Case: 20-60919 Document: 00516224894 Page: 1 Date Filed: 03/04/2022 United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit FILED March 4, 2022 No. 20-60919 Lyle W. Cayce Summary Calendar Clerk Magner Nixobel Raymundo Morales, Petitioner, versus Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney General, Respondent. Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals BIA No. A074 862 037 Before Southwick, Oldham, and Wilson, Circuit Judges. Per Curiam: Magner Nixobel Raymundo Morales is a forty-year-old man from Guatemala. Raymundo Morales entered the United States in 1999 under a non-immigrant H-2B visa. The visa expired on July 15, 2000, but Raymundo Morales has remained in the United States throughout the intervening twenty-two years. He now has a teenage son. He sees his son every two to three weeks and regularly talks on the phone with him. Raymundo Morales lives approximately two and a half hours away from him. While there is no Case: 20-60919 Document: 00516224894 Page: 2 Date Filed: 03/04/2022 No. 20-60919 legal custody arrangement, Raymundo Morales sends his son between three hundred and four hundred dollars a month for his care. These proceedings began in 2016 when the Department of Homeland Security filed a notice to appear alleging that Raymundo Morales was removable because he overstayed his visa authorization. Raymundo Morales appeared at his hearing and conceded that the allegations were true. But he asserted a right to asylum, withholding of removal under 8 U.S.C. § 1231(b)(3) and the Convention Against Torture, as well as cancellation of removal pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1). The immigration judge denied Raymundo Morales’s petitions. 1 The IJ found that Raymundo Morales could not make the necessary threshold showings for asylum or withholding of removal; Raymundo Morales does not contest these holdings. The IJ also held that Raymundo Morales was not entitled to cancellation of removal, and this finding is the subject of Raymundo Morales’s appeal. The IJ evaluated the statutory requirements for cancellation of removal and determined that Raymundo Morales met all but one: exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to qualifying relatives. While the IJ acknowledged that Raymundo Morales’s son would bear hardship if his father was deported, the judge concluded that the evidence did not show that this hardship was any greater than that “regularly faced by families having a member removed.” Raymundo Morales avers that the IJ did not apply the proper standard of review in denying his cancellation of removal claim. While our review of orders under 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1) is limited by 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b), 1 Generally, this court only reviews final decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals, but here the Board affirmed the immigration judge’s decision without an opinion, so we review both. Parada-Orellana v. Garland, 21 F.4th 887, 893 (5th Cir. 2022) (citing Sealed Petitioner v. Sealed Respondent, 829 F.3d 379, 383 (5th Cir. 2016)). 2 Case: 20-60919 Document: 00516224894 Page: 3 Date Filed: 03/04/2022 No. 20-60919 whether the correct legal standard has been applied “is …
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