Seventh Circuit Issues Key Ruling on Notices to Appear
Could save tens of thousands of removal cases
By Andrew R. Arthur on May 23, 2019
In a July 2018 post captioned "SCOTUS Sets Up Potential Immigration Train Wreck," I described the potential dire ramifications of the Supreme Court's decision in Pereira vs. Sessions, which could potentially lead to the termination of tens of thousands of removal proceedings. A decision by the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit this week could potentially prevent the vast majority of those cases from being terminated, even assuming that an intervening Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decision were to be overturned.
The Supreme Court in Pereira had held that an alien who been served with a Notice to Appear (NTA) that did not specify the time and date of the initial removal hearing was not subject to the "stop-time rule" from applying for cancellation of removal until a new NTA containing that information was served. Under that statutory rule, service of a NTA prior to the alien accruing the required 10 years of presence in the United States would bar that relief. Left unresolved in that decision was whether it invalidated all NTAs that did not include the time and place of the hearing. If that were the case, tens of thousands of NTAs would be invalid, given the fact that, as the Court noted, almost 100 percent of the NTAs issued over the last three years omitted the time and date of the proceedings.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Seventh-Circuit-Issues-Key-Ruling-Notices-Appear
