United States Court of Appeals For the Eighth Circuit ___________________________ No. 17-2044 ___________________________ Carlos Caballero-Martinez lllllllllllllllllllllPetitioner v. William P. Barr, Attorney General of the United States lllllllllllllllllllllRespondent ___________________________ No. 18-1198 ___________________________ Carlos Caballero-Martinez lllllllllllllllllllllPetitioner v. William P. Barr, Attorney General of the United States lllllllllllllllllllllRespondent ____________ Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals ____________ Submitted: December 11, 2018 Filed: April 3, 2019 ____________ Before SMITH, Chief Judge, WOLLMAN and GRASZ, Circuit Judges. ____________ SMITH, Chief Judge. Carlos Caballero-Martinez petitions for review of two orders from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). The first order denied his motion to administratively close or remand to the immigration judge and the second order denied his motion to reopen and reconsider the first denial. We grant the petition for review and affirm in part and remand in part. I. Background A native and citizen of Mexico, Caballero-Martinez entered the United States illegally in 2000. He has four children, three of whom are United States citizens. In September 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiated removal proceedings against Caballero-Martinez. At his removal hearing, Caballero-Martinez admitted to being in the United States illegally. However, he requested cancellation of removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1229b. Section 1229b(b)(1)(D) allows for cancellation of removal if the “removal would result in exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to the alien’s spouse, parent, or child, who is a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” Caballero-Martinez claimed his children would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” if he were removed. Immigration Judge (IJ) Paula Davis conducted Caballero-Martinez’s removal hearing. However, IJ Davis retired before issuing a decision; the case was then -2- assigned to IJ Glen Baker. IJ Baker reviewed the proceedings and IJ Davis’s draft decision, and he adopted “the reasoning and conclusions therein.” Pet’r’s Add. at 20. In a February 2016 order, IJ Baker found Caballero-Martinez’s “children [were] good students in school and [did] not have any learning problems or other mental health problems.” Id. at 18. He noted that “[t]he principal hardship factor identified by [Caballero-Martinez] is difficulty in finding work in his hometown and that he would struggle [to] find a place for his family to live.” Id. Though the IJ found Caballero-Martinez’s hardship testimony credible, he ultimately held that Caballero-Martinez had “not provided evidence to establish that his qualifying relatives would suffer hardship that is substantially different from, or beyond that, which would normally be expected to result from deportation of an alien with close family members in the United States.” Id. at 19. In March 2016, Caballero-Martinez appealed IJ Baker’s order to the BIA. He again argued his children would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” if he returned to Mexico; he also argued that, by allowing a judge who had not been present at his cancellation hearing to issue a decision in his case, the immigration court had violated his due process rights as well as the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) and ...
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Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals