FILED United States Court of Appeals PUBLISH Tenth Circuit UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS December 24, 2019 Elisabeth A. Shumaker FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT Clerk of Court _________________________________ KAREN SAMANTHA ROBLES- GARCIA, Petitioner, v. No. 18-9511 WILLIAM BARR, United States Attorney General, Respondent. _________________________________ Petition for Review of an Order from the Board of Immigration Appeals _________________________________ Aaron Elinoff, Elinoff & Associates (Danielle C. Jefferis, with him on the supplemental brief), Denver, Colorado, for Petitioner. Chad A. Readler and Joseph H. Hunt, Acting Assistant Attorneys General, Civil Division, Kohsei Ugumori, Senior Litigation Counsel, and Aric A. Anderson, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., on the briefs for Respondent. 1 _________________________________ Before HARTZ, EBEL, and McHUGH, Circuit Judges. _________________________________ EBEL, Circuit Judge. _________________________________ 1 Although the panel heard argument on this petition for review, Respondent’s counsel was unable to appear due to a medical emergency. Respondent’s counsel filed a brief written response to Petitioner’s counsel’s oral argument, and Petitioner’s counsel has replied. Petitioner Karen Robles-Garcia, a Mexican citizen unlawfully in the United States, was ordered removed. She challenges that removal order in two ways. First, relying on Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018), Robles-Garcia argues for the first time that the immigration judge (“IJ”) who initially presided over her removal proceedings never acquired jurisdiction over those proceedings because the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) initiated those proceedings by serving Robles-Garcia with a defective Notice to Appear. Because Robles-Garcia has not yet made that argument to the IJ or the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”), it is unexhausted and we, therefore, cannot address it in the first instance here. Second, Robles-Garcia contends that the BIA erred in concluding that she was ineligible to apply for discretionary cancellation of removal. We uphold that determination because Robles-Garcia was unable to show that her theft conviction was not a disqualifying crime involving moral turpitude. We, therefore, DENY Robles- Garcia’s petition for review challenging the BIA’s determination that she was ineligible for cancellation of removal, and we DISMISS the petition for lack of jurisdiction to the extent that it asserts the Pereira question. I. BACKGROUND In 1991, at age three, Robles-Garcia was admitted to the United States as a nonimmigrant visitor authorized to remain in this country for up to seventy-two hours and to travel within twenty-five miles of the Mexican border. She stayed longer and traveled further than permitted. In 2008, DHS served Robles-Garcia with a Notice to Appear (“NTA”)—the document that DHS issues an immigrant to initiate removal 2 proceedings—charging her with violating her visitor permissions from almost seventeen years earlier. Robles-Garcia admitted the five factual allegations charged in the NTA and conceded she is removable. But she applied for cancellation of removal and adjustment of her status, asserting that her removal would work an “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” on her two children, 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1)(D), who are U.S. citizens. To be eligible to request such discretionary relief from removal, however, Robles-Garcia ...
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