The Ninth Circuit has remanded a case to the agency to reevaluate a petitioner’s evidence of her delay in meeting a filing deadline. “Rodriguez was in the process of gathering evidence when she fled her abusive partner and was no longer able to access the documents that she had already collected. That evidence became unavailable once she became homeless, destitute, and unable to contact her attorney. Moreover, we see no reason to penalize Rodriguez for failing to meet a December 2017 deadline that the IJ vacated and extended to September 2018, particularly because neither party has asked us to do so. The BIA should therefore decide on remand whether any evidence that Rodriguez might have been able to access years earlier but that became unavailable more than ten months before the September 2018 filing deadline was still ‘reasonably available’ to her as the deadline approached.”
The full text of Alcarez-Rodriguez v. Garland can be found here: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2023/12/28/21-411.pdf