Analysis | Immigration Court · REAL ID Act of 2005 · Form I-213 · Crawford v. Washington

On March 26, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a decision that crystallized something immigration lawyers have long known but rarely said so plainly: the evidentiary playing field in immigration court is not level, has never been level, and was designed not to be level. Understanding exactly how unlevel it is — and whether the Constitution tolerates it — is the subject of this post.

Imagine a civil trial where one party’s documents are presumed reliable by default, where the other party has no right to pretrial discovery, no automatic right to cross-examine the authors of documents filed against them, and where the standards the first party must meet to introduce evidence are dramatically lower than those the second must meet to challenge it. Now imagine that the stakes are not money damages, but whether a person is permitted to remain in the country where they have built their life.

This is immigration court.

Immigration removal proceedings are civil, not criminal. That single classification — consistently upheld by the Supreme Court and every circuit — has enormous downstream consequences for the constitutional protections available to respondent aliens. The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause does not apply. The Federal Rules of Evidence do not govern. The exclusionary rule for Fourth Amendment violations is generally inapplicable. The right to appointed counsel, even for an indigent person facing removal, does not exist.

“Deportation may result in the loss of all that makes life worth living.”— Justice Murphy, Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945)

What does apply is a two-part test articulated by the Board of Immigration Appeals and adopted by every circuit: evidence is admissible if it is probative and its use is fundamentally fair. That sounds reasonable. In practice, it creates a framework where the government’s primary evidentiary instrument — the Form I-213 — enters every proceeding with a presumption of reliability that no comparable alien evidence enjoys.

The government’s evidence is presumed correct. The alien’s evidence is presumed nothing. That asymmetry is not an accident. It was built deliberately, has been reinforced by decades of BIA and circuit court decisions, and was significantly deepened by a 2005 statute that imposed new evidentiary burdens exclusively on the alien — without adding a single corresponding obligation to the government.

The REAL ID Act of 2005 is most famous for standardizing state driver’s licenses. Its immigration provisions, buried in Section 101 of an emergency military spending bill and enacted without a standalone Senate floor debate, received far less attention. They deserved far more.

Section 101 amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to impose five new evidentiary burdens on asylum applicants and other relief seekers. Every one of those burdens runs against the alien. Not one runs against the government.

1. The “Central Reason” Standard

Before the REAL ID Act, an asylum applicant had to show that a protected ground was a reason for persecution. The Act raised this to the “central reason” — requiring applicants to isolate and prove the primacy of a particular motive among what may be multiple overlapping causes. Critics immediately identified this as imposing a “nearly insurmountable” standard in complex persecution cases.

2. The Three-Part Testimonial Test

Testimony can now satisfy the burden of proof only if it is credible, persuasive, and refers to specific facts. All three must be satisfied conjunctively. No equivalent standard applies to government evidence.

3. Mandatory Corroboration

Immigration judges may now demand corroborating evidence when they deem it appropriate — and failing to provide it can result in denial, even for otherwise credible applicants. The statute goes further: even the inability to obtain corroborating evidence “does not excuse the applicant from meeting his or her burden of proof.” This language is extraordinary. It tells an asylum seeker fleeing persecution, whose home may have been burned and whose records destroyed, that the absence of documents they cannot possibly obtain can still be used against them.

4. No Presumption of Credibility

INA § 208(b)(1)(B)(iii), as amended, states explicitly: “There is no presumption of credibility.” The alien’s testimony carries no presumption of truthfulness. The government’s I-213 carries a presumption of reliability. The asymmetry is now written into the statute.

5. Preclusion of Appellate Review

The Act shielded immigration judges’ corroboration demands from appellate reversal unless a reviewing court concludes that a “reasonable trier of fact is compelled to conclude that such corroborating evidence is unavailable.” This is a near-impossible standard — it effectively insulates the IJ’s corroboration requirements from any meaningful judicial oversight.

The Act is completely silent on:

• The government’s presumption of regularity for the I-213
• The alien’s burden to rebut that presumption with specific evidence
• The authentication barriers for foreign documents under 8 C.F.R. § 1287.6
• The absence of any pretrial discovery rights for alien respondents
• The alien’s inability to compel disclosure of government investigative files

Every burden the Act imposed runs in one direction. The government’s structural advantages were left wholly intact.

The Form I-213, “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien,” is the primary evidentiary instrument in removal proceedings. It is prepared by an ICE or CBP officer during or shortly after an encounter with a suspected removable alien. It records biographical information, purported admissions by the alien, immigration history, criminal history, and a narrative of the encounter. It is the document that gives birth to the Notice to Appear — the charging instrument that initiates removal proceedings.

It is, in virtually every case, hearsay. The officer who prepared it rarely attends the hearing. The alien typically had no lawyer present when it was created. The alien may not have fully understood what was being recorded. The alien may have been frightened, exhausted, or confused. And yet:

“Absent any evidence that a Form I-213 contains information that is incorrect or was obtained by coercion or duress, it is inherently trustworthy and admissible as evidence to prove alienage or deportability.”— Matter of Barcenas, 19 I&N Dec. 609 (BIA 1988)

The theoretical predicate for this presumption is the “presumption of regularity” — the idea that government officials perform their duties properly and without bias. Courts have extended this reasoning to the I-213 specifically, holding that a government officer who prepares one “cannot be presumed to be an unfriendly witness or other than an accurate recorder.”

That presumption is debatable. The officer who prepares an I-213 is an enforcement agent whose job is to build the case for removal. But courts have accepted the presumption, and it has real consequences: a single I-213, standing alone, can satisfy the government’s burden of proving alienage by clear and convincing evidence. The alien who disputes it must produce specific, concrete record evidence to overcome the presumption — not just testimony, not just assertion, but documented rebuttal.

Under BIA precedent adopted across the circuits, the presumption is rebuttable on two grounds only:

• Material errors or inaccuracies: Specific, documented evidence that specific facts in the I-213 are wrong. Requires evidence the alien may not have access to.
• Coercion or duress: Credible evidence that information was extracted improperly. Typically requires more than the alien’s testimony alone.

A bare assertion — “that’s not what I said” — is not enough. The alien must produce rebuttal without pretrial discovery, without automatic access to the officer’s notes, and without any guaranteed right to cross-examine the person who wrote the document she is trying to undermine.

Every statement an alien has ever made — to a border officer, at an airport interview, in a prior asylum application prepared by a non-attorney, during a credible fear screening — becomes part of the permanent evidentiary record that can be used against her. The REAL ID Act codified that credibility may be assessed based on “any inaccuracies or falsehoods in such statements, whether or not they go to the heart of the applicant’s claim,” and that statements made “at any time” to “any individual,” “whether or not under oath,” are fair game.

This means an alien who told a Border Patrol officer at 2 AM, through an interpreter of uncertain quality, without counsel, that she came “for work” — and who later explains in a merits hearing that she fled because she feared for her life — faces an adverse credibility finding based on that inconsistency, regardless of the circumstances in which the original statement was made.

When an alien tries to rebut the I-213 with her own documents — a foreign police report, a court record, a birth certificate — she faces a completely different evidentiary regime:

• Foreign documents must be authenticated under 8 C.F.R. § 1287.6 before being considered for their substance
• For non-Hague Convention countries, this requires U.S. consular certification — from the embassy in the very country the alien may have fled
• Even after authentication, the foreign document carries no presumption of reliability
• Documents are evaluated against State Department country condition reports and may be sent to the federal Forensic Document Lab
• If the Lab finds a document fraudulent — even one not central to the case — the alien’s entire claim can be found not credible

On March 26, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued Matter of Ricardo Mercado-Martinez, 29 I&N Dec. 529 — the most recent and explicit statement yet of how the asymmetric burden framework operates in practice.

The Facts: Mercado-Martinez was charged with being present without admission or parole. The government’s evidence: an I-213 indicating he had admitted being born in Mexico, plus his own written pleadings admitting the first three factual allegations in the Notice to Appear. The immigration judge granted his motion to terminate, finding DHS hadn’t proven alienage because it had produced no additional corroborating documentation — such as a birth certificate. The BIA reversed.

The Core Holdings:

1. No extra documents required. A presumptively reliable I-213 can, standing alone, satisfy DHS’s burden of proving alienage by clear and convincing evidence. The IJ cannot demand additional corroboration if the presumption is unrebutted.
2. Specific evidence required to rebut. An IJ who finds an I-213 unreliable “must point to specific evidence in the record sufficient to rebut the presumption of reliability.” General dissatisfaction is not enough. None was identified here.
3. Written admissions are independent evidence. The respondent’s own written pleadings admitting the factual allegations constituted significant independent evidence that the IJ failed to address — compounding the error.

Also notable: The decision acknowledged a live circuit split. The case arose in the Ninth Circuit, which treats “clear and convincing” and “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” as equivalent standards. The First Circuit, in Rosa v. Bondi, 144 F.4th 37 (1st Cir. 2025), recently held these are distinct standards — with the latter being more demanding on the government. This means aliens in the First Circuit may have marginally stronger grounds to contest an I-213-only alienage proof.

So what can an alien actually do to fight a contested I-213?

There is no automatic right to cross-examine the agent who prepared an I-213. The Seventh and Tenth Circuits have held this explicitly. Courts reason that the I-213’s preparer is presumed to be “an accurate recorder, not a hostile witness,” and requiring his presence at every hearing “would place an unwarranted burden on the INS.”

The exception: where the alien specifically disputes the accuracy of the I-213’s contents with concrete, documented allegations, the government’s failure to make the preparer available may render the document inadmissible or fundamentally unfair. The Eighth Circuit remanded in Rodriguez-Quiroz v. Lynch, 835 F.3d 809 (8th Cir. 2016) when this right was denied after a specific challenge. The Seventh Circuit found a due process violation in Karroumeh v. Lynch, 820 F.3d 890 (7th Cir. 2016) where the government requested a subpoena for a witness — then never served it. The key: specific rebuttal triggers the right; bare assertion does not.

Immigration judges have exclusive jurisdiction to issue subpoenas. The IJ issues one only upon being satisfied the testimony is “essential” — an uphill threshold. Even if issued, a government agent’s failure to appear does not automatically result in exclusion of the document.

Where the I-213 was obtained through constitutional or regulatory violations — coercion, unlawful stop, denial of consular notification — a motion to suppress is appropriate. The Supreme Court in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032 (1984) held the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule is generally inapplicable in civil deportation proceedings. But several circuits recognize that egregious constitutional violations or systemic regulatory misconduct may warrant suppression on due process grounds.

Because there is no pretrial discovery, the primary mechanism for obtaining the government’s underlying records is a FOIA request for the alien’s A-file. This can take months — sometimes after the merits hearing has already occurred. File FOIA requests immediately upon opening a case.

In 2004, the Supreme Court issued Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36, transforming criminal evidence law. The Court held that the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause prohibits admission of “testimonial” hearsay against a criminal defendant unless the declarant is unavailable and the defendant had a prior cross-examination opportunity. The old “reliability” test was thrown out.

Justice Scalia’s majority opinion contained a sentence that should echo in every immigration courtroom, even though the Sixth Amendment doesn’t technically apply there:

“Dispensing with confrontation because testimony is obviously reliable is akin to dispensing with jury trial because a defendant is obviously guilty.”

The BIA’s “inherent trustworthiness” doctrine for the I-213 is, functionally, the old Ohio v. Roberts ”reliability” test that Crawford condemned. A court substitutes a judicial finding of reliability for actual cross-examination of the government agent who prepared the document. Crawford said, in criminal proceedings, that this is constitutionally unacceptable. In civil immigration proceedings, the Sixth Amendment’s direct command doesn’t apply — but the reasoning remains devastatingly relevant to the Fifth Amendment fundamental fairness inquiry.

In criminal prosecutions for illegal reentry under 8 U.S.C. § 1326, the Confrontation Clause applies in full. The Fifth Circuit in United States v. Noria (2019) and the Eleventh Circuit in United States v. Caraballo, 595 F.3d 1214 (11th Cir. 2010) held I-213s nontestimonial — classifying them as routine public records not prepared specifically for trial use.

However, a Florida district court, applying Melendez-Diaz faithfully, excluded I-213s that were “created only weeks prior to trial and well after the underlying facts,” concluding they were prepared for litigation. And Certificates of Nonexistence of Record — government certifications that a defendant lacked permission to reenter — have been held testimonial and subject to Confrontation Clause requirements. The logic: they are prepared specifically to certify a fact for use at trial. That logic applies with even greater force to the I-213.

This is the argument that hasn’t been adequately pressed — and that, under Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009), is analytically correct.

Melendez-Diaz established the definitive test for when a government document is testimonial:

“Business and public records are generally admissible absent confrontation not because they qualify under an exception to the hearsay rules, but because — having been created for the administration of an entity’s affairs and not for the purpose of establishing or proving some fact at trial — they are not testimonial. Whether or not they qualify as business or official records, the analysts’ statements here — prepared specifically for use at petitioner’s trial — were testimony against petitioner.”

The test is binary: Was this document created for the administration of the entity’s general affairs? Or was it created to establish or prove a fact in litigation? Business records fall into the first category. Forensic lab reports — like those in Melendez-Diaz — fall into the second. The Supreme Court held the second category is testimonial and requires confrontation.

Here is the fact the Fifth Circuit admitted in Noria while trying to argue around it:

“I-213s are created only for aliens suspected of being removable.”— United States v. Noria, citing Bauge v. INS, 7 F.3d 1540 n.2 (10th Cir. 1993)

Let that sink in. The I-213 is not created when a lawfully admitted alien enters on a visa. It is not created when a green card holder presents at the border. It is created specifically and only when a government officer has determined an individual is suspected of being removable — and who will therefore be the subject of removal proceedings in which the I-213 will serve as the primary evidentiary instrument.

Applying the Melendez-Diaz test:

• Was the I-213 created for the administration of the agency’s general affairs? No. It is not a document prepared as part of routine management of DHS operations. It is prepared specifically because this individual is suspected of being removable.
• Was the I-213 created to establish or prove a fact in legal proceedings? Yes. Emphatically yes. The ILRC’s own practice guide describes it as providing “the basis and key facts to support DHS’s position that a person should be removed.” It is the predicate document for the Notice to Appear. It is the document that initiates the litigation it is then used to support.

Under Melendez-Diaz: Testimonial.

Federal Rule of Evidence 803(8) creates a public records hearsay exception but expressly excludes ”in criminal cases, matters observed by police officers and other law enforcement personnel.” This exclusion exists because:

“Police reports are considered less reliable than records prepared by other public officials because of the adversarial nature of the confrontation between the police and the defendant in criminal cases and the likelihood of the report’s use in litigation.”— United States v. Pena-Gutierrez, 222 F.3d 1080, 1086-87 (9th Cir. 2000)

The I-213 is a police report. It is prepared by a law enforcement officer during an adversarial encounter with a suspected violator, specifically to establish facts for use in legal proceedings. The FRE excludes exactly this type of document from the public records exception — and its drafting history says so explicitly.

Melendez-Diaz stated the principle directly: “Documents kept in the regular course of business may ordinarily be admitted at trial despite their hearsay status. But that is not the case if the regularly conducted business activity is the production of evidence for use at trial.“

The regularly conducted business activity of an ICE officer encountering a suspected removable alien is the production of evidence for use in immigration proceedings. The I-213 is that evidence. The business activity and the evidentiary production are one and the same.

The Fifth and Eleventh Circuits tried to rescue the I-213 by arguing it records “routine biographical information” collected from any entrant. But both courts acknowledged the factual premise is false: I-213s are created only for aliens suspected of being removable.

Melendez-Diaz also anticipated and explicitly rejected the argument that the defendant can simply subpoena the analyst, making confrontation unnecessary:

“Respondent asserts that we should find no Confrontation Clause violation because petitioner had the ability to subpoena the analysts. But that power… is no substitute for the right of confrontation. Unlike the Confrontation Clause, those provisions are of no use to the defendant when the witness is unavailable or simply refuses to appear.“

In immigration court, the alien must petition the IJ for a subpoena, establish the testimony is “essential,” and then hope the government agent appears. The burden is entirely reversed from what Melendez-Diaz demands: the obligation should be on the government to produce its witnesses, not on the alien to compel them.

Everything discussed so far applies to any alien in removal proceedings. But two specific scenarios dramatically escalate both the stakes and the strength of the constitutional arguments.

The Supreme Court recognized in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763 (1950) that the alien’s constitutional protections exist on an “ascending scale” that increases with “identity with our society.” A lawful permanent resident (LPR) who has lived in the United States for years or decades, paid taxes, raised American children, and built an established life is not constitutionally equivalent to a recent undocumented entrant.

Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21 (1982) confirmed that LPRs “may claim the protections of the Due Process Clause” in immigration proceedings and that the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test must be applied with explicit attention to what the LPR stands to lose. When an LPR is removed, she loses everything she has built over a lawful life in the United States. That private interest is enormous.

Applied to the evidentiary asymmetry: an LPR facing removal based substantially on a disputed I-213 — who has no right to cross-examine its preparer, no discovery to verify its accuracy, and must authenticate foreign rebuttal documents through channels that may be impossible — has a significantly stronger due process claim. The private interest is greater. The risk of erroneous deprivation is the same. The government’s efficiency interest cannot justify procedures that effectively prevent an established legal resident from meaningfully contesting the document that may seal her fate.

INA § 236(c) requires mandatory detention — without bond — for any alien deportable for an aggravated felony or other enumerated offense. This is where the constitutional arguments reach their greatest force.

Physical incarceration based on a contested hearsay document, without any meaningful adversarial testing of the document’s reliability, is the precise combination that Crawford identified as constitutionally intolerable in criminal proceedings — and that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004) identified as inadequate even in national security contexts.

Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510 (2003) upheld mandatory detention under § 236(c) against a due process challenge — but Justice Kennedy’s critical concurrence contained an explicit warning that has never been adequately tested:

“Due process requires individualized procedures to ensure there is at least some merit to the INS’s charge and, therefore, sufficient justification to detain a lawful permanent resident alien pending a more formal hearing… a lawful permanent resident alien could be entitled to an individualized determination as to his risk of flight and dangerousness if the continued detention became unreasonable or unjustified.”— Justice Kennedy, concurring in Demore v. Kim

If the predicate for § 236(c) detention is an aggravated felony conviction established primarily by a disputed I-213 — which the detained alien cannot meaningfully challenge because she has no discovery, no automatic cross-examination right, and is behind bars — Justice Kennedy’s framework demands more. The government has physically incarcerated a person based substantially on its own document, tested only by the alien’s ability to produce rebuttal evidence while confined without access to government files.

Any constitutional challenge must confront the plenary power doctrine — the Supreme Court’s long-standing principle that Congress has near-unlimited authority over immigration regulation. Congressional immigration legislation receives presumptive constitutionality far stronger than ordinary rational basis review. Facial challenges to the REAL ID Act’s evidentiary provisions face extremely long odds.

Despite plenary power, the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee applies to all persons in the United States — including undocumented aliens. Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67 (1976). Courts have reversed immigration adjudications on due process grounds. The standard — a proceeding so fundamentally unfair that the alien was prevented from reasonably presenting her case, causing actual prejudice — has been satisfied in real cases.

Every constitutional and evidentiary argument must be raised specifically and preserved on the record at the immigration court level. A bare “objection” with no stated grounds preserves nothing. A relevance objection does not preserve an authentication challenge. The argument must be named, grounds stated, and a ruling obtained — or the issue is waived before the BIA and circuit courts.

One of the most troubling features of this legal landscape is that similarly situated aliens receive dramatically different procedural protections depending solely on where their case is heard.

No Notice Required (2nd and 7th Circuits; BIA):

• Matter of L-A-C-, 26 I&N Dec. 516 (BIA 2015)
• Wei Sun v. Sessions, 883 F.3d 23 (2d Cir. 2018)
• Rapheal v. Mukasey, 533 F.3d 521 (7th Cir. 2008)

Advance Notice Required (3rd, 6th, and 9th Circuits):

• Ren v. Holder, 648 F.3d 1079 (9th Cir. 2011)
• Saravia v. U.S. Att’y Gen., 905 F.3d 729 (3d Cir. 2018)
• Bhattarai v. Lynch, 835 F.3d 1037 (6th Cir. 2016)

An applicant who presents credible testimony but fails to bring corroborating documents the IJ deems necessary will be denied without warning in the Second or Seventh Circuits. The same applicant in the Third, Sixth, or Ninth Circuits gets notice and an opportunity to respond. Two certiorari petitions on this split have been denied.

Standards Equivalent (9th Circuit, majority):

• Mondac-Vega v. Lynch, 808 F.3d 413 (9th Cir. 2015)

Standards Distinct — latter more demanding (1st Circuit):

• Rosa v. Bondi, 144 F.4th 37 (1st Cir. 2025)

More Protective:

• 9th Circuit (Baliza v. INS) — denial of cross-examination may render document inadmissible when accuracy is disputed
• 8th Circuit (Rodriguez-Quiroz v. Lynch) — remanded when right was denied after specific challenge
• 7th Circuit (Karroumeh v. Lynch) — due process violation when government didn’t serve its own subpoena

Less Protective:

• 7th Circuit (Antia-Perea v. Holder) — no automatic right; preparer presumed accurate
• 10th Circuit (Vladimirov v. Lynch) — no violation if absence “legitimate and not contrived”

Due Process Concern:

• 3rd Circuit (Ezeagwuna v. Ashcroft) — reliance on “double and triple hearsay” may violate due process
• 6th Circuit (Alexandrov v. Gonzales) — unreliable when source unidentified

Generally Permissible:

• 10th Circuit (Vladimirov v. Lynch) — “triple hearsay” I-213 upheld

These splits produce materially different outcomes for identically situated aliens based solely on geography — a state of affairs in tension with the notion of due process as a uniform constitutional floor.

The evidentiary framework in immigration court is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. A system was built in which the government’s primary evidence enters proceedings with a presumption of reliability, the alien’s evidence enters with no presumption at all, the burdens of proof and corroboration are stacked against the alien at every turn, and the statute that most dramatically deepened this asymmetry — the REAL ID Act — was designed to do precisely that.

The question is not whether this framework is one-sided. It clearly is. The question is whether the Constitution tolerates it.

For most aliens in ordinary civil removal proceedings, the answer under current doctrine is probably yes — the plenary power doctrine provides broad insulation, and the Fifth Amendment’s fundamental fairness floor is not typically reached by the ordinary operation of the evidentiary system.

But the analysis changes as the stakes escalate. For an LPR with decades of established legal residence, the private interest in Mathews balancing reaches its peak. For an alien detained under mandatory § 236(c) based on a disputed I-213, physical liberty is at stake, Justice Kennedy’s Demore concurrence demands individualized contestability, and the Crawford/Melendez-Diaz framework demonstrates that the government has created a litigation-purpose document while demanding it receive deference normally accorded only to routine administrative records.

And in criminal immigration prosecutions, the argument becomes direct law rather than constitutional analogy: the I-213 is not a business record kept in the ordinary course of affairs. It is created only when an alien is suspected of being removable. It is the predicate for the NTA. Its “regularly conducted business activity” is the production of evidence for use in legal proceedings. Under Melendez-Diaz‘s own test, it is testimonial — and testimonial evidence requires confrontation.

The scales of immigration justice are not balanced. They were not designed to be. The question that remains open — the one the courts must eventually answer — is whether the imbalance has crossed from the constitutionally tolerable asymmetry that the plenary power doctrine permits into the constitutionally intolerable fundamental unfairness that the Fifth Amendment forbids.

That question is not hypothetical. For the lawful permanent resident detained without bond for months while contesting a disputed I-213, for the asylum seeker denied relief because she could not produce documentation from the government that persecuted her, and for the criminal defendant convicted on a hearsay government document whose preparer never appeared in court — it is the question on which everything depends.

The BIA’s Mercado-Martinez decision, issued March 26, 2026, makes the asymmetry more explicit than it has ever been. The courts now face the choice of whether to confront its constitutional implications — or leave millions of people to navigate a system that was built to work against them.

This post is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Immigration law is complex and fact-specific. Anyone facing removal proceedings, mandatory detention, or any immigration matter should consult a qualified immigration attorney.

Based on publicly available court decisions, BIA opinions, statutory text, and legal scholarship through March 2026. Includes analysis of Matter of Mercado-Martinez, 29 I&N Dec. 529 (BIA March 26, 2026).