Traveling Abroad with a Pending Case: What You Must Know Before You Go

A mother is unwell in San Salvador. A niece is getting married in Guadalajara. Or there is nothing urgent about it at all, only that the whole family can finally be in one place this year, for the first time in seven years. In these situations, our clients want to know: if I leave, will I be able to safely come back?

That question has never had a single answer, and this year it is even more difficult to answer it than last year. In August 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) changed a rule that many people had relied on for more than a decade in a direction that matters enormously for anyone thinking about leaving the country while an application is still pending.

None of this automatically means you cannot travel. It means the answer depends on facts that belong to you specifically, and that a conversation with an immigration attorney should come before you buy the ticket.

Start with what you hold, and what is waiting

When someone calls us about holiday travel, our first question is not where you are going. It is what status you currently hold and what application is pending. Those two answers change everything that follows. Consider four different immigration statuses:

• A lawful permanent resident with a green card in hand
• Someone with a pending adjustment of status application who has been granted advance parole
• Someone with DACA or Temporary Protected Status considering advance parole
• A U.S. citizen’s spouse, parent, or child who is waiting on consular processing abroad

Four people in each of those four statuses can ask the identical question and get completely different answers. And the details that decide the answer are often the ones people assume are beside the point: a lapse in status back in 2014, a trip taken years ago before anyone was advising you, how old you were when you first arrived.

Advance parole travel with a pending case: what changed in August 2026

On August 13, 2026, the Board of Immigration Appeals decided Matter of Delcarmen-Lara, holding that leaving the United States on advance parole now counts as a “departure” under immigration law. That decision overturned a 2012 ruling, Matter of Arrabally and Yerrabelly, which had held the opposite for fourteen years.

One word is doing an enormous amount of work there. Under a law passed in 1996, a person who has accumulated more than 180 days of unlawful presence and then departs the United States becomes inadmissible for three years. A person with one year or more of unlawful presence who departs becomes inadmissible for ten. Inadmissible means you cannot re-enter the country or receive a green card without a waiver. These are what people know as the three- and ten-year bars.

The Arrabally decision reasoned that advance parole should not be turned against the people it was designed to help, that treating it as a departure would convert a humanitarian benefit into a means of barring relief. Under that reasoning, a person could travel and be paroled back in, which also satisfied the requirement of having been “inspected and admitted or paroled” in order to adjust status from inside the United States, without the trip itself triggering the bars.

The recent 2026 case Delcarmen-Lara removes that distinction. The same trip that used to open a path can now close one.

Whether this reaches you

The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) puts the threshold plainly: this decision affects you if you are considering travel on advance parole on or after August 13, 2026 and you have spent more than 180 days in the United States without lawful presence, now or at any point in the past. Advance parole is most often used by people with DACA, with TPS, or with a pending green card or asylum application.

Unlawful presence, though, is a narrower thing than most people assume. Several periods do not count toward it at all:

• Time you spent in the United States before you turned 18
• Time you held DACA, TPS, or Family Unity protection
• Time a pending asylum application was on file, or a pending family petition for an asylee or refugee
• Time a pending TPS or adjustment of status application was on file
• For some survivors of domestic violence and trafficking, time where the abuse was connected to the unlawful presence

This is why the calendar of your years here matters so much, and why we ask for it in detail. Two people who arrived in the same month can carry entirely different exposure.

One further practical note that is good to know in case you missed it: since late 2025, reentry on parole carries a $1,000 fee.

If you already traveled on advance parole

People ask this the moment they hear the news, usually with real alarm, and the decision is not perfectly clear on the point. NILC reads it as applying only to travel on or after August 13, 2026, and takes the position that the government should not apply it to earlier trips. How the government will actually interpret those trips is still being watched.

If you or someone you love is outside the United States on advance parole right now, that is a conversation to have today rather than on the way to the airport.

A waiver is not a plan you can rely on

There is a waiver of the unlawful presence bars, and people reach for it quickly when they hear this news. It is worth understanding what it asks. A waiver requires showing that refusing your admission would cause extreme hardship to a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse or parent. Hardship to you does not count. Hardship to your children does not count on its own. It is decided by the Department of Homeland Security, it is not available to everyone, and it is never a certainty.

And a person who goes that route generally still has to leave the country and complete residency through a consular process abroad, with the possibility of being unable to return if the waiver is refused. That deserves much more than a hurried conversation in December.

If you hold a green card

Much of the above will not apply to you, and that is worth saying plainly, because permanent residents often read news like this and assume the worst about their own situation.

The questions we work through with residents before a trip are different ones. How long you intend to be gone, and what you can show about where your life is centered. Whether anything you have pending (a naturalization application in particular) is affected by the timing or the length of an absence. What to expect when you present yourself for inspection on the way back in.

For someone a decade into her life here, six years with a green card, two children born in California, a mother who is ill abroad and a naturalization application she is finally ready to file, the trip is likely fine. But we would still rather look at the dates and unique circumstances of her overall case with her first than reassure her in general terms.

Before you book: five things that make this a short conversation

• Come to us with dates, not tickets. Advice given before a purchase is advice you can still act on.
• Bring the full calendar of your time here. Every entry, every departure, every gap, including the ones you think are too old to matter.
• Tell us what else is pending, and for whom. Your travel can touch an application filed by or for someone else in your household.
• Plan for a delay abroad. Consular schedules shift. Decide in advance what happens at work, at school, and at home if your return moves by three weeks.
• Carry copies. Your documents, your attorney’s contact information, and a family member here who knows where both of those things are.

The point of asking first

People sometimes apologize for asking us about a trip, as though a wedding or a funeral or a grandmother’s birthday were too small a reason to take up a lawyer’s afternoon. It is exactly the right reason. These are the moments the whole process is meant to protect.

A short conversation before you book your trip ends ideally with you going home for the holidays. But sometimes it ends with a different plan, made calmly and months ahead rather than last minute at an airport counter. Either way, you will know where you stand before you make plans and promises.