MATHEW CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS and YOHANCE CHRISTIAN MILLINGTON v. MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Submitted February 8, 2024*
Decided February 12, 2024
Before
FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge
MICHAEL Y. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge
AMY J. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge
No. 23-2585
MATHEW CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS and
YOHANCE CHRISTIAN MILLINGTON,
Petitioners,
v.
MERRICK B. GARLAND, Attorney General,
Respondent.
Petition for Review of an Or-
der of the Board of Immigra-
tion Appeals.
Nos. A210-085-136 & -137
O R D E R
Petitioners, citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, concede that they lack authority to
remain in the United States. They had been granted conditional permanent-residence
status, which required them to depart at the end of 2013 unless Williams’s U.S.-citizen
spouse certified an appropriate application on Form I-751. The spouse did so but aban-
doned the application process, before completion, in light of the couple’s divorce.
* The court granted the parties’ joint motion to waive oral argument.

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No. 23-2585 Page 2
Petitioners then asked for the application to be treated as a request for waiver of all con-
ditions. That request was denied in 2015. Petitioners’ permanent-residence status
ended, and they were placed in removal proceedings.
Petitioners asked the Immigration Judge to waive the conditions on their (ex-
pired) permanent-residence status. The IJ set a deadline of July 27, 2018, for providing a
copy of the I-751 application form. The IJ told petitioners how to obtain a copy if they
had not retained one. That deadline came and went without a filing or a request for
more time. Late in 2021, days before the removal hearing, petitioners sought a continu-
ance to give them more time to file the form. The IJ denied this request, held the hear-
ing, and ordered petitioners removed.
The Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed their appeal, observing that by do-
ing nothing for more than three years after a clearly stated deadline (and more than six
years after the removal proceeding began) petitioners had abandoned their request for a
waiver. Petitioners concede that they knew of the need for a copy of the form yet had
not obtained and filed it. The assertion that petitioners’ original counsel retired at the
end of 2020 and did not provide his successor with all necessary information hardly ex-
plains a failure to meet a 2018 deadline—and it cannot justify inaction throughout 2021.
The BIA’s decision therefore is not an abuse of discretion.
Petitioners’ principal argument in this court is that the agency lacked jurisdiction
to enter a removal order because the Notice to Appear did not include a date for a hear-
ing. That date was provided in a later notice. We held in Ortiz-Santiago v. Barr, 924 F.3d
956 (7th Cir. 2019), that the need to put all information in a single document is a case-
processing rule that does not affect the agency’s jurisdiction. See also, e.g., Chen v. Barr,
960 F.3d 448 (7th Cir. 2020). The benefit of this rule must be timely asserted, we held.
No other court of appeals has disagreed, and we do not see any good reason to revisit
that subject. Petitioners let more than six years pass before contending that the Notice to
Appear lacked a date, and they do not offer any explanation for that omission or tell us
how the use of two documents rather than one caused prejudice. Accordingly, the peti-
tion for review is
DENIED.

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