In a significant ruling for asylum seekers, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a long-standing practice that allowed immigration judges to automatically reject traffic delays as a valid reason for missing a court hearing.
The en banc decision, filed on February 5, 2026, centers on Claudia Elena Montejo-Gonzalez and her two children. The family was ordered removed from the U.S. “in absentia” (in their absence) after they arrived two hours late to their 2019 hearing in Seattle.
A Four-Hour Nightmare on the Highway
The family’s journey from Bremerton to Seattle—usually a 90-minute trip—turned into a nearly four-hour ordeal. Montejo-Gonzalez provided evidence, including news alerts and photos, showing that two major car accidents had created a ten-mile traffic backup.
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Despite the family showing up at the courthouse immediately after getting through the gridlock and pleading with clerks to be heard, an Immigration Judge (IJ) denied their motion to reopen the case. The IJ, and later the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), relied on a rigid interpretation of past cases to suggest that traffic is a “typical daily occurrence” and can never be an “exceptional circumstance” under federal law.
Ending “Per Se” Rejections
The appeals court disagreed with that “one-size-fits-all” approach. Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Roopali H. Desai clarified that the law requires a case-specific inquiry into whether a situation was truly beyond a person’s control.
“We have never adopted a rule that traffic (or any other circumstance) is per se unexceptional,” the court stated. The ruling emphasizes that judges must look at the totality of the circumstances, including:
- Whether the delay was truly extraordinary and unforeseen.
- Whether the person acted with diligence (e.g., leaving early or attempting to contact the court).
- Whether there was any motive to intentionally skip the hearing.
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A Split Court and a Path Forward
The decision was not unanimous. Dissenting judges argued that the family failed to leave a sufficient “cushion” for contingencies and that traffic, however severe, is not as compelling as the statutory examples of “battery or serious illness.”
However, the majority held that the government’s own admission during oral arguments—that the traffic that day was “extraordinary and unusual”—proved that a blanket rejection was an abuse of discretion.
The case now heads back to the Board of Immigration Appeals. This time, the board must actually weigh the family’s evidence rather than dismissing it as a simple “miscalculation” of commute time.
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