Source: http://openjurist.org/436/f3d/11/fernandes-pereira-v-gonzales
Timestamp: 2014-10-02 09:25:55
Document Index: 467383596

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 212', '§ 1182', '§ 212', '§212', '§ 212', '§ 212', '§ 212', '§ 212', '§ 212', '§ 212']

436 F3d 11 Fernandes Pereira v. Gonzales | OpenJurist
436 F. 3d 11 - Fernandes Pereira v. Gonzales	Home436 f3d 11 fernandes pereira v. gonzales
436 F3d 11 Fernandes Pereira v. Gonzales 436 F.3d 11
Ramiro FERNANDES PEREIRA, Petitioner, Appellant,v.Alberto GONZALES, Attorney General,* et al., Respondents, Appellees.
No. 04-1473.
Randy Olen, Providence, RI, for Petitioner-Appellant.
Robin E. Feder, U.S. Attorney's Office, Providence, RI, for Respondents-Appellees.
Before BOUDIN, Chief Judge, TORRUELLA and SELYA, Circuit Judges, CAMPBELL and CYR, Senior Circuit Judges, LYNCH, LIPEZ, and HOWARD, Circuit Judges.
I respectfully dissent from the denial of en banc review. This case involves difficult issues of exceptional importance and adds to a circuit split. Faced with a petition for relief from deportation1 by a noncitizen serving a state prison sentence of twelve or more years for child molestation and sexual assault, the panel in this case concluded that equitable relief—nunc pro tunc relief—was not available. Eschewing a more narrow ground for its decision, the panel issued a decision that, in my view, improperly construes the scope of nunc pro tunc relief and due process rights for immigrants facing deportation. Thus, while I agree that this petitioner is not entitled to nunc pro tunc relief, I disagree with the broad grounds upon which the panel based its decision. In light of the negative consequences that may flow to petitioners with far more compelling equities, I believe that the panel's opinion should have been reviewed by the en banc court.
This case addressed the question of "whether an alien aggravated felon, serving a state prison sentence of twelve or more years, whose application for a section 212(c) waiver was delayed for several years by an erroneous agency legal interpretation so that he had served more than five years of his felony sentence by the time he could proceed with the waiver application, is now barred by law from seeking a waiver." Fernándes Pereira v. Gonzales, 417 F.3d 38, 40 (1st Cir.2005). The discretionary waiver provision, former § 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA"), permits the Attorney General to waive deportation for certain eligible immigrants, but bars from relief "an alien who has been convicted of one or more aggravated felonies and served for such felony and felonies a term of imprisonment of at least 5 years." 8 U.S.C. § 1182(c) (1994) (repealed 1996). Ramiro Fernándes-Pereira, facing deportation for his criminal conviction, applied for a § 212(c) waiver during his administrative deportation hearing. Although he was eligible for a §212(c) waiver throughout the course of the proceedings, the Immigration Judge (IJ) and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) erroneously denied him an adjudication of his application.2 When Fernándes-Pereira and the Immigration and Naturalization Service3 jointly moved to reopen his proceedings, the IJ and the BIA agreed that they had previously erred, but concluded that he was no longer eligible for the waiver because he had since served more than five years of his sentence.
The petitioner appealed the decision of the BIA to this court, and the panel concluded that the defendant was barred from seeking relief under the statute. In doing so, the panel rejected the approach of the Second Circuit in a recent decision permitting a petitioner under similar circumstances to rile his § 212(c) application nunc pro tunc (literally "now for then")-treating the application as if filed when the petitioner had first sought the waiver and was eligible. Fernándes Pereira, 417 F.3d at 47 (disagreeing with the holding in Edwards v. INS, 393 F.3d 299, 311 (2nd Cir.2004) that nunc pro tunc relief is available for petitioners who accrued more than five years' imprisonment subsequent to the entry of a final order of removal and the erroneous denial of an application for § 212(c) relief). The panel also rejected the petitioner's argument that the agency's error in this case and the application of the statutory eligibility bar despite that error violated his due process rights. The petitioner then filed a petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc, which was denied.
In my view, the panel's opinion errs in two ways that warrant en banc review. First, the opinion improperly limits the availability of equitable relief for immigrants, which may have negative consequences for immigrants with a variety of strong claims in other contexts. Second, the opinion takes the wrong approach to the due process issue in this case. That error may contribute to a misunderstanding of the due process rights implicated by the erroneous failure to adjudicate an immigrant's application for relief.4 As discussed in further detail below, the opinion should have dispatched these issues more narrowly, denying the petitioner's claim for nunc pro tunc relief on equitable grounds and rejecting his due process argument because of his failure to show a reasonable likelihood that he would have received § 212(c) relief if he had been permitted to apply. Instead, the broad basis for the panel's rejection of the petitioner's nunc pro tunc and due process arguments may prevent other individuals with more compelling claims from receiving relief.
The petitioner argues that the opinion creates an unprecedented bar to equitable relief and ignores applicable agency decisions in which the doctrine of nunc pro tunc has been invoked. There is merit to the petitioner's assertions. While I do not think the petitioner himself is deserving of nunc pro tunc relief, I believe that the panel's opinion went too far by finding that nunc pro tunc relief is unavailable due to the statute's eligibility requirements and the type of error involved in this case. Thus, this decision may foreclose relief for petitioners in a wide variety of circumstances.
The panel concluded that the statute created a clear bar to § 212(c) relief for the petitioner, and that "[g]iven not only the uncompromising language of the five-year bar, which notes no exception, but also the history of Congress's desire to expel convicted aggravated felons, we disagree with the Second Circuit's suggestion, expressed in Edwards, that Congress, confronted with the instant situation, might likely have desired that a court make an exception to its own statutory language." Fernándes Pereira, 417 F.3d at 47 n. 6. In rejecting the reasoning in Edwards, the panel suggested that nunc pro tunc relief applies only in limited contexts, such as the correction of "inadvertent or clerical errors" or constitutional violations, which, the panel determined, were not at issue in this case.5 Id. at 47. Under the panel's analysis, nunc pro tunc relief is not available for petitioners who have become ineligible for discretionary relief from deportation following an erroneous legal interpretation by the agency, even when equity so demands.
In my view, the panel's analysis of the statute does not resolve the question of whether nunc pro tunc relief is available in this case. To be sure, the statute has eligibility requirements. However, § 212(c) relief has always included specific eligibility requirements, yet the BIA has applied nunc pro tunc relief to provide certain ineligible immigrants with relief from removal for over sixty years. Congress can preclude the availability of equitable relief by making statutes jurisdictional. Yet Congress has codified, recodified, and amended the § 212(c) statute many times without making its eligibility requirements jurisdictional, despite the BIA's repeated use of nunc pro tunc relief. I am concerned with the panel's conclusion that, because Congress wishes to deport certain noncitizens with criminal records, Congress also wishes to preclude the agency from exercising the equitable relief that it has used to correct errors and further the interests of justice under extraordinary circumstances for several decades.6
The Attorney General and the BIA have long held that nunc pro tunc relief is available to noncitizens who have become ineligible for discretionary relief but present strong equities indicating that an application for such relief, if available, would be granted and deportation prevented. See Matter of L-, 1 I. & N. Dee 1, 4-7 (A.G. 1940) (holding that Attorney General can exercise discretion to waive deportation nunc pro tunc