS III, Attorney General of the United 

States,

Respondent.

____________________

Petition for Review of an Order of the

Board of Immigration Appeals.

No. A 205 153 425.

____________________

ARGUED MAY 17, 2017 — DECIDED JUNE 15, 2017

____________________

Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and MANION and HAMILTON,

Circuit Judges.

WOOD, Chief Judge. Maricela Herrera-Ramirez is fighting 

deportation from the United States. She is a citizen of Mexico, 

but she has been living in this country without the right to do 

so since she was six years old. She is married and has four 

U.S.-citizen children. She found herself facing removal after a 
2 No. 16-4204

violent incident on December 30, 2011, in which she was involved with a drive-by shooting near a Milwaukee bar where 

she had been with her friends. State criminal proceedings followed, and in time she came to the attention of U.S. Immigration and Customs Service, known as ICE, which instituted removal proceedings against her. First an Immigration Judge 

(IJ) and then the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) found 

that her offense was a “particularly serious crime” for immigration purposes, and thus that she was ineligible for withholding of removal (the only possible relief). She has filed a 

petition for review from that determination, but we conclude 

we lack jurisdiction over it because there is no legal issue before us, and so we dismiss on that basis. 

The underlying facts of Herrera-Ramirez’s offense are 

straightforward. She was at the bar in Milwaukee with her 

friends when the friends got into a fight with some other patrons. Herrera-Ramirez ushered her friends out of the bar and 

into her car; she intended to drive away. One of the friends, 

however, told her to drive past the other patrons who were 

still standing outside the bar. She did so, and the passenger 

rolled down the car window and shot two of the bystanders. 

Herrera-Ramirez claimed that she initially had no idea that 

the passenger had a gun or what he was planning to do. After 

the shooting, Herrera-Ramirez drove off and dropped her 

friends off somewhere. She did not contact the police, but the 

police found her, arrested her, and found the gun in her car. 

She was charged with, and convicted for, first-degree reckless 

injury in violation of Wis. Stat. § 940.23(1)(a). The court sentenced her to 11 months in prison. She came to the attention 

of ICE a short time after the shooting, and that led to the order 

of removal she is challenging. 
No. 16-4204 3

On a petition for review of a decision of the BIA, we have 

jurisdiction over final orders, but our authority is not 

unlimited. As relevant here, we may not second-guess the 

Board’s decision that the crime of which a petitioner has been 

convicted is a “particularly serious” one, see

8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii), unless the petitioner has raised a 

question of law, see id. § 1252(a)(2)(D). We must therefore 

decide whether Herrera-Ramirez has raised a legal question, 

or if she is disputing only the Board’s discretionary 

characterization of her offense.

As Herrera-Ramirez sees it, the critical issue is whether the 

Board correctly interpreted the term “particularly serious 

crime.” She emphasizes the fact that she was charged as a 

party to the crime of first-degree reckless injury, not as the 

principal offender. That much is true, but it does not help her. 

Under Wisconsin law, all parties to a crime are principals for 

liability purposes, even if they did not directly commit the 

crime. Wis. Stat. § 939.05(1). The law defines as a party to a 

crime any person who (a) directly commits the crime, 

(b) intentionally aids and abets the commission of the crime, 

or (c) is a party to a conspiracy to commit the crime or advises 

another to commit it. Wis. Stat. § 939.05(2). At HerreraRamirez’s criminal trial, therefore, the jury needed only to 

find that she did one of those three things in order to convict 

her. In Holland v. State, 280 N.W.2d 288 (Wis. 1979), the 

Supreme Court of Wisconsin noted that “the party to a crime 

statute does not create three separate and distinct offenses.” 

Id. at 293. See also State v. Zelenka, 387 N.W.2d 55, 60 

(Wis. 1986); State v. Charbarneau, 264 N.W.2d 227, 229 

(Wis. 1978). In short, nothing about the fact that HerreraRamirez was charged as a party to a crime prevented the 

Board from regarding her level of culpability as significant 
4 No. 16-4204

under the immigration laws. We note that even the shooter 

was charged as a party to a crime.

Herrera-Ramirez also contends that she was just a minor 

player in the unfolding violence—nothing more than an inadvertent aider and abettor who had no idea that the passenger 

was going to shoot at the bystanders. But this is not a legal 

argument; at best it is a characterization of the facts. (And 

some of the facts are unfavorable to Herrera-Ramirez, including that she told police she realized her passenger had a gun 

before the shooting, and that she thought that the passenger 

meant only to rob the men standing outside the bar, not to 

shoot them.)

No rule of law prevents the Board from regarding 

Herrera-Ramirez’s offense as “particularly serious.” Pertinent 

regulations allow the Board to examine “the nature of the 

conviction, the type of sentence imposed, and the 

circumstances underlying facts of the conviction” in the 

course of determining whether a crime meets that standard. 

Estrada-Martinez v. Lynch, 809 F.3d 886, 889 (7th Cir. 2016) 

(quoting In re N-A-M, 24 I. & N. Dec. 336, 342 (BIA 2007)). The 

Board also is entitled to, and did, give weight to the elements 

of the offense and the nature of the crime. N-A-M, 

24 I. & N. Dec. at 342. At worst, it did not give as much weight 

to Herrera-Ramirez’s supposedly peripheral role in the 

offense as she would have liked. But that was a discretionary 

decision beyond our authority to review. 

Herrera-Ramirez also accuses the Board of totally ignoring

her argument that the evidence did not support a finding that 

her offense was especially serious, and she points out that 

such a claim describes a legal error. Delgado-Arteaga v. Sessions, 

856 F.3d 1109, 1116–17 (7th Cir. 2017). The problem with this 
No. 16-4204 5

point is that the Board did identify the evidence supporting 

its determination. It noted the following facts about the offense: (1) it required that she have caused great bodily harm 

under circumstances showing utter disregard for human life, 

(2) it was a crime against a person, and (3) it involved driving 

a car while another person shot a gun. It also quoted the IJ’s 

conclusion that the offense “was a dangerous crime against 

[sic] involving driving a motor vehicle through the city streets 

while people in the car shot out a window.” HerreraRamirez’s argument that the Board ignored the fact that her 

sentence was seemingly light and she was released early for 

good behavior is similarly unfounded. It acknowledged these 

facts at the beginning of its opinion, even though it did not 

repeat them later during the discussion of what made the offense particularly serious. 

We conclude by noting that Herrera-Ramirez would face 

additional problems even if she had somehow surmounted 

the jurisdictional barrier. She failed to present her argument 

based on Wisconsin’s “party-to-the-crime” statute to the 

Board, and so there is a serious question whether she properly 

exhausted her remedies. See 8 U.S.C. § 1252(d)(1). The fact 

that she complained more generally about the “particularly 

serious” label would not be enough if it did not alert the Board 

to the specific issue she had in mind. Finally, even if exhaustion did not block her case, she would still have to persuade 

us that the Board abused its discretion when it refused to 

place very much weight on her role in the offense. That, too, 

is a heavy lift. 

We need not resolve those issues, however, because we 

lack jurisdiction over this petition for review. It is therefore 

DISMISSED.