Villegas-Olea v. Bondi

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
• Decided: June 13, 2025
• Docket: 21-784
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

NOT FOR PUBLICATION FILED UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS JUN 13 2025 MOLLY C. DWYER, CLERK U.S. COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

ARTEMIO VILLEGAS-OLEA, No. 21-784 Agency No. Petitioner, A213-079-174 v. MEMORANDUM* PAMELA BONDI, Attorney General,

Respondent.

On Petition for Review of an Order of the Board of Immigration Appeals

Submitted June 11, 2025** Pasadena, California

Before: BYBEE, IKUTA, and FORREST, Circuit Judges.

Petitioner Artemio Villegas-Olea is a Mexican citizen and national who first

entered the United States in 2005. Villegas-Olea seeks review of a Board of

Immigration Appeals (“BIA”) order dismissing his appeal of an immigration judge’s

(“IJ”) order removing him from the United States. We deny his petition.

* This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. ** The panel unanimously concludes this case is suitable for decision without oral argument. See Fed. R. App. P. 34(a)(2). “The BIA’s legal determinations are reviewed de novo and its factual findings

for substantial evidence. To the extent the BIA reviewed the IJ’s decision and

incorporated portions of it as its own, we treat the incorporated parts of the IJ’s

decision as the BIA’s.” Guan v. Barr, 925 F.3d 1022, 1031 (9th Cir. 2019) (citations

omitted). We review the BIA’s determination of hardship for cancellation of removal

under the substantial evidence standard. See Gonzalez-Juarez v. Bondi, __ F.4th __,

2025 WL 1440220 (9th Cir. May 20, 2025).

1. Villegas-Olea challenges the IJ’s decision to admit into evidence

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (“ICE”) Form I-213, which describes his

March 2017 arrest and identifies him as a noncitizen. Villegas-Olea argues that the

IJ should have suppressed the Form I-213 under the exclusionary rule as fruit of the

poisonous tree because the ICE officials who prepared the form violated his Fourth

Amendment rights by conducting an unconstitutional search and seizure. Villegas-

Olea argues that, because the I-213 was suppressible, “[t]he IJ’s removability

finding” is “reversible legal error.”

We decline to consider whether ICE’s alleged seizure of Villegas-Olea

violated the Fourth Amendment because the government produced independent

evidence of Villegas-Olea’s alienage. At Villegas-Olea’s removal hearing, DHS

submitted into evidence a San Diego Sheriff’s Inmate Report from January 2017 that

described Villegas-Olea as an “undocumented person.” Although Villegas-Olea

2 21-784 argues on appeal that this Inmate Report also should have been suppressed, he did

not object to admission of the Inmate Report at his removal hearing. Therefore,

Villegas-Olea failed to exhaust any objection to admission of the Inmate Report,

which was independent evidence of his alienage. See Honcharov v. Barr, 924 F.3d

1293, 1296–97 (9th Cir. 2019). There was thus substantial evidence for the IJ and

BIA to conclude that Villegas-Olea was removable regardless of whether the agency

erred in considering the Form I-213.

2. Villegas-Olea challenges the BIA’s determination that his U.S. citizen

relatives would not experience “exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship if he

were removed to Mexico. Substantial evidence supports the BIA’s conclusion. At

the time of his hearing, Villegas-Olea had been estranged from his “dependent” wife

for a large portion of their brief marriage, and his wife earned more money than he

did. And, despite Villegas-Olea’s reference to unidentified minor children, his

“dependent” stepson is an adult who earned an independent income. Substantial

evidence supports the BIA’s conclusion that Villegas-Olea’s relatives would not face

“exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship if he were removed, and it

consequently did not err in denying him cancellation of removal.

3. Villegas-Olea argues that the immigration court lacked subject matter

jurisdiction over his removal proceedings because the government initially served

him with a deficient Notice to Appear that failed to specify the time and date of his

3 21-784 hearing. But because Villegas-Olea failed to raise this argument before the BIA, this

claim is unexhausted, and we decline to consider it. See Bare v. Barr, 975 F.3d 952,

960 (9th Cir. 2020).

We DENY the petition for review.

4 21-784