The Board Just Reversed a Rule DACA Families Relied on for 14 Years — It Can Now Trigger a Reentry Ban

For fourteen years, a travel document called advance parole worked like a safety net. It let someone with a pending immigration case step outside the U.S. and come back without that trip counting against them. On August 13, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals cut a hole in that net, ruling that a trip taken on advance parole can now be treated as a legal “departure” — language that, for certain immigrants, can trigger years-long bans on returning to the country at all.

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Advance parole exists for people with a case pending — a green card application, a DACA grant, Temporary Protected Status — who need to leave the country without abandoning that case. Since 2012, the Board’s own precedent in Matter of Arrabally and Yerrabelly had drawn a clean line: traveling on advance parole simply didn’t count as a “departure” for purposes of the reentry penalties written into immigration law. That line is gone. USCIS confirmed that, effective immediately, a trip taken under a valid advance parole document can now trigger inadmissibility under the same statute that governs everyone else’s departures.

The new decision, Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, centers on a Salvadoran woman ordered removed from the U.S. in 2006, a ruling the Board upheld two years later. She was granted DACA in 2013 anyway, later married a U.S. citizen who filed an immigrant petition on her behalf, and returned to the country on advance parole in January 2024 after a trip abroad. When she tried to use that approved petition to adjust her status, the Board seized the moment to revisit — and reverse — the 2012 rule that had shielded travelers like her. Notably, the Board didn’t even decide whether her own trip counted as a “departure” under the new standard; it threw out her case on unrelated procedural grounds and used the opinion mainly to settle the broader legal question for future travelers.

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The consequences come down almost entirely to time spent in the country without legal status before someone landed protected status. Under the statute, racking up more than 180 days of unlawful presence and then departing can trigger a three-year reentry ban; a year or more can trigger a ten-year ban, a threshold Murthy Law Firm’s breakdown lays out clearly. Those numbers aren’t new — what’s new is that an advance parole trip can now flip the switch on them.

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