Lemus v. Lynch, No. 12-73654 (9th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseThe Supreme Court unanimously held in Holder v. Martinez Gutierrez that the BIA permissibly construed section 240A(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. 1229b(a), when it concluded that an alien seeking cancellation of removal had to satisfy the years-of-residence requirement on his own, without relying on a parent’s residential history. In this case, petitioner argues that Martinez Gutierrez announced a new rule of law and that, under Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson, its holding should not be applied retroactively to him. The court concluded, however, that petitioner's citation of Nunez-Reyes v. Holder in support of his argument for prospective application of Martinez Gutierrez is not persuasive. The court explained that this case is different from Nunez-Reyes where the court is not overruling its own firmly rooted precedent and the record offers no evidence that applying Martinez Gutierrez retroactively will risk the sort of broad injustice that concerned the court in Nunez-Reyes. Therefore, the court concluded that Chevron Oil is not applicable in this case and that Garfias-Rodriguez v. Holder offers a much closer analogy to this case. Garfias-Rodriguez held that in this situation the proper approach to the issue of retroactivity is set forth in Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc. v. FTC. Applying the Montgomery Ward factors, the court held that Martinez Gutierrez should be applied retroactively. Accordingly, the court denied the petition for review.
Court Description: Immigration. The panel denied Jose Daniel Lemus’s petition for review from the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision retroactively applying to him the holding in Holder v. Martinez Gutierrez, 132 S. Ct. 2011 (2012), that an applicant for cancellation of removal must satisfy the years-of- residence requirement on his own, without relying on a parent’s residential history. Petitioner contended that Martinez Gutierrez announced a new rule of law and that, under Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson, 4040 U.S. 97 (1971), its holding should not be applied retroactively to him. The panel held that because it was deferring to the BIA’s decision in Matter of Escobar, 24 I. & N. Dec. 231 (BIA 2007), as directed by the Supreme Court, rather than adopting a new rule on its own, the retroactivity analysis set forth in Montgomery Ward & Co., Inc. v. FTC, 691 F.2d 1322 (9th Cir. 1982), applied rather than that of Chevron Oil. The panel held that the second Montgomery Ward factor, which favors retroactivity if a party could reasonably anticipate the change in law, and the third factor, which examines the extent of reliance upon the former rule, weighed heavily against Lemus. The panel further found that the fifth factor favored the government’s strong interest in uniform application of the immigration statutes. LEMUS V. LYNCH 3
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