After more than half a century in Chicago, a longtime resident has run out of legal runway. A Chicago father who has lived in the United States for more than 50 years lost his last court bid to remain in the country when a federal appeals court refused on Tuesday, April 14, to overturn an existing removal order. The ruling leaves him facing deportation from the only country he has known since infancy.
Appeals court backs immigration board and keeps order in place
In an opinion issued April 14, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied Bato Petrov’s petitions for review and affirmed the Board of Immigration Appeals, which leaves the agency’s removal order in place, according to Justia. The opinion describes Petrov as a stateless native of Germany who first entered the United States in 1974 and notes that he sought cancellation of removal on the ground that deporting him would cause “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to his U.S.-citizen relatives.
Family’s evidence and the push to reopen the case
Petrov’s 2021 motion to reopen came with a thick stack of documentation. It included records of his wife’s anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, details of a 2018 miscarriage, medical conditions affecting two of his children and his father, and articles describing discrimination and economic difficulties for Gypsies in Germany, as reported by Tampa Free Press. Filings and coverage explain that Petrov and his wife, Helen Owens, live in Chicago with three U.S.-citizen children, and that Petrov has been the household’s primary breadwinner for years.
Why the court said the evidence fell short
The Seventh Circuit concluded that much of the material Petrov later submitted either already existed before the initial hearing or did not show hardship “substantially different from, or beyond” the ordinary consequences of deportation required under 8 U.S.C. § 1229b(b)(1), the opinion explains. “We have deep sympathy for Ms. Owens,” the court wrote, but it said that the loss of a breadwinner by itself does not meet the statute’s demanding standard. The court’s full opinion is available on Justia.
Legal context and what comes next
The decision leaves federal authorities with the underlying removal order to enforce, a step the Tampa Free Press notes would begin the process of returning Petrov to the country designated by the Department of Homeland Security. The outcome also tracks recent Seventh Circuit rulings that apply a deferential standard when reviewing whether established facts satisfy the exceptionally high hardship threshold, as courts have discussed in coverage of similar cases like Santos Mendoza v. Bondi, per FindLaw. For now, the appeals court has denied relief and left the agency’s orders intact, while other administrative options, such as requests for stays or discretionary relief, remain the next avenues for Petrov’s legal team.
