Niz-Chavez Practice Advisory (June 30, 2021)

American Immigration Council, The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, June 30, 2021

Strategies and Considerations in the Wake of Niz-Chavez v. Garland

"On April 29, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Niz-Chavez v. Garland, 141 S. Ct. 1474 (2021), holding unequivocally that a Notice to Appear (NTA)—the charging document that commences immigration court removal proceedings—must contain the time and place of the hearing in a single document in order to trigger the stop-time rule in cancellation of removal cases, and that a subsequently-issued hearing notice does not stop time if the NTA did not include the required information. This decision answered some, though by no means all, of the questions raised by the Supreme Court’s decision in Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018). Following Pereira, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA or Board) issued several precedential decisions that interpreted Pereira very narrowly, and U.S. courts of appeals issued sometimes conflicting decisions on the numerous arguments that arose post-Pereira. This practice advisory will discuss the Supreme Court’s decisions in Niz-Chavez and Pereira and provide strategies for practitioners to consider in cases where the client’s NTA was defective. As this area of the law continues to develop, practitioners should use this practice advisory as a starting point, but be sure to do their own research into the state of the law."

Copyright (c) 2021, American Immigration Council, The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), and the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild (NIPNLG). Click here for information on reprinting this practice advisory. This practice advisory is intended for authorized legal counsel and is not a substitute for independent legal advice supplied by legal counsel familiar with a client’s case. The authors of this advisory are Khaled Alrabe, Gianna Borroto, Kate Melloy Goettel, Michelle Mendez, Victoria Neilson, Rebecca Scholtz, Cristina Velez, and Karolina Walters. The authors would like to thank Grant Chamness, Kristin Macleod-Ball, Aimee Mayer-Salins, Abby Nyberg, Trina Realmuto, David Stern, Patrick Taurel, Stacy Tolchin, Ben Winograd, and Valerie Zukin for their contributions.