United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 19-1524 ANA RUTH HERNANDEZ LARA, Petitioner, v. WILLIAM P. BARR, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Barron, Stahl, and Lipez, Circuit Judges. Sang Yeob Kim and Eloa J. Celedon, with whom Harvey Kaplan, Gilles Bissonnette, Henry Klementowicz, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, and Celedon Law were on brief, for petitioner. Deirdre M. Giblin, Iris Gomez, and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute on brief for Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, American Immigration Lawyers Association New England Chapter, Boston College Law School Immigration Clinic, Boston University Immigrants' Rights and Human Trafficking Program, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston, Catholic Social Services of Fall River, Central West Justice Center, DeNovo Center for Justice and Healing, Greater Boston Legal Services, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Justice Center of Southeast Massachusetts, MetroWest Legal Services, The Northeast Justice Center, Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, and University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Immigration Law Clinic, amici curiae. Zoe Jaye Heller, with whom Katherine A. Smith, Trial Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Immigration Litigation, Civil Division, Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, and Kiley Kane, Senior Litigation Counsel, Office of Immigration Litigation, were on brief, for respondent. June 15, 2020 LIPEZ, Circuit Judge. Ana Ruth Hernandez Lara ("Hernandez"), a native and citizen of El Salvador, entered the United States in the fall of 2013 without being admitted or paroled. She made her way to Portland, Maine, where she was living and working when she was arrested by immigration officers on September 20, 2018, and issued a Notice to Appear. Following her arrest, Hernandez was detained at the Strafford County Department of Corrections in Dover, New Hampshire ("Strafford County Jail"), where she remained throughout her removal proceedings. Those proceedings culminated in an evidentiary hearing on the merits of Hernandez's application for relief from removal, during which Hernandez was required to represent herself. At the end of the hearing, an Immigration Judge ("IJ") denied Hernandez's claims for relief. With the assistance of her newly retained attorney, Hernandez appealed the IJ's decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals ("BIA") and filed a motion to reopen and remand. The BIA dismissed Hernandez's appeal, denied her motion, and ordered her removed to El Salvador. Hernandez petitions for review on multiple grounds, but we need decide only one. Concluding that the IJ denied Hernandez her statutory right to be represented by the counsel of her choice, we grant the petition, vacate the BIA's decision, and remand for further proceedings consistent with this decision. - 3 - I. Over the course of her removal proceedings, Hernandez retained an attorney, lost that attorney, and attempted to find another to assist her in presenting the merits of her claims. Because Hernandez's efforts to secure counsel, her requests for additional time for that purpose, and the IJ's responses to those requests are at the heart of our analysis, we describe the relevant ...
Original document
Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals