Decisions

E.D. Cal. March 26, 2026 833 F. Supp. 3d 1092; 2026 WL 849861. Findings and recommendations 10 March 2026, order adopting them 26 March 2026. Third country: None identified. The injunction is prospective.

A man ordered removed to Vietnam in 1998, released by a federal court in 2000 because there was no reasonable likelihood of removal, and living under an order of supervision since then, was taken into immigration custody in July 2025 on the day he was due to be paroled from a state sentence. He filed a habeas petition himself, without a lawyer, after his request for appointed counsel was refused. He won on every ground he raised. The magistrate judge recommended, and the district judge adopted, an order releasing him immediately on his previous conditions, requiring the government to hand back his identification, passport, work permit and social security card at release, and permanently barring the government from revoking his supervision again without following 8 C.F.R. 241.13(i) and due process. The order also set out, in numbers, what the government must do before it may remove him to any third country: a meaningful opportunity and at least ten days to raise a fear-based claim; if he shows a reasonable fear, the government must move to reopen his removal proceedings; and if he does not, a meaningful opportunity and at least fifteen days to seek reopening himself. On the punitive question the court found that, to the extent the policy deliberately seeks to remove people to countries where they will be imprisoned on arrival, it is punitive and violates due process, following Baltodano v. Bondi. It reached that finding on the petitioner's uncontested allegations, and explained why they were uncontested: the government did not address them, and under Rule 8(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure an allegation that is not denied is admitted. The same silence appears in Nguyen v. Scott, Abubaka v. Bondi and Baltodano v. Bondi, where courts recorded that the government argued only that the question was foreclosed and never answered it on the merits. The findings also record the state of D.V.D. v. Department of Homeland Security as at 10 March 2026: the District of Massachusetts had set the third-country removal policy aside as unlawful on 25 February 2026 and held that class members have a right to meaningful notice before removal to any third country and a meaningful opportunity to raise a country-specific claim against it; that judgment was stayed until 12 March 2026 or until the First Circuit ruled on a stay motion; and an appeal was pending.

Prolonged detention (Zadvydas) Revocation of supervision Third-country removal Notice Reopened removal proceedings Unconstitutional punishment Wong Wing Rule 8(b)(6) admission Self-represented petitioner D.V.D. class action

Caution The punitive finding rests on allegations the government never answered, treated as admitted under Rule 8(b)(6). That is a rule of pleading, not a finding on evidence, and the decision says so. It is a description of what happens when the government declines to contest a claim, and it would carry less weight against a government that had. This is a district court decision and binds only the parties. The petitioner had serious convictions, including a sentence of twenty-five years to life, and still obtained the injunction, because the protection does not depend on the record of the person invoking it. The account of D.V.D. above is the state of that case as the court recorded it on 10 March 2026, not as at today. Anyone relying on it should check where the appeal now stands.

7th Cir. January 5, 1998 132 F.3d 405 Third country: Russia

At the outset of a one-day hearing, at the request of the government, the immigration judge designated Russia as Mrs. Kossov’s country of deportation and Latvia as Mr. Kossov’s. The hearing and the asylum application concerned Latvia. The judge granted voluntary departure and, in the alternative, ordered them both deported to Russia. The Court of Appeals vacated the decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals and remanded, concluding that the immigration judge had committed errors that severely prejudiced the couple’s ability to present their claim for asylum. The error was the absence of notice: “The IJ never informed the Kossovs, who at the time were without counsel, that they had the right to seek asylum here and introduce evidence specifically directed against deportability to Russia.” The court cited the regulation then in force, 8 C.F.R. 242.17(c)(2), as “providing that immigration judge must advise alien of right to apply for asylum or withholding of deportation with respect to any country specified as a possible deportation site, provided alien ‘expresses fear of persecution or harm upon return to’ such country”. It rejected the argument that designating the country at the start of the hearing was notice enough. That argument “fails miserably”, because the couple appeared without counsel and “It is too much to expect that they should have the expertise to adapt instantaneously to such an unexpected turn of events”. The couple had not raised the point before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which ordinarily forfeits it. The court held that it could reach the issue anyway: “What this Court is in effect asked to review is an order deporting the Kossovs to Russia in the absence of a fair hearing concerning that deportation. The BIA should have recognized sua sponte such a fundamental failure of due process during its consideration of the Kossovs’ challenge to the deportation order.”

Notice Third-country designation Due process Self-represented petitioner Jurisdiction Remand to the BIA

Caution A deportation case decided under the rules in force before the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, so its statutory and regulatory references are to provisions that have since been renumbered. The regulation it relied on, 8 C.F.R. 242.17(c)(2), has a successor at 8 C.F.R. 1240.11(c)(1), and the trigger phrase the court placed inside its own quotation marks, “expresses fear of persecution or harm upon return to”, appears in the rule in force today word for word. The Coalition has compared the court’s quotation with the current rule; it has not obtained the 1997 printing of the older one. The reported text is taken from a scanned reporter volume and carries line-break hyphens inside words. The reported decision also includes a separate concurring opinion, which the Coalition has not read.