Whether the court had jurisdiction to review the denial of petitioner’s "hardship waiver"; 8 USC §§ 1182(a)(9)(B)(v) & (i)(1); § 1252(a)(2)(B); Application for adjustment of status; § 1255(a); Whether petitioner was “admissible” into the country; Inadmissibility for “fraud” (§ 1182(a)(6)(C)(i)); Inadmissibility for seeking readmission within 10 years of a prior removal after having unlawfully lived here for over a year (§ 1182(a)(9)(B)(i)(II)); The “safe harbor” provision (§ 1252(a)(2)(D)); Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA or the Board); Immigration judge (IJ)

The court held that it lacked jurisdiction to review the BIA’s decision affirming the IJ’s ruling that petitioner-Rahman was not entitled to a waiver of inadmissibility based on “extreme hardship” to her spouse where “Congress committed the hardship inquiry to agency discretion in the waiver context.” Rahman, who was born in Bangladesh, is married to an American citizen and they had five children here. She stayed in the country after her visa expired. When she visited Bangladesh in 1998, she was unable to reenter the U.S. for a time and lived in Bangladesh between 1998 and 2000. After one of her attempts to reenter, she was placed in removal proceedings and an IJ ordered her removed in her absence. Around the same time, her husband successfully sought a green card for her. She became a permanent resident and then applied to become a citizen. Her husband was convicted of financial crimes and Rahman pled “guilty to using a social security number that she had procured by providing false information to the Commissioner of Social Security.” Removal proceedings were initiated against her in 2008. In 2019, an IJ ordered her “removed to Bangladesh and denied her requests for relief.” The IJ denied her hardship waivers, and the BIA dismissed her appeal. The parties agreed that Rahman was inadmissible because she had received her permanent-residency status by fraud and because she “had sought readmission into the country within ten years of her prior removal after having unlawfully lived in this country for over a year[.]” The IJ had the Attorney General’s authority to waive these two grounds if an immigrant’s qualifying spouse would suffer “extreme hardship.” While Rahman asked the court to review the denial of these two waivers, the court found that it largely lacked “jurisdiction to review her arguments.” She mostly challenged the BIA’s “ultimate hardship decision on the ground that the Board placed too much emphasis on some evidence at the expense of other evidence. Yet the text of the waiver clauses leaves this evidentiary balancing for the Board.” And while she contended that the IJ “committed a ‘purely legal’ error” in finding her not credible, “the Supreme Court has held that ‘credibility’ determinations qualify as ‘unreviewable’ findings of fact.” The court denied her petition for review.