Galaz

MEMORANDUM **

Jose Angel Galaz and his wife Minerva Durazo-Coronado, natives and citizens of Mexico, petition for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’ dismissal of their appeal of an immigration judge’s denial of their applications for cancellation of removal. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 8 U.S.C. § 1252 . We grant the petition for review.

The Board held that Jose failed to meet the ten-year continuous physical presence requirement of 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1)(A) due to a departure from the United States in 1997. Although we have held an administrative voluntary departure constitutes a break in continuous physical presence, see Vasquez-Lopez v. Ashcroft, 343 F.3d 961, 972 (9th Cir.2003) (per curiam), we recently held that the fact that an alien is turned around at the border, i.e., voluntarily returned, even where the alien is fingerprinted and information about his attempted entry is entered into the government’s computer database, does not in and of itself interrupt accrual of physical presence, see Tapia v. Gonzales, 430 F.3d 997, 1002-1004 (9th Cir.2005).

On the record before us, we cannot determine whether Jose’s return to Mexico by immigration officials was the…