Dada v. Mukasey
The Supreme Court ruled that a person who has agreed to leave the country voluntarily must be allowed to withdraw that agreement before their departure deadline passes, so they can instead pursue a motion asking immigration officials to reopen their case.
The decision resolves a split among federal appeals courts over what happens when a tight voluntary-departure deadline collides with a separate legal right to ask for a case to be reopened, giving immigrants a way to preserve that right without automatically extending their time to leave.
“Absent tolling or some other remedial action by the Court, then, the alien who is granted voluntary departure but whose circumstances have changed in a manner cognizable by a motion to reopen is between Scylla and Charybdis”
Describing the dilemma facing immigrants caught between departure deadlines and reopening their case.
How it got here: An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against Dada, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a split among the circuits.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Samson Dada, a Nigerian citizen, overstayed his visa after marrying an American citizen. His wife's petition on his behalf was denied for lack of documentation, and immigration officials sought his removal. An immigration judge let him voluntarily depart rather than be formally deported, but before his 30-day deadline, Dada tried to withdraw that request and asked to reopen his case based on a new marriage petition and additional evidence.
The question before the Court
If someone facing deportation agrees to leave voluntarily but then wants a chance to reopen their case over a new marriage claim, can they change their mind before their deadline to leave?
Why it matters
Every year, tens of thousands of people granted voluntary departure face a similar bind: leave on time and lose any chance to reopen their case, or stay and risk being barred from immigration relief for a decade. This ruling gives them a way out of that trap — but only if they act before their departure deadline expires, and only by giving up the benefits of voluntary departure.
What changes now
The case returns to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which must grant Dada's request to withdraw his voluntary departure and consider his motion to reopen, regardless of that motion's merits. This is a final decision on the legal question, though Dada's underlying request to reopen still needs to be evaluated on remand. The ruling also establishes a nationwide rule for future cases involving the same timing conflict.
What this does not decide
The Court did not adopt the immigrant's broader proposal to automatically pause the departure deadline whenever a reopening motion is filed, and it left open whether appeals courts can independently stay voluntary departure while a petition for review is pending. It also did not address the validity of the regulation that treats actual departure as withdrawing a reopening motion.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“Litigants are put to similar voluntary choices between the rock and the whirlpool all the time, without cries for a judicial rewrite of the law.”Scalia's rebuttal that the immigration bargain is no different from ordinary legal trade-offs like plea deals.
Justice Scalia argued the majority invented a nonexistent conflict: the law simply offers immigrants a deal—leave promptly and get certain benefits, or risk losing them—much like a plea bargain, and immigrants who accept it should be held to it. He objected that the Court had no authority to let Dada back out of his voluntary departure agreement, comparing it to unconstitutionally rewriting an unambiguous statute, and would have affirmed against Dada.
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito agreed the statute doesn't require automatic tolling, but disagreed with letting the Court itself create a withdrawal option, arguing that when a statute is ambiguous, the choice belongs to the immigration agency rather than the courts. Because the Board never explained why it denied Dada's withdrawal request, he would have sent the case back for the agency to decide the policy question in the first instance rather than imposing the Court's own rule.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court examined how two provisions of the 1996 immigration overhaul law interact: the right of any removable immigrant to file one motion asking officials to reopen their case based on new evidence, and the separate rule capping voluntary departure at 60 days with steep penalties for missing that deadline.
- The Court rejected the immigrant's proposed fix — automatically pausing the departure clock while a reopening motion is pending — because nothing in the statute authorizes such tolling, and voluntary departure works like a negotiated deal in which the immigrant promises a prompt, cost-free exit in return for specific benefits.
- Reading the statute as a whole rather than looking at one provision in isolation, the Court found that treating voluntary departure as automatically canceling out the right to seek reopening would make that right meaningless in most cases, since reopening motions routinely take longer to decide than the 60-day departure window.
- Because the plain text contained no clear signal that Congress meant to erase the reopening right for people who choose voluntary departure — the very immigrants the law treats most favorably — the Court concluded some accommodation was required.
- The Court settled on letting an immigrant unilaterally withdraw the voluntary-departure request any time before the departure deadline expires, without needing to show the reopening motion has merit, reasoning this preserves the immigrant's statutory right while still holding immigrants who complete voluntary departure to their full bargain.
- An immigrant who withdraws forfeits the benefits of voluntary departure and becomes subject to a standard removal order, though they may seek a stay of removal while the reopening motion is decided.