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.
Mr. Niz-Chavez entered the United States in 2005. In 2013, DHS served him an NTA that did
not list a time or place for his initial hearing. Two months later, Mr. Niz-Chavez received a
hearing notice stating the time and place of his hearing. Mr. Niz-Chavez applied for withholding
of removal and protection under the Convention Against Torture, which the IJ denied. Mr. NizChavez appealed to the BIA, also requesting that the BIA remand to the IJ so that he could apply
for non-LPR cancellation of removal based on Pereira. The BIA denied Mr. Niz-Chavez’s
motion to remand and the Sixth Circuit subsequently denied Mr. Niz-Chavez’s petition for
review, holding that the stop-time rule was triggered when the government had finished
delivering all of the information required by INA § 239(a)(1), which occurred when Mr. Niz Chavez received his hearing notice.
The Supreme Court then reversed the Sixth Circuit. The Court found that the plain language
of INA § 239(a)(1)—which uses the indefinite article “a” when referring to “a ‘notice to
appear’”—leaves no room to permit a second document to cure the defect. Reversing the Sixth
Circuit’s decision, the Court concluded that “the government must issue a single and
comprehensive notice before it can trigger the stop-time rule.”