In a victory for Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s Department of Justice, a federal appeals court has shut the door on a Bosnian couple’s 25-year struggle to remain in the United States. The First Circuit’s ruling, issued March 19, 2026, officially denies Redzo and Edina Hodzic’s final attempt to overturn their deportation orders.
The Hodzics, who arrived in 2000 fleeing military tension in the Sandzak region of Serbia, had become a fixture in the New England legal system.
Despite the couple’s claims of religious persecution as Bosnian Muslims and their use of forged Slovenian passports to enter the country, the court stood by the government’s long-standing position that their initial “willful misrepresentation” barred them from permanent residency.
This latest chapter pitted the family against the legal team representing Attorney General Bondi, who was automatically substituted as the respondent in the case.
The central dispute focused on whether the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) was forced to reopen the case following a 2021 Supreme Court decision, Niz-Chavez v. Garland, which changed the rules for how the government must notify noncitizens of their removal hearings.
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The Hodzics argued that a technical flaw in their original paperwork should have wiped the slate clean, allowing them to apply for “cancellation of removal” based on their two decades of residency.
They also presented harrowing evidence regarding their daughter Emma’s specialized skull surgeries and Edina’s own end-stage liver disease, arguing that deportation would be a “death sentence” due to the lack of comparable medical care in North Macedonia or Serbia.
However, the three-judge panel led by Circuit Judge Gelpí ruled that the court’s hands were largely tied. The judges found that the power to reopen a case “sua sponte”—or on the court’s own motion—is an “extraordinary remedy” that rests entirely within the discretion of the BIA, not the federal appeals court.
The court also dismissed the couple’s constitutional arguments, including a claim that the deportation violated their right to “family integrity.” The ruling noted that the Hodzics failed to develop those arguments deeply enough in their briefs to warrant a reversal of the government’s decision.
With this ruling, the Bondi-led Department of Justice has successfully defended the removal orders. Redzo Hodzic is now slated for removal to North Macedonia or Serbia, while Edina Hodzic is ordered back to the former Republic of Yugoslavia, ending a legal saga that spanned a quarter of a century.
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