Lopez
Lopez v. Gonzales
Opinion
Lead Opinion
MEMORANDUM *
Petitioners Marcos Flores Lopez, Flora Nelia Flores, and Erick Alexander Flores Meija (“Petitioners”) are aliens present in the United States without having been lawfully admitted. Marcos’s and Flora’s son, Marcos Jr., is an American citizen. Petitioners applied for cancellation of removal and argued that their removal would cause Marcos Jr. an exceptional and extremely unusual hardship. See 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(l)(D). The immigration judge (“IJ”) denied their application, and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) affirmed his decision. This petition followed.
Petitioners based their hardship claim on the educational disruption Marcos Jr., a 13 year-old at the time of the hearing, would suffer if forced to move to Mexico. They tried to solicit testimony from Marcos Jr.’s teacher, a bilingual instructor with extensive experience teaching Mexican emigré children, to compare the Spanish fluency of her U.S.-educated students with that of recent Mexican immigrants. The IJ excluded this testimony, clearly relevant to the hardship Marcos Jr. would face in a Mexican school, because the teacher was “not an expert on 5th graders in Mexico.”