Introduction

On April 9, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued its decision in Matter of M-K-, 29 I&N Dec. 556 (BIA 2026), affirming the removability of Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia University graduate student and lead public spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (“CUAD”).1 The Board sustained two independent grounds of deportability: first, the Secretary of State’s determination, pursuant to Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, that Khalil’s continued presence in the United States would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest;2 and second, willful material misrepresentation on his Form I-485 application for adjustment of status under Section 237(a)(1)(A) of the Act, arising from the concealment of his affiliation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (“UNRWA”).3 On April 16, 2026, the Board designated the decision as binding precedent.4

The reaction from the organized civil liberties bar has been one of unified condemnation. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Van Der Hout LLP have collectively framed the proceedings as a politically motivated assault upon constitutionally protected speech.5 Most recently, Khalil’s legal team has filed a motion to reopen, accompanied by declarations from former immigration judges and former Board members, alleging that the Administration “secretly engineered” the outcome of the case.6

This article argues, contrary to that chorus, that Matter of M-K- was correctly decided; that the position of the Trump Administration in the case is legally sound and morally just; and that Mahmoud Khalil should be removed from the United States. The argument proceeds in five parts. Part II establishes that anti-Zionism, as deployed by CUAD and by Khalil personally, is not a distinct ideology from antisemitism but a contemporary manifestation of it, and as such is reprehensible. Part III sets forth the documented record of Khalil’s conduct, including his public defense of the October 7, 2023 massacre, his leadership of an organization that publicly venerated the perpetrators of that massacre, and his concealment of his UNRWA affiliation. Part IV examines the statutory framework and defends the Board’s precedential rulings on the merits. Part V demonstrates that the First Amendment provides no shelter for an alien whose conduct independently satisfies multiple statutory grounds of removability. Part VI concludes.

Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

A. The Origins and Meaning of Zionism

Zionism, as articulated by Theodor Herzl in Der Judenstaat (1896),7 by Leon Pinsker in Auto-Emancipation (1882),8 and by the First Zionist Congress at Basel in August 1897, is the political movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. It arose in direct response to two millennia of European persecution, manifested most acutely in the late nineteenth century by the Dreyfus Affair in France, the Kishinev and Odessa pogroms in the Russian Pale of Settlement, and the institutionalized exclusions of Jews from civic life across Central and Eastern Europe. It culminated, but did not conclude, in the Shoah. To support Zionism is to affirm the proposition that the Jewish people, alone among nations, possesses the right to a state of its own in the land where its nationhood was forged three thousand years ago. To oppose Zionism, qua Zionism, is to deny that proposition with respect to no nation other than the Jewish one.

B. The IHRA Working Definition

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (“IHRA”) adopted its Working Definition of Antisemitism on May 26, 2016.9 The Definition has been adopted, in whole or in substantial part, by the United States Department of State, the European Parliament, and the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and dozens of other states and intergovernmental bodies.10 The accompanying illustrative examples expressly enumerate the following as manifestations of antisemitism:

  • “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
  • “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
  • “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
  • “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”11
  • CUAD’s published materials, and Khalil’s documented personal statements, satisfy each of these criteria, often simultaneously.

C. The Sharansky 3D Test

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik (one of the Soviet Jews systematically denied permission to emigrate to Israel), prisoner of conscience, and Israeli minister, has proposed an analytically rigorous test for distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israeli policy from antisemitism: the test of demonization, double standards, and delegitimization.12 Criticism that compares Israel to the Nazis is demonization. Criticism that holds Israel, alone among the world’s nations, to standards not applied to any other state, while ignoring the conduct of states such as China, Russia, Syria, and Iran, is a double standard. Criticism that denies Israel’s right to exist is delegitimization. The form of anti-Zionism propagated by CUAD and embraced by Khalil fails each prong.

D. The Soviet Genealogy of the “Anti-Zionist Not Antisemitic” Formula

The rhetorical maneuver of disclaiming antisemitism while attacking Zionism is not an original product of twenty-first century campus activism. It was perfected in the Soviet Union, beginning with Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of 1948 to 1953 and formalized in the Soviet “anti-Zionist” propaganda apparatus of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1975 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” sponsored by the Soviet bloc and its Arab clients, was the apotheosis of that effort.13 The Resolution was repealed in 1991 by an overwhelming margin, after President George H.W. Bush told the General Assembly that “to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history.”14 Those who today insist that anti-Zionism is conceptually distinct from antisemitism are, knowingly or not, restating a Soviet propaganda script that the international community has long since repudiated.

E. The Lived Experience of Diaspora Jewry

The annual audits of the Anti-Defamation League, the Uniform Crime Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the parallel reporting of the Community Security Trust in the United Kingdom demonstrate, with statistical consistency, that surges in anti-Zionist activism on Western campuses and city streets correlate precisely with surges in physical violence against identifiable Jews who have no connection to Israeli policy. Synagogues are firebombed. Hasidic men are assaulted on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish university students are excluded from campus spaces and from extracurricular organizations. The proposition that the perpetrators of these acts are engaged in legitimate criticism of a foreign government, rather than in antisemitism, is a fiction that no honest observer can sustain.

The Khalil Record

A. CUAD Leadership

Khalil was not a peripheral participant in the post-October 7 Columbia University protests. He served as the primary spokesperson and lead negotiator for CUAD throughout the 2024 encampments and the March 2025 occupation of Barnard College’s Milstein Library.15 He held those roles by his own choice, presented himself publicly in those roles, and gave interviews to mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, The Forward, and others, in his capacity as the public face of the movement.

B. CUAD’s Veneration of the October 7 Perpetrators

The organization Khalil led publicly praised the Hamas-led massacre of October 7, 2023, in which approximately 1,200 Israelis, including infants, children, and the elderly, were murdered and 251 hostages were seized. In a November 7, 2024 Substack post, CUAD characterized the massacre as “Sinwar’s crowning achievement,” and described October 7 itself as “a day that will go down in history.”16 It described the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the massacre, as a “brave man” whose memory would “live in the hearts of many.”17 It published comparable encomia to Ismail Haniyeh, the late chairman of the Hamas political bureau; to Ghassan Kanafani, the late spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and to Hassan Nasrallah, the late Secretary-General of Hezbollah.18 During the occupation of Milstein Library, CUAD members distributed a pamphlet produced by the Hamas Media Office under the title “Our Narrative,” which expressly justified the October 7 attack as the resumption of armed struggle against what the pamphlet termed “75 years of Zionist occupation.”19

C. Khalil’s Personal Statements

Khalil’s own public statements, given in his own voice and recorded by mainstream outlets, are not materially distinguishable from those of the organization he led. In an August 2025 interview with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Khalil stated of the October 7 massacre: “It felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle. We couldn’t avoid such a moment.”20 Hamas, he continued, committed the attack “to break the cycle, to break that Palestinians are not being heard. That was my interpretation of why Hamas did the October 7 attacks on Israel.”17 Asked by The Forward whether Hamas had targeted civilians, Khalil responded: “I wouldn’t rule out that Hamas targeted civilians, but I wouldn’t confirm it either.”21 Asked at the South by Southwest festival in March 2026 to condemn Hamas, Khalil responded that “it’s very racist to ask a Palestinian” to do so.17 In a June 2025 ABC News interview, he stated that the wave of antisemitic attacks visited upon American Jews was a “direct result of the U.S. support for Israel,” thereby ascribing collective responsibility for foreign-government conduct to American Jews and to Americans who support the Jewish state, a textbook IHRA-enumerated form of antisemitism.22

D. The UNRWA Concealment

Khalil served as an intern with UNRWA, the United Nations agency from which Secretary-General António Guterres terminated at least nine identified staffers in 2024 after credible evidence emerged that those staffers had personally participated in the October 7 attack.23 On his Form I-485 application for adjustment of status to that of lawful permanent resident, Khalil omitted the UNRWA affiliation entirely.24 The omission was not trivial. UNRWA’s compromised relationship with Hamas is the subject of ongoing congressional and executive branch scrutiny, including the conditional funding requirements of Section 301(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the categorical funding restrictions imposed by Section 301 of Division G of the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, and bears directly upon the discretionary judgments that United States Citizenship and Immigration Services makes in adjudicating applications for permanent residence.

The Statutory Framework

A. INA Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i): The Foreign Policy Ground

Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C)(i), provides that ”[a]n alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” The statute is neither a recent invention nor a partisan instrument. It was enacted as Section 602 of the Immigration Act of 1990,25 building upon the speech-protective architecture established by the Moynihan-Frank amendment in the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1990 and 1991,26 and was preserved without material amendment through the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.27 Since enactment, the provision has been administered by every Administration, Republican and Democratic, in the intervening thirty-six years.

By its plain terms, the statute vests the Secretary of State, not the immigration judge, with the determinative substantive judgment. Congress provided that the Secretary’s determination, communicated by letter, is the operative trigger of removability. The role of the immigration judge is confined to confirming the existence and facial validity of the determination, and the identity of the respondent, and is not to second-guess the foreign policy judgment of the Cabinet officer to whom that judgment was committed by statute. This allocation of authority is the considered policy choice of the elected branches, and it reflects the longstanding constitutional principle, recognized in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580 (1952), and reaffirmed throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, that the political branches possess plenary authority over the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of aliens, and that judicial inquiry into the foreign policy judgments of the political branches is sharply circumscribed.28

B. INA Section 237(a)(1)(A): The Material Misrepresentation Ground

Section 237(a)(1)(A) renders deportable ”[a]ny alien who at the time of entry or adjustment of status was within one or more of the classes of aliens inadmissible by the law existing at such time.”29 Inadmissibility under Section 212(a)(6)(C)(i) attaches to any alien who, “by fraud or willfully misrepresenting a material fact, seeks to procure … a visa, other documentation, or admission into the United States or other benefit provided under this Act.”30 A misrepresentation is material if it has a “natural tendency to influence” the decisions of the adjudicating officer. Kungys v. United States, 485 U.S. 759, 770 (1988).31

The Board’s misrepresentation holding in Matter of M-K- deserves candid engagement, because its strongest objection is doctrinal and structural. Kungys teaches that materiality is parasitic upon a specific decision the omission could have influenced. The test, the Court emphasized, is whether the misrepresentation had a natural tendency to “produce the conclusion that the applicant was qualified” for the benefit sought. Kungys, 485 U.S. at 772. The Board’s published precedents on materiality, with consistency, identify the substantive statutory ground to which the omission is material. In Matter of D-R-, the Board tied the alien’s omission of his wartime service to the persecutor bar, to refugee status eligibility, and to inadmissibility under the extrajudicial killing ground at INA § 212(a)(3)(E)(iii)(II).32 The same opinion drew upon Matter of Bosuego, in which the Board articulated the foundational principle that materiality attaches where the omission “tend[s] to shut off a line of inquiry which is relevant to the alien’s eligibility and which might well have resulted in a proper determination that he be excluded.”33 The pattern across the Board’s materiality jurisprudence is uniform: the Board identifies the substantive ground to which the omission is material, and it traces the natural tendency to influence back to that ground.

Matter of M-K- does not follow the pattern. The Board affirmed the Immigration Judge’s finding that Khalil willfully failed to disclose his UNRWA affiliation and treated the omission as material, but did not identify the substantive ground of inadmissibility to which the omission was material. A practitioner reading the opinion against the Kungys backdrop is entitled to ask: material to what? The most plausible candidate, on the face of the record, is the foreign policy ground at the inadmissibility stage under INA § 212(a)(3)(C), the analog of the deportation-stage provision that supplied the first ground of removability in this case. The reading has surface appeal. Had Khalil disclosed his UNRWA internship on his Form I-485, USCIS could have referred the file for State Department review, and a Section 212(a)(3)(C) determination at the adjustment stage was at least a theoretical possibility. But the reading sits uncomfortably with Kungys. To predicate adjustment-stage materiality on a hypothetical future foreign policy determination by the Secretary of State invites the bootstrapping that Kungys cautioned against: what is relevant, the Court said, is what would have ensued from official knowledge of the misrepresented fact, not what would have ensued from official knowledge of inconsistency.34 A materiality theory premised on a discretionary future executive determination is itself a form of bootstrapping, not a substantive ground of disqualification fixed at the moment of adjustment.

There is, however, a third reading, and it is the doctrinally responsible one. Adjustment of status under INA § 245(a) is discretionary in two respects: the applicant must be statutorily eligible, and the Attorney General, or by delegation United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, must affirmatively determine that the applicant warrants a favorable exercise of discretion.35 The Form I-485 inquiry into employment and organizational affiliations exists precisely because such information bears on that discretionary calculus. An applicant who has worked, even on a third-party-funded internship basis, for an agency whose own staff have been credibly implicated in a terrorist attack on a close United States ally, an agency that has been the subject of intense and continuing congressional, executive branch, and public scrutiny, has information directly relevant to the discretionary determination that USCIS performs at the adjustment stage. The natural tendency of disclosure would have been to influence the discretionary balance, and very possibly to result in denial as a matter of discretion, even where statutory eligibility was not in doubt. On that reading, Khalil’s omission was material to the discretionary decision committed to USCIS by Section 245(a), and the Board’s bottom line is correct. The Board would have done better to say so expressly. The doctrinal silence is a vulnerability that the Fifth Circuit petition will surely press.

The doctrinal question has practical consequences for practitioners and their clients. The post-M-K- environment counsels in favor of full and candid disclosure on Form I-485 of all employment, affiliations, and organizational ties, including those whose status is politically contested but not formally designated as inadmissibility-triggering. The downside risk of nondisclosure, in the present enforcement climate, materially exceeds the perceived downside risk of disclosure-based adverse discretionary inference. This is particularly so for clients with affiliations to organizations active in regions of intense United States foreign policy interest, including the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus, the People’s Republic of China, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and others. Counsel should treat the Form I-485 inquiries into employment and affiliations as exhaustive, document the basis for any close call in the client file, and where the analysis is genuinely uncertain, opt to disclose with a contemporaneous explanation rather than to omit and hope.

Within that framework, however, Khalil’s omission cannot be defended. He concealed an internship with an agency whose terrorism-related compromises were a matter of public record and ongoing United States policy debate at the time of his application. The natural tendency of disclosure to have influenced USCIS’s discretionary determination is not seriously contestable. The Board reached the right result. Future panels would do well to reach the same result with greater doctrinal precision.

The First Amendment Provides No Shelter

The argument, ubiquitously advanced by Khalil’s counsel and by sympathetic commentators, that removal here punishes speech protected by the First Amendment misapprehends both the constitutional doctrine and the statutory framework. The Supreme Court held in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 525 U.S. 471 (1999), that aliens have no constitutional right to selective non-enforcement of the immigration laws, and that the discretionary executive judgment to commence removal proceedings against a particular alien on the basis of his associations is not subject to ordinary First Amendment scrutiny.36 The Court in Harisiades, decided at the height of the Cold War, upheld the deportation of long-resident lawful permanent residents on the basis of their past Communist Party membership, notwithstanding their First Amendment objections.37

More fundamentally, the foreign policy ground does not “punish” speech; it removes an alien whose continued presence within the United States the Executive has determined to be inconsistent with the national interest. An alien may say what he wishes; he has no entitlement to remain in the United States while saying it. He may continue to say what he wishes from Damascus, from Algiers, or from any other place that will receive him. The material misrepresentation ground is entirely separate and pertains to affirmative fraud upon the United States government, which has never enjoyed any form of constitutional protection.

The further argument, raised in the recent motion to reopen, that the Administration “secretly engineered” the outcome of the case is unsupported by anything other than the inferences that Khalil’s counsel would draw from the speed of the proceedings and from the recusals of certain Board members. Speed is not impropriety. Recusal is not collusion. The motion is in substance a complaint that the law was applied to its terms.

Conclusion

Matter of M-K- should stand. The Fifth Circuit petition for review should be denied. The motion to reopen pending before the Board, however framed, should likewise be denied. Mahmoud Khalil should be removed from the United States.

The Trump Administration’s position in this case is correct as a matter of law and just as a matter of policy. A lawful permanent resident is not a citizen. Permanent residence is a privilege, conditioned by statute upon ongoing admissibility, upon continuing good moral character, and upon conformity with the substantive grounds of removal that Congress has enacted. An alien who serves as the public face of an organization that venerates the perpetrators of the deadliest single-day massacre of Jews since the Shoah; who personally rationalizes that massacre as one that “couldn’t [be] avoid[ed]”; who refuses to condemn Hamas and characterizes the very request to do so as racist; who attributes the antisemitic violence visited upon American Jews to American support for the Jewish state; and who concealed from the United States government, on his application for permanent residence, his affiliation with an agency whose own staff included identified participants in the October 7 attack, has demonstrated by his own conduct that he is unfit for continued lawful permanent residence in the United States.

The framing, advanced by Khalil and his supporters, that this conclusion is reached because he “spoke out against the genocide in Palestine” is a self-serving fiction. Hundreds of thousands of lawful permanent residents, citizens, and visitors have publicly opposed Israeli military operations in Gaza, attended protests, signed petitions, and written opinion pieces. The vast majority have not been placed in removal proceedings. The Secretary of State has invoked the foreign policy ground in only a small number of cases involving alien organizers whose conduct, like Khalil’s, has extended well beyond protected criticism of Israeli policy and into the active veneration of those who murder Jews. The variable that distinguishes Khalil and the handful of others in his position is not the holding of an opinion about Israeli policy. It is the public leadership of organizations that praise terrorists, the celebration of an antisemitic massacre, the refusal to condemn the murderers of Jewish civilians, and, in Khalil’s case, the concealment of material affiliations from the United States government in the pursuit of immigration benefits.

The United States has long extended an extraordinary measure of grace to those who come to our shores. That grace is not unconditional. It carries with it the expectation that those who would partake of American liberty will not turn that liberty into a weapon against the Jewish people, against the State of Israel, or against the foreign policy interests of the nation that received them. Mahmoud Khalil has not met that expectation. The Immigration and Nationality Act, properly applied, calls for his removal. So does justice.

  1. Matter of M-K-, 29 I&N Dec. 556 (BIA 2026).
  2. 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C)(i).
  3. 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(A); 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(i).
  4. See James Montana, Board of Immigration Appeals Swats Away Mahmoud Khalil’s Appeal, ARLNOW (Apr. 16, 2026).
  5. See, e.g., Press Release, ACLU, Trump Administration’s Board of Immigration Appeals Denies Mahmoud Khalil’s Bid to Throw Out Deportation Case (Apr. 9, 2026).
  6. Press Release, ACLU, After New Evidence of DOJ Misconduct, Mahmoud Khalil Calls On Board of Immigration Appeals to Terminate Case (May 15, 2026).
  7. THEODOR HERZL, DER JUDENSTAAT: VERSUCH EINER MODERNEN LÖSUNG DER JUDENFRAGE (Leipzig & Vienna, M. Breitenstein 1896).
  8. LEON PINSKER, AUTO-EMANCIPATION: AN APPEAL TO HIS PEOPLE BY A RUSSIAN JEW (Berlin, W. Issleib 1882).
  9. Int’l Holocaust Remembrance All., Working Definition of Antisemitism (May 26, 2016).
  10. U.S. Dep’t of State, Defining Antisemitism.
  11. Int’l Holocaust Remembrance All., supra note 9.
  12. Natan Sharansky, 3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization, 16 JEWISH POL. STUD. REV., nos. 3-4, at 3 (Fall 2004).
  13. G.A. Res. 3379 (XXX) (Nov. 10, 1975).
  14. G.A. Res. 46/86 (Dec. 16, 1991); President George H.W. Bush, Address Before the 46th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (Sept. 23, 1991), 27 WEEKLY COMP. PRES. DOC. 1325 (1991).
  15. Andrew Stiles, Columbia Activists, Including Mahmoud Khalil, Serve as Hamas’s “Propaganda Arm in New York City,” Lawsuit States, WASH. FREE BEACON (Mar. 31, 2025).
  16. Michael Starr, Mahmoud Khalil: Columbia U. “Reminiscent” of Assad Regime, “Manufactured” Antisemitism “Hysteria”, JERUSALEM POST (Apr. 6, 2025).
  17. Id.
  18. Mona Charen, Mahmoud Khalil Has Rights, Dammit, THE BULWARK (Mar. 13, 2025); What Are the Beliefs of Mahmoud Khalil’s Activist Group CUAD?, JERUSALEM POST (Mar. 13, 2025).
  19. Stiles, supra note 15.
  20. Adam Kredo, Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil: “We Couldn’t Avoid” Committing October 7 Massacre, WASH. FREE BEACON (Aug. 6, 2025).
  21. Adam Kredo, “I Have No Idea, To Be Honest”: Columbia Encampment Organizer Mahmoud Khalil Says It’s Unclear Whether Hamas Targeted Civilians on Oct 7, WASH. FREE BEACON (Apr. 7, 2026).
  22. Id.; Kredo, supra note 20.
  23. Kredo, supra note 20.
  24. Id.; see also Matter of M-K-, 29 I&N Dec. 556 (BIA 2026).
  25. Immigration Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-649, § 602(a), 104 Stat. 4978, 5077-81 (1990) (codified as amended at 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(4)(C).
  26. Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1990 and 1991, Pub. L. No. 101-246, § 901, 104 Stat. 15, 84 (1990) (commonly known as the Moynihan-Frank amendment).
  27. Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-208, div. C, 110 Stat. 3009-546.
  28. Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 588-89 (1952); see also Fiallo v. Bell, 430 U.S. 787, 792 (1977); Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753, 765-66 (1972).
  29. 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(A).
  30. 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(i).
  31. Kungys v. United States, 485 U.S. 759, 770 (1988).
  32. Matter of D-R-, 27 I&N Dec. 105, 110-115 (BIA 2017); see also Alexander J. Segal, Matter of D-R-, 27 I&N Dec. 105 (BIA 2017): Determining Whether Misrepresentation Is “Material” for Inadmissibility, MYATTORNEYUSA.COM.
  33. Matter of Bosuego, 17 I&N Dec. 125, 130 (BIA 1979, 1980), cited in Matter of D-R-, 27 I&N Dec. at 112.
  34. Kungys, 485 U.S. at 772.
  35. 8 U.S.C. § 1255(a); see Matter of Marques, 16 I&N Dec. 314 (BIA 1977); Matter of Arai, 13 I&N Dec. 494 (BIA 1970) (adjustment of status is a matter of administrative grace requiring a favorable exercise of discretion in addition to statutory eligibility).
  36. Reno v. Am.-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471, 488 (1999).
  37. Harisiades, 342 U.S. at 591-92.