BIA precedent narrows DACA-based termination of removal in Matter of Santiago-Santiago

The Board of Immigration Appeals, the appellate tribunal within the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review, issued Matter of Santiago-Santiago, 29 I&N Dec. 589 (BIA 2026), on April 24, 2026 as an Interim Decision (#4186). The case arose from a removal proceeding against Catalina "Xóchitl" Santiago, an active recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, after she was detained by Customs and Border Protection officers while boarding a domestic flight at the El Paso airport in August 2025; the immigration judge terminated proceedings on the basis of her DACA status, and the Department of Homeland Security appealed. A three-judge appellate panel sustained DHS's appeal, vacated the termination, and remanded the case to a different immigration judge for further proceedings.

The recordable action is the precedent rule the BIA announced in the published decision: an immigration judge may not terminate removal proceedings based solely on the respondent's active DACA status, but must instead weigh DHS's stated reasons for opposing termination. As a precedent decision, it binds immigration judges nationwide. Because the DACA program itself was not amended, revoked, or formally changed in any way, the practical effect is to narrow the substantive standard available to immigration judges without any statutory or regulatory action — what had operated in practice as a class-wide protection for the roughly 500,000 active DACA recipients is now contingent on a case-by-case discretionary weighing in favor of DHS.

The ruling sits within a broader pattern of BIA precedent activity during the same period: NPR reported the panel issued roughly seventy published precedent decisions in the preceding year — by its count a record number of precedent-setting cases — and a March 2026 NPR analysis found the BIA sided with government lawyers in 97 percent of publicly posted cases over the prior year, roughly thirty points above the sixteen-year average. The abuse here is captured by the archive's narrowing-civil-rights- protections tag rather than by a due-process tag: the procedural protections in removal proceedings remain in place, and the change is to the substantive standard the immigration judge may rely on in deciding whether to keep the case alive. The decision also operates alongside a set of parallel agency actions — including HHS marketplace eligibility revocation for DACA recipients, Education Department investigations into universities offering DACA-recipient aid, and DHS public encouragement of "self-deportation" — that together erode benefits and protections adjacent to DACA without formally ending the program.