Oum v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 79-1060

• Citation: 613 F.2d 51
• Decision Date: 02 January 1980
• Docket Number: No. 79-1060,79-1060
• Parties: Sung Ja OUM and Young Deuk Oum, Petitioners, v. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

Page 51

613 F.2d 51

Sung Ja OUM and Young Deuk Oum, Petitioners, v. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, Respondent.

No. 79-1060.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued Dec. 4, 1979.

Decided Jan. 2, 1980.

Samuel Jay Levine and Richard A. Boswell, Washington, D. C., for petitioners.

Margaret J. Perry, Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C. (James P. Morris, Dept. of Justice, Washington, D. C., on brief), for respondent.

Before BRYAN, Senior Judge, and PHILLIPS and MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judges.

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge.

Sung Ja Oum and her husband, Yong Deuk Oum, natives of Korea, entered the United States on a student visa on December 3, 1971, and a business visa on April 20, 1972, respectively. Following a full hearing in deportation proceedings, in which they admitted they were deportable, the immigration judge on December 3, 1973, denied their request for a discretionary adjustment of status to permanent residents, and ordered them deported. They were allowed, in lieu of deportation by the government, to depart voluntarily, on the condition that they do so by January 3, 1974. They did not comply with the condition.

Since that date there has ensued a plethora of steps which have served to keep the Oums in this country: an administrative appeal, an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, motions to reopen and to reconsider, petitions to classify Mrs. Oum as an immediate relative of an American citizen and as a permanent resident, a petition to classify Mr. Oum as an accompanying spouse, a motion for stay of deportation, and an application for suspension of deportation. While these many maneuvers have had the practical effect of frustrating deportation, not one has yielded a result favorable to the Oums.

With procedural devices apparently exhausted, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia having affirmed on February 24, 1976, the immigration judge's decision to order deportation and to deny change to permanent resident status, a final order of deportation entered by the Naturalization Board of Appeals on January 16, 1978, outstanding, warrants of deportation issued May 23, 1978, in effect, and the Oums scheduled to report for deportation on January 30, 1979, one would have thought that the time had indeed come for the Oums to accept the inevitable. Not so, however, for the Oums, through their counsel on January 30, 1979, petitioned this court for review of what was characterized by them as "a final order of deportation of January 26, 1979 by the Immigration and Naturalization Service." ¹

The lodging in this court of that "petition for review of deportation order" automatically operated as a stay of deportation under 8 U.S.C. § 1105a(a)(3). No such stay effect attached, however, to the Oums' January 23, 1979, motion submitted to the district director for stay of deportation (denied on February 5, 1979) or to their January 25, 1979, filing with the Naturalization Board of Appeals of a motion to reopen, based on a contemporaneous application for suspension of deportation (denied on April 11, 1979).

The petition to this court was manifestly without merit. The action supposedly appealed from constituted no order at all, and certainly no order which we have jurisdiction to review. Cheng Fan Kwok v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 392 U.S. 206, 216, 88 S.Ct. 1970, 20 L.Ed.2d 1037 (1968). The most recent action of the Immigration and Naturalization Service which conceivably could qualify as a "deportation order," the purported subject of the petition for review, was the January 16, 1978, denial of a motion to reopen, in which deportation was ordered. If it is to that action of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to which the petition for review was actually addressed, the petition was plainly untimely. The maximum period of six months, provided for in 8 U.S.C. 1105a(a)(1), had, in any view of things, expired on July 17, 1978 (July 16, 1978, having been a Sunday). ² Hence, the petition for review was without justification, filed to effect a statutory stay manifestly allowed only on the assumption that the petition for review to a court of appeals would raise justiciable issues.

The filing of the petition in these circumstances amounted to an abuse of process, and a dereliction of the duty owed by counsel to this court. It was, in the kindest view one may take of it, frivolous. We should, had the government, as the other party to the case, requested it, have been disposed to deny the petition as frivolous, to reprimand the petitioners' counsel for filing it, and to assess double costs taxed personally against the attorney. 28 U.S.C. § 1912; F.R.A.P. 38; Acevedo v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 538 F.2d 918 (2d Cir. 1976). However, the government, at oral argument, specifically disavowed any desire for imposition of sanctions.

While denial of the petition for review purely on grounds that it was not timely and utterly frivolous is, therefore, indicated, there are troubling circumstances which make us hesitant to follow so restricted a course. We can well imagine that should we simply deny the petition without addressing any possible merits of the case we should be faced with further acts in the charade in the forms of further petitions to review the February 5, 1979, denial of a motion for stay of deportation and the April 11, 1979, denial of the motion to reopen and accompanying application for suspension of deportation, or even from a denial of yet another meritless petition to reopen (filed to obviate the obvious time bar existing with respect to the February 5, 1979, and April 11, 1979, orders). We are reluctant to set the stage for such patently unmeritorious and untimely petitions for review which would be taken simply to obtain the benefit of a further statutory stay pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1105a(a) (3), and thereby put off the day of reckoning, in hope against farfetched hope that the Oums will obtain something they have never been entitled to, and which their conduct in this matter does nothing to enhance their eligibility for. ³

Therefore, without intending to indicate that in a case in which the question might arise without such considerations present . . . we would determine that jurisdiction exists to review orders not extant when the petition for review was filed, we proceed to consider the merits of the objections of the petitioners to the February 5, 1979, and April 11, 1979, orders. ⁴ As for the February 5, 1979, denial by the district director of the motion for a stay of deportation, we have no occasion to investigate the substantiality of the district director's reasons. His action was simply not reviewable by us. Cheng Fan Kwok v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 392 U.S. 206, 88 S.Ct. 1970, 20 L.Ed.2d 1037 (1968). When we turn to the action of the Board of Appeals on April 11, 1979, denying the latest motion of the Oums to reopen and the associated application for suspension of deportation, we find that the materials presented by the Oums were inadequate to supply a basis for the relief they sought. In the first place, they submitted no affidavits or other material demonstrating the existence of significant new evidence. See 8 C.F.R. §§ 3.8, 103.5, 242.22. There was, consequently, no basis for the reopening of the proceedings. Acevedo v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 538 F.2d 918, 920 (2d Cir. 1976); See also Gena v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 424 F.2d 227, 232 (5th Cir. 1970).

Moreover, among the items which the Oums were required by 8 U.S.C. § 1255(a) to establish Prima facie if any basis for relief was to be deemed to exist even for the Board...