I want to talk about Niz-Chavez, the SCOTUS opinion today about notices to appear in immigration cases, and about appellate practice generally.

When the gov’t wants to deport you, they send you a notice to appear, which is supposed to tell you to when to come to court, and where the court is, so you can contest the deportation. The sooner the gov’t sends you these notices, the easier it is to deport you.

But the notices are supposed to include the date, time, and location of the court so you can show up and defend yourself (for example, if you married an American, or have relief under VAWA, or you’re actually a citizen–which happens somewhat often on the border).

Before today, the gov’t would send you a first notice with no date or time or location, and then send you a second notice later telling you when to show up. It made sense for the gov’t to do this bc it’s hard to schedule these things with immigration judges.

But that’s not what Congress wrote in the statute! And Congress had good reason to make sure the essential details were in the first notice, not the second or third or fourth or etc.

SCOTUS held today that all this info must be in the notice to appear for it to stop the clock on immigration relief.

Why am I tweeting about it? Bc I argued the same thing for my asylum-seeking client two years ago. But the Board of Immigration Appeals disagreed with me, denied the appeal, and deported my client back to her country where she was FGM’d. I’m not sure if she’s still alive today.

I was right bc SCOTUS agreed with me today. Had I pursued my clients claims beyond the BIA, maybe she would get a second shot at relief too. But I was doing the case for free and thought it was too much of a long shot, so I didn’t. Obvi I was wrong.

These are the things that keep me up at night. If I were more convinced that I would eventually be right, would my client still be here? But I’m often convinced that I’m right—how do I sort out when I should keep pursuing a claim vs when I should accept the loss?

There’s no answer in this thread. The best I have is a recognition that it’s difficult to know what a winning issues is or when that issue will eventually win. This case reminds me to err on the side of hope. Sometimes it just takes a while before they realize that we’re right.