Poker Star Faces Deportation

Poker Star Faces Deportation

Friday, 21 September 2007

According to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, top professional poker player Shahram ‘Shawn’ Sheikhan is in danger of being deported from the US based on a decade-old California misdemeanour conviction.

According to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper, top professional poker player Shahram ‘Shawn’ Sheikhan is in danger of being deported from the US based on a decade-old California misdemeanour conviction.
Sheikhan is an Iranian citizen who immigrated to the US in 1983 but has an American-born wife and maintains full legal resident status. According to the newspaper, he received five years of probation and served nine months in jail after a 1995 conviction for 'sexual battery and annoyance or molestation of a child'.
Immigration officials arrested Sheikhan on August 30 and held him for over a week before releasing him on a $10,000 bond pending a deportation hearing. The arrest was part of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Operation Predator, which was started in 2003 by the Department Of Homeland Security to protect children from sexual predators.
Virginia Kice, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson stated that Sheikhan ‘was targeted for arrest by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement because of his criminal history’.
'We want to see him removed from the United States,' said Kice.
Sheikhan first gained world attention when he made a deep run in the 2005 World Series Of Poker’s Main Event where he served as a verbal sparring partner for Mike 'The Mouth' Matusow.
He is being represented in this case by noted Vegas attorney David Chesnoff, who received high poker visibility after representing Bruce Crispin Leyser in his dispute with 2006 World Series Of Poker Main Event winner Jamie Gold.
'We're going to do everything in our power to prevent this,' said Chesnoff.



Tags: Poker News, Poker, Star, Faces, Deportation