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