Background
Sanaullah Khan Mohammed entered the United States on a visitor visa in 2016 and overstayed. He applied for asylum in 2019, well beyond the one-year deadline. An immigration judge denied his application as untimely and ordered his removal. The Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed his appeal.
The court’s reasoning
The court relies on its precedent in Khan v. Filip, which holds that factual determinations regarding the one-year deadline and discretionary decisions on extraordinary circumstances are not subject to judicial review. Although the Supreme Court has issued recent decisions creating a circuit split on this issue, the petitioner did not address the jurisdictional question in his briefs. Therefore, the court adheres to existing precedent and declines to review the timeliness determination.
Absent adversarial presentation of this issue, we rely on our own precedent and hold that we lack jurisdiction to review the timeliness of Mohammed’s request for asylum.
What it means going forward
Petitioners in the Seventh Circuit cannot challenge the timeliness of asylum applications in federal court unless they frame the issue as a pure question of law or constitutional claim, and even then, only if they properly present the argument.
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