Yurvin Morales-Lopez v. Merrick Garland


UNPUBLISHED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT No. 20-1835 YURVIN JUAN MORALES-LOPEZ, Petitioner, v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General, Respondent. On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals. Argued: January 25, 2022 Decided: February 15, 2022 Before WILKINSON, NIEMEYER, and HEYTENS, Circuit Judges. Petition dismissed by unpublished opinion. Judge Heytens wrote the opinion, in which Judge Wilkinson and Judge Niemeyer joined. ARGUED: Theodore John Murphy, MURPHY LAW FIRM, PC, West Chester, Pennsylvania, for Petitioner. Jonathan Kevin Ross, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Respondent. ON BRIEF: Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Acting Assistant Attorney General, Zoe J. Heller, Senior Litigation Counsel, Anthony O. Pottinger, Office of Immigration Litigation, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Respondent. Unpublished opinions are not binding precedent in this circuit. TOBY HEYTENS, Circuit Judge: Petitioner Yurvin Morales-Lopez is a Guatemalan citizen who entered the United States without authorization. The same day he arrived, the government personally served Morales-Lopez with a form advising him of removal proceedings and ordering him to appear in immigration court. The form was captioned “Notice to Appear” but failed to specify where Morales-Lopez was supposed to go or when he was supposed to go there. See AR 491 (ordering Morales-Lopez to appear for a hearing “at a place to be set,” on “a date to be set,” at “a time to be set”). A month later, the immigration court sent Morales- Lopez a different form that supplied the previously omitted information. Morales-Lopez attended all relevant hearings and presented various arguments in support of relief from removal, all of which were rejected by an immigration judge, who ordered him removed. Morales-Lopez appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, arguing the initial notice to appear was defective because of the omitted time, date, and place information and, as a result, the immigration judge lacked “subject matter jurisdiction to adjudicate this matter.” AR 29. The Board rejected that argument, citing, among other things, this Court’s decision in United States v. Cortez, 930 F.3d 350 (4th Cir. 2019). We dismiss Morales-Lopez’s petition for review. To be clear, we agree with Morales-Lopez that his notice to appear did not comply with the relevant statute, which expressly requires “a ‘notice to appear’ ” that “shall . . . specify[ ]” various things, including “[t]he time and place at which the proceedings will be held.” 8 U.S.C. § 1229(a)(1) & (a)(1)(G)(i). Consistent with both Congress’s chosen language and two recent Supreme Court decisions, we emphasize that this statute requires the agency to 2 provide “a single document containing all the information an individual needs to know about his removal hearing”—including where and when it will be held. Niz-Chavez v. Garland, 141 S. Ct. 1474, 1478 (2021); accord Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105, 2110 (2018) (“A notice that does not inform a noncitizen when and where to appear for removal proceedings is not a ‘notice to appear under section 1229(a)[.]’ ”). By failing to do so here, the …

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