The Eleventh Circuit has determined that a challenge to a Notice to Appear missing the time and date of the first removal hearing is a claim-processing challenge, not a jurisdictional challenge. As such, the claim needed to be raised before the agency.
The court rejected the agency’s asylum analysis. The Immigration Judge had determined that one central reason for the Gulf Cartel’s persecution of the petitioner was to collect on a debt owed by his father-in-law, but then stated that the family relationship was merely “incidental” to the persecution. The court disagreed, stating that “it is impossible to disentangle his relationship to his father-in-law from the Gulf Cartel’s pecuniary motives: they are two sides of the same coin. The record is replete with evidence that the Gulf Cartel sought out and continuously extorted Mr. Perez-Sanchez because of his father-in-law’s past history with the cartel.” “Absent the familial relationship between Mr. Perez-Sanchez and Mr. Martinez-Carasco, the cartel would never have hunted him and his partner down to begin with or continued persecuting them for months.”
The full text of Perez-Sanchez v. Attorney General can be found here:
http://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/201812578.pdf