The Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent decision on August 18, 2026 that sharply narrows one of the last procedural options available to people with final removal orders. In Matter of M-M-L-J-, 29 I&N Dec. 843 (BIA 2026), Interim Decision #4235, the Board held that a noncitizen may file only one motion to reopen in total — not one with the Immigration Court and another with the Board — and that equitable tolling does not apply to that numerical limit.
The reasoning turns on the text of INA section 240(c)(7)(A), which says a noncitizen may file one motion to reopen. Practitioners had read that as supplying one motion at each level of the system. The Board rejected that reading, treating the statute as setting a single ceiling across both forums, subject to the narrow statutory exception Congress wrote for battered spouses, children, and parents.
The case reached that holding on unusually unsympathetic facts. The respondent, a Jordanian national who entered in August 2010 on an F-1 student visa and did not attend the required academic program, received a final removal order on March 11, 2020. He then filed three untimely motions to reopen, all denied, before filing a fourth based on an I-130 petition from his third wife and a renewed claim that prior counsel had been ineffective. The Board construed the filing as another attempt to equitably toll the statutory limits and denied it.
The second half of the holding is the part that will be felt most widely. The Board concluded that ineffective assistance of counsel cannot equitably toll the number bar. Courts and the Board have long allowed equitable tolling of the filing deadline where a lawyer’s failure caused a missed cutoff, using the framework from Matter of Lozada, 19 I&N Dec. 637 (BIA 1988), and Matter of Assaad, 23 I&N Dec. 553 (BIA 2003). M-M-L-J- holds that the same excuse does not buy a second motion once the one allotted motion has been used.
For most employment-based applicants — NIW, EB-1A, H-1B and adjustment filers who are not in removal proceedings — this decision does not touch their cases directly. Its practical significance is for anyone who is in proceedings, or who has a final order in their history: the single motion to reopen is now a genuinely one-time resource, and spending it on a weak or premature filing may foreclose a stronger claim that emerges later. It also raises the cost of a badly handled case, because the remedy for bad lawyering just got narrower.
Anyone weighing a motion to reopen should treat it as a single, non-renewable filing and get the evidence and legal theory right before it goes in.
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