United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 19-1777 WISSAM MAHMOUD, Petitioner, v. WILLIAM P. BARR, ATTORNEY GENERAL, Respondent. PETITION FOR REVIEW OF AN ORDER OF THE BOARD OF IMMIGRATION APPEALS Before Lynch, Thompson, and Kayatta, Circuit Judges. Randy Olen for petitioner. Victoria M. Braga, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, with whom Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, and Cindy S. Ferrier, Assistant Director, Office of Immigration Litigation, were on brief for respondent. November 30, 2020 THOMPSON, Circuit Judge. Petitioner Wissam Mahmoud seeks our intervention in a decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) dismissing his appeal of an Immigration Judge's (IJ) decision finding that Mahmoud had abandoned his status as a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR) in the United States and ordering removal. Bound by a deferential standard of review, we must deny Mahmoud's petition. BACKGROUND Mahmoud's Story Mahmoud is a Lebanese citizen, admitted to the United States as an LPR in 1991. By 2002, Mahmoud's parents and siblings had all lawfully immigrated to the United States, with the bulk of them settling in Rhode Island. From 1991 to 2008, Mahmoud lived with his family in what might be appropriately described as the family compound. Consequently, Mahmoud never owned his own home in Rhode Island. During this seventeen-year period, he did pay taxes to the United States and had health insurance here. In 2008, in the midst of a United States recession, Mahmoud, having lost his job managing one brother's restaurant, obtained a temporary work visa and moved to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to work in a restaurant owned by another one of his brothers. While there, he solely paid taxes to Canada and had Canadian health insurance. - 2 - Mahmoud renewed his Canadian temporary work visa annually because he says he was unable to find work in the United States and, in 2012, he purchased a home in Canada. In April of 2013, Mahmoud was visiting the United States when a United States Customs and Border Patrol Officer advised him that he should apply for a reentry permit for travel to the United States. Along the way, Mahmoud met a Canadian citizen of Lebanese descent who would become his wife. The couple travelled to Lebanon in 2013 where they married in August. While Mahmoud was there, a United States Customs and Border Patrol Officer again advised Mahmoud that he should obtain a reentry permit. After the wedding, the couple flew back to Canada with the professed intention of settling their affairs and returning to the United States. Towards that end (and as before), Mahmoud's wife never petitioned Canada on Mahmoud's behalf for any sort of permanent immigration status. But before Mahmoud could order his affairs, he fell ill with listeria and viral meningitis and required months of hospitalization and rehabilitation in Canada from October of 2013 through most of 2014. The rehabilitation program prohibited Mahmoud from traveling, but once he was well enough to adequately move about, he says he intended to return ...
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