Jose Rodriguez v. Jeffrey A. Rosen


NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit Chicago, Illinois 60604 Submitted December 22, 2020* Decided December 29, 2020 Before FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge No. 20-2190 Petition for Review of an Or- JOSE LUIS RODRIGUEZ, der of the Board of Immigra- Petitioner, tion Appeals. v. No. A200-142-031 JEFFREY A. ROSEN, Acting Attorney General, Respondent. Order Jose Luis Rodriguez has been ordered removed to Mexico, his native country. He asked for cancellation of removal on the ground that a change of nations would cause hardship to his five-year-old daughter, a citizen of the United States. See 8 U.S.C. §1229b(b)(1)(D). Both an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals re- jected that request, ruling that petitioner does not meet the statutory standard: “excep- * After examining the briefs and the record, we have concluded that oral argument is unnecessary. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a). No. 20-2190 Page 2 tional and extremely unusual hardship to … [a] child, who is a citizen of the United States”. The sorts of economic and social hardships that petitioner asserts are ordinary, the IJ and BIA concluded, rather than “exceptional and extremely unusual”. Petitioner contends in this court that the Board did not “properly consider[] the hardship factors.” By this he appears to mean that the Board rendered a substantively incorrect decision. But 8 U.S.C. §1252(a)(2)(B)(i) forecloses judicial review of such an ar- gument. A proviso in 8 U.S.C. §1252(a)(2)(D) allows our correction of legal errors, but the Board did not commit one. Petitioner observes that the Board did not mention and analyze all of the many factors arguably pertinent to cancellation of removal. Yet no rule of law requires an administrative adjudicator to traipse mechanically through lists of factors. We have held that the Board must consider arguments presented to it, see Champion v. Holder, 626 F.3d 952, 956 (7th Cir. 2010), but the Board’s opinion shows that it understood and resolved the argument that petitioner was making. Petitioner also contends that the agency should have dismissed the proceeding be- cause the notice to appear, which was issued in August 2011, omitted a date for the ini- tial hearing and was therefore defective under the holding of Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018). If petitioner had brought this error to the agency’s attention in a timely manner, perhaps it would indeed have dismissed the proceeding (though the agency instead might have fixed the problem, once it had been flagged). But petitioner did not protest in 2011. He duly appeared for the initial hearing, which a separate notice had set for April 2013, and did not complain about the defect until July 31, 2018. The Board held that this lengthy delay forfeited any opportunity to object. That decision has the support of Ortiz-Santiago v. Barr, 924 F.3d 956 (7th Cir. 2019), which holds that a flaw in ...

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