A federal appeals court on Monday shut the door on a Guatemalan woman’s decades-long fight to remain in the United States, handing a procedural victory to Attorney General Pamela Bondi.
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit centers on a clerical mix-up dating back to the Clinton administration and reaffirms strict limits on how often immigrants can petition to reopen their deportation cases.
The case involves Dominga Sanik Herrera, who entered the U.S. unlawfully in 1994. According to court documents, Herrera applied for asylum in 1997 with the help of a Tennessee man she believed was a “knowledgeable immigration attorney.” He wasn’t.
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Herrera used the man’s address on her paperwork. When the government mailed a “Notice to Appear” for a deportation hearing to that address, Herrera never received it. When she failed to show up to court in June 1997, a judge ordered her removed in absentia.
The legal battle that followed highlights the unforgiving nature of immigration procedure.
Herrera first tried to fix the error in 2010, filing a motion to reopen the case based on the lack of notice. However, when an immigration judge asked for more evidence regarding the address mix-up, Herrera failed to respond, and the motion was denied. She did not appeal that decision.
Nearly ten years later, in 2020, Herrera tried again. This time, the immigration courts blocked her based on the “number bar”—a rule that generally limits a person to a single motion to reopen proceedings.
In the opinion filed Monday, Circuit Judge Hermandorfer wrote that the court could not help Herrera because she failed to navigate the procedural hurdles correctly. Specifically, the panel found that Herrera did not properly challenge the “number bar” or argue for “equitable tolling”—a legal concept that can pause deadlines in extraordinary circumstances—when she appeared before the Board of Immigration Appeals.
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“Because Herrera failed to exhaust her number-bar challenge, we deny her petition,” Hermandorfer wrote for the panel.
The court also declined to intervene on Herrera’s request for the government to reopen the case sua sponte—essentially asking the board to use its own authority to grant a do-over. The Sixth Circuit ruled that despite recent Supreme Court decisions changing how courts review agency actions, federal judges still lack the jurisdiction to force the immigration board to exercise its purely discretionary power.
The decision leaves the 1997 removal order in place, concluding a legal saga that spanned nearly 30 years.
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