The Ninth Circuit has determined that when the government becomes aware that notice of an upcoming removal hearing has been ineffective (i.e., notice has been returned), it must take additional steps, when practicable, to provide notice to the non-citizen. In this case, the Court found that personal service of the Order to Show Cause - which did not contain the date and time of the first immigration court hearing - was not sufficient on its own. Furthermore, even if a non-citizen has failed to update his or her address with the immigration court, they have not forfeited their constitutional right to notice.
The Court also suggested certain practicable steps that the government could take when a notice of hearing is returned as undeliverable. “One alternative is to consider whether the address in the A-file matched the address to which the Government sent the notice of hearing by certified mail. The record indicates that, when the approval of Rivera-Valdes’s employment authorization application was sent to the Cleveland address that included ’Ave.,’ he showed up to retrieve his authorization papers. It was only after subsequent mailings were sent without the word ‘Ave.’ in the Cleveland address that the OSC and notice of hearing were returned as ‘not deliverable as addressed’ and ‘unclaimed.’ The district court should consider if any discrepancy in the addresses was a basis for the unsuccessful mailings, and if so, whether the Government could have taken additional steps to correct it.
The dissent concludes that remand is unnecessary because Rivera-Valdes ‘confirmed’ or ‘corroborated’ that the address listed on the OSC—which omitted the word ‘Ave.’—was his current address. But the dissent misreads what the OSC actually states. The OSC did not prompt Rivera-Valdes to confirm the accuracy of the OSC. Rather, the OSC’s signature line prompted Rivera-Valdes’s ‘acknowledgment/receipt of this form.’ This stands in contrast, for example, to the signature line in Rivera-Valdes’s application for employment authorization, which required that the signer ‘certify under penalty of perjury under the laws of the United States of America, that the foregoing is true and correct.”’ In that document, Rivera-Valdes listed his N. Cleveland address with the word ‘Ave.’”
“Another alternative for the district court to consider may be whether sending the notice of hearing by first-class mail was a feasible option. In Yi Tu, we observed that first-class mail may be a reasonably calculated alternative because it can ‘be examined at the end of the day, [whereas certified mail] can only be retrieved from the post office for a specified period of time.’”
The full text of U.S. v. Rivera-Valdes can be found here:
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2025/09/18/21-30177.pdf