If you or someone you know has used — or was planning to use — advance parole to travel abroad while a green card application is pending, a new decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) is worth understanding right away.
On August 13, 2026, the Board issued Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, overturning more than a decade of settled guidance and reversing its 2012 decision in Matter of Arrabally and Yerrabelly. The change affects how a temporary trip outside the U.S. on advance parole can impact a person’s ability to adjust status here at home.
For years, immigrants with pending adjustment of status applications (green card applications filed from inside the U.S.) could apply for “advance parole” — a travel document that let them leave the country temporarily and be paroled back in, without abandoning their pending application.
Under Arrabally and Yerrabelly, the BIA held that this kind of trip did not count as a “departure” for purposes of a specific and serious inadmissibility ground: section 212(a)(9)(B)(i)(II) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That provision makes someone inadmissible if they accrued a year or more of unlawful presence in the U.S. and then departed, only to seek readmission within the following 10 years. Because advance parole trips weren’t treated as “departures,” people who had unlawful presence in their history could travel on advance parole and return without triggering this 10-year bar.
The Board has now reversed course. It held that a departure on advance parole is a “departure” within the meaning of that statute, just like any other trip abroad. In doing so, it relied heavily on the plain language of the INA — the statute doesn’t define “departure” with any carve-out for advance parole, and the Board found no clear evidence that Congress intended one.
The Board also pointed out that Congress has written specific advance-parole exceptions into other parts of the immigration code when it wanted to — for example, in provisions dealing with continuous physical presence for certain green card categories and legalization programs. Because Congress knew how to write such an exception and didn’t do so in this particular provision, the Board concluded the omission was intentional.
This is the detail that matters most for anyone who has already traveled on advance parole: no, not retroactively. The Board expressly limited its new rule to prospective application, weighing factors like how significant a shift this is from decades of settled practice and how much people reasonably relied on the old rule.
In plain terms, that means:
The Board didn’t even decide whether the individual respondent in this case, who traveled on advance parole in January 2024, was affected by the new rule — because the rule doesn’t reach backward to her either.
This ruling is especially significant for people who:
Before this decision, someone in this situation could often travel on advance parole without worrying about triggering the harsh 3-year/10-year unlawful presence bars. Now, at least going forward, that safety net doesn’t exist in the way it used to — a trip abroad on advance parole could itself create a new inadmissibility problem, on top of whatever it was meant to solve.
The Board did flag that its own jurisdiction sits within the Eleventh Circuit, which had previously applied the old Arrabally and Yerrabelly standard in a 2013 case. The Board concluded that the case doesn’t prevent it from revisiting the definition of “departure,” but this kind of tension between agency interpretation and existing circuit case law is often where future litigation happens. This issue may get tested further in federal court.
Matter of Delcarmen-Lara closes a door that had been open since 2012: temporary international travel on advance parole is no longer treated as risk-free for people with a history of unlawful presence. The change applies prospectively, so past trips aren’t affected, but anyone weighing a future trip on advance parole — particularly with prior unlawful presence in their history — should talk to an immigration attorney before booking that flight.