Court Opinion

ID: 9574438
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:04:55.862692+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:33.423888
License: Public Domain

RIPPLE, Circuit Judge,
concurring, dubitante.
I agree with the principal opinion that our disposition of the present case appears to be controlled by our holding in Ali v. Gonzales, 502 F.3d 659 (7th Cir.2007). Ali held that the jurisdictional bar contained in 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(ii) “applie[d] to discretionary decisions under regulations that are based on and implement the Immigration and Nationality Act.” Kucana, slip op. at 536. The principal opinion further explains that
[t]he discretionary decision in Ali was whether to grant an alien’s request for a continuance of a hearing; here the discretionary decision is whether to reopen the proceeding and hold a new hearing. Regulations specify that both decisions are discretionary; both regulations draw their force from provisions in the Act allowing immigration officials to govern their own proceedings. It follows that they are equally subject to § 1252(a) (2) (B) (ii).
Id. (internal citations omitted). Ali, therefore, operates as a de facto overruling of our decision in Singh v. Gonzales, 404 F.3d 1024, 1026-27 (7th Cir.2005),1 which held that § 1252 was not a bar to our review of motions to reopen because the “authority for motions to reopen derived solely from the regulations.” Singh also noted that the statute was devoid of “any specific language entrusting the decision on a motion to reopen to ‘the discretion of the Attorney General.’ ” Id.
Although I believe that we are bound by the holding in Ali and that the principal opinion represents a logical extension of that holding, I write separately because I continue to be concerned by the breadth of Ali’s holding. In Ali, we addressed our authority to hear appeals from the denial of a motion to continue — an interim decision, discretionary in nature, which “derives from 8 U.S.C. § 1229a,” which, in turn, “confers upon immigration judges the plenary authority to conduct removal proceedings.” 502 F.3d at 660. We further observed that “[t]he regulation regarding continuances simply implements the immigration judge’s statutory authority to control the course of removal proceedings.” Id. Here, however, the rationale of Ali is being applied beyond the realm of procedural rulings; it is being used to deny aliens review of substantive decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals that are based on a mistake or misunderstanding of the factual basis of the claim — decisions that the Supreme Court has analogized to motions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b). See Stone v. INS, 514 U.S. 386, 405, 115 S.Ct. 1537, 131 L.Ed.2d 465 (1995). Furthermore, although the present case involves only a *540motion to reopen, All’s rationale would appear to apply equally to motions to reconsider — the basis for which must be a mistake or misapprehension of law. See 8 C.F.R. § 1003.2. In short, the rationale of Al% taken to its logical conclusion, deprives this court of jurisdiction to review the BIA’s mistakes of fact and law made during the course of deciding whether an alien should be removed from this Country.
Although the result today appears to be dictated by circuit precedent, I respectfully suggest that, had Congress intended to deprive this court of jurisdiction of specific substantive decisions, it would have done so explicitly, as it did in 8 U.S.C. § 1252(a)(2)(B)(i). As Ali spreads its dominion to substantive fields, it is turning this court into a virtual council of revision with respect to settled federal law. Before taking these steps, we should revisit the holding in Ali and determine whether we should chart a course that more closely adheres to the statutory language chosen and enacted by Congress.

. Ali was circulated to the entire court pursuant to Circuit Rule 40(e).