Pereira v. Sessions
The Court ruled that a deportation notice which doesn't state the actual time and place of the hearing does not stop the clock on an immigrant's years of continuous presence in the country.
The decision means immigrants who received vague 'to be determined' notices for years can still count that time toward the ten-year presence requirement for a discretionary form of relief called cancellation of removal.
How it got here: An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against Pereira; the First Circuit denied his appeal; he asked the Supreme Court to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Wescley Pereira, a Brazilian citizen, overstayed his visa after arriving in the United States in 2000. In 2006 the government served him with a document labeled "Notice to Appear" that ordered him to appear for a deportation hearing "on a date to be set at a time to be set," without ever specifying an actual date or time.
The question before the Court
If the government tells an immigrant only that a deportation hearing exists, without saying when or where it will happen, does that notice still stop the clock on the years needed to qualify for relief from deportation?
The Court's answer
No — a deportation notice that fails to state the actual time and place of the hearing does not stop the clock on an immigrant's years of continuous presence. The Court read the statute's stop-time rule together with the provision defining what a "notice to appear" must contain, which requires the notice to specify the time and place of the removal hearing. Because the government's document to Pereira left the date and time as "to be determined," it did not meet that definition and therefore never triggered the rule that ends the continuous-presence clock.
This means immigrants who received similarly incomplete notices can keep counting their time in the country toward the ten years required to be eligible for cancellation of removal, a discretionary form of relief from deportation. The Court declined to decide how its ruling applies to notices missing other kinds of information besides the time and place.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Thousands of immigrants received notices from the Department of Homeland Security that omitted hearing dates, a practice the agency used routinely. This ruling lets many of them keep accumulating time toward the ten-year residency threshold needed to ask a judge to cancel their deportation, potentially changing outcomes in a large number of pending removal cases.
What changes now
The case goes back to the lower courts to apply the Court's reading of the stop-time rule to Pereira's individual circumstances, including whether he can now show ten years of continuous presence. The ruling also affects other pending removal cases nationwide where immigrants received similarly incomplete notices, though the Court left open how its holding applies to notices missing other kinds of required information.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly left open whether a notice missing other categories of required information — such as the charges against the person or the legal basis for removal — would also fail to trigger the stop-time rule. It ruled only on notices missing the time and place of the hearing.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy joined the majority in full but wrote separately to criticize how lower courts have applied the Chevron deference doctrine, under which courts defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. He argued several circuits gave the immigration agency reflexive deference without genuinely analyzing whether the statute was ambiguous, and urged the Court to reconsider Chevron's premises in a future case.
Dissent — Justice Alito
“I can only conclude that the Court, for whatever reason, is simply ignoring Chevron.”Alito's central objection that the majority failed to defer to the agency's reasonable interpretation.
Justice Alito argued that the statute is genuinely ambiguous and that under Chevron the Court was required to defer to the immigration agency's reasonable interpretation that an incomplete notice can still count as a notice to appear. He contended the majority's textual and 'common sense' arguments were not the only reasonable reading, pointed to statutory history involving pre-existing 'orders to show cause' that also lacked hearing details, and warned that requiring exact dates would force the government to issue confusing, frequently-changed hearing times.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court read the stop-time rule together with the statute it cross-references, which defines a 'notice to appear' as a written notice that specifies, among other things, the time and place of the removal hearing.
- Because the stop-time rule only stops the clock when a person is served a notice to appear 'under' that defining provision, a document missing the time and place does not meet the statute's own definition of the triggering document.
- The Court found support in a neighboring provision that lets the government change 'the new time and place' of a hearing, reasoning that this only makes sense if an original notice had already specified a time and place to change.
- The Court also pointed to a provision giving immigrants ten days after service of the notice to secure a lawyer, reasoning that this protection is meaningless unless the notice actually states when and where the hearing will occur.
- The Court rejected the government's argument that the word 'under' in the stop-time rule loosely means 'authorized by' rather than 'in compliance with,' concluding that the plain text and structure required strict compliance with the time-and-place requirement.
- Having found the statutory text unambiguous, the Court declined to give deference to the immigration agency's contrary interpretation, since deference only applies when a statute's meaning is genuinely unclear.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (467 U. S. 837)
The Court said deference to the agency wasn't needed because the statute's text was already clear.