Turkhan v. Lynch

• Decision Date: 09 September 2016
• Docket Number: 15–1378,Nos. 14–3456 &amp,s. 14–3456 &amp
• Citation: 836 F.3d 843
• Parties: Shmael Isaac Turkhan, Petitioner, v. Loretta E. Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

836 F.3d 843

Shmael Isaac Turkhan, Petitioner,
v.
Loretta E. Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, Respondent.

Nos. 14–3456 &
15–1378

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 5, 2016
Decided September 9, 2016

Royal F. Berg, Attorney, LAW OFFICE OF ROYAL F. BERG, Chicago, IL, for Petitioner.

Catherine Bye, Sunah Lee, OIL, Attorneys, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Civil Division, Immigration Litigation, Washington, DC, for Respondent.

Before Wood, Chief Judge, and Bauer and Williams, Circuit Judges.

Wood, Chief Judge.

Bureaucracy's “specific nature,” Max Weber said, “develops the more perfectly the more [it] is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation.” Max Weber, Bureaucracy , in FROM MAX WEBER: ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY 196, 215–16 (H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills eds. & trans., 1991). By this standard, the government's treatment of this case has achieved perfection.

In 1979, Shmael Isaac Turkhan, an Assyrian Christian and citizen of Iraq, immigrated to the United States as a lawful permanent resident. He was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 1990 but has had no trouble with the law since then. Twenty-six years later, the Department of Homeland Security, Javert-like, is still trying to deport him to Iraq. The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the immigration judge's decision to defer his removal under the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), implemented at 8 C.F.R. §§ 208.16, 208.17. It refused, however, to reopen the immigration judge's order for Turkhan's removal. This means that he can be removed whenever the conditions for CAT deferral abate.

Turkhan argues that the Board and the immigration judge erred in declining to reopen the decision requiring his removal for two reasons: first, he says, it was wrong for the Board to read its own order as a limited remand for consideration of relief under the CAT rather than as a reopening of the entire proceeding under section 212(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), 8 U.S.C. § 1182(c) (1994) ; and second, the Board should have found that Turkhan's constitutional right to procedural due process was violated at his original section 212(c) hearing. While we are mystified by the government's decision to contest this matter, the decision is not ours to make, and we must therefore deny Turkhan's petition for review.

I

Turkhan was born in 1960, in Kirkuk, Iraq. On January 29, 1979, at age 19, he

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arrived in New York. His entry was lawful, and he eventually became a legal permanent resident. He was—and is—a practicing Assyrian Christian and has not left the United States since he entered in 1979. He is married to a U.S. citizen, is the father of two U.S. citizen children, ages 10 and 19, and is the stepfather of his wife's other two children, whom he helped to raise.

For his first 11 years in the United States, Turkhan lived uneventfully in Chicago, Illinois (where he still resides). But on April 17, 1990, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846. He was sentenced to 47 months' imprisonment. By all accounts, he was a model prisoner: he obtained his G.E.D., completed a 166–hour course for nursing assistants, was awarded a certificate for finishing another course for nursing assistants and mental-health companions, and graduated from the Adult Basic Education Course. He also worked as a mental-health companion while in federal custody. A letter of commendation written by a supervisor noted that “his language abilities ha[d] proved invaluable to the correctional and medical staff in our mission to provide safe, humane and professional psychiatric services to our patients”; that he was “a positive role model for the patients and for the other inmates in our institution”; and that he “balance[d] his role as a patient advocate and compassionate Mental Health worker with [sic ] the confines of his status as an inmate with great finesse and maturity.”

At the conclusion of his prison term, Turkhan was placed in deportation proceedings. On October 3, 1994, an immigration judge found him deportable based on his conviction of an aggravated felony. Turkhan turned for relief to section 212(c) of the INA, which at the time allowed the Attorney General to waive deportation for certain otherwise excludable legal permanent residents. See 8 U.S.C. § 1182(c) (1994) ; INS v. St. Cyr , 533 U.S. 289, 294, 121 S.Ct. 2271, 150 L.Ed.2d 347 (2001) (noting that the Board has interpreted section 212(c) to allow for waiver of deportation). (Section 212(c) was later repealed by § 304(b) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, (IIRIRA) Pub. L. No. 104–208, Div. C, 110 Stat. 3009, 3009–597, and replaced with a narrower waiver for which Turkhan is not eligible. See 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(a)(3) (waiver available only to permanent residents not convicted of aggravated felony)).

At the hearing, Turkhan attempted to have his mother and sister testify on his behalf. They do not speak English, however, and although arrangements were supposed to have been made for an interpreter, one was not provided. According to the testimony of Gerardo Gutierrez, Turkhan's attorney, Gutierrez was supposed to renew Turkhan's request for an interpreter 30 days before the hearing but he forgot to do so. As a result, Turkhan was unable to present the testimony of his mother and sister. The immigration judge reviewed only their “somewhat boiler plate” affidavits, to which he gave almost no weight because they did not testify. The immigration judge found Turkhan statutorily eligible for relief under section 212(c), but denied it as a matter of discretion. The Board affirmed.

From there, Turkhan's case meandered along a long and winding road. In May 1997, the Board denied Turkhan's motions to reconsider and reopen his case, finding that, as an aggravated felon, he was statutorily ineligible for section 212(c) relief under changes to the INA made by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), Pub. L. No. 104–208, Div. C, 110 Stat. 2009, and IIRIRA. Later that year, we ruled that AEDPA and IIRIRA deprived us of jurisdiction to review the Board's decisions in Turkhan's

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case. See Turkhan v. INS , 123 F.3d 487 (7th Cir. 1997), abrogated by LaGuerre v. Reno , 164 F.3d 1035 (7th Cir. 1998). In 1999, we held that we had jurisdiction to consider Turkhan's petition for a writ of habeas corpus, but affirmed the district court's denial of the writ and held that Turkhan was ineligible for a section 212(c) waiver. See Turkhan v. Perryman , 188 F.3d 814 (7th Cir. 1999).

In January 2001, the Department of Justice issued new regulations providing for the reopening of certain section 212 cases. See 8 C.F.R. §§ 3.44, 212.3 (2001). Turkhan filed another motion to reopen. While that motion was pending, the Supreme Court handed down INS v. St. Cyr , 533 U.S. 289, 121 S.Ct. 2271, 150 L.Ed.2d 347 (2001), which held that persons rendered removable by guilty pleas entered prior to AEDPA's enactment may still obtain relief under section 212(c). The Board nevertheless denied Turkhan's motion and his motion to reconsider.

The Department issued additional regulations in 2004. See 8 C.F.R. §...