The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) – the administrative tribunal that considers challenges to immigration court decisions – issued an opinion last month in Matter of Tepec-Garcia, holding that an immigration judge didn’t err in terminating removal proceedings without prejudice when neither the alien (termed a “respondent”) nor the government appeared. How insane were Biden-era immigration policies? Well, imagine they held removal proceedings and nobody came.
The Way Things Used to Be
The government is represented in removal proceedings under section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) by ICE attorneys, and technically the regulations give the agency the option not to send counsel, except in specified instances.
That said, prior to the Biden administration there were few scenarios where a government lawyer didn’t appear in immigration court, and I should know: when one of my colleagues forgot he was supposed to be in court in April 1995, the judge’s clerk called me and I had to pull myself away from lunch to argue a case I’d never prepped.
The result was the BIA’s 1996 opinion in Matter of S-P-, and the less said about it the better.
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