A Notice to Appear is Form I-862, the charging document that begins a removal case. INA 239(a) sets what it must contain: the nature of the proceedings, the legal authority, the acts alleged to violate the law, the charges, the right to counsel at no expense to the government, the obligation to give an address, and the time and place of the hearing with the consequences of missing it.
USCIS, ICE and CBP all have authority to issue one. What changed in 2025 is how readily USCIS uses it.
The memo
On February 28, 2025 USCIS issued Policy Memorandum PM-602-0187, "Issuance of Notices to Appear (NTAs) in Cases Involving Inadmissible and Deportable Aliens." Its framing sentence is short: USCIS "will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement, which includes referring cases to ICE and issuance of NTAs."
It replaces the November 7, 2011 memorandum, PM-602-0050, which had confined USCIS issuance largely to national security cases, fraud, criminal cases, and the situations where a regulation requires an NTA. Under that memo most other denials went to ICE for a decision or went nowhere. A 2018 memorandum had briefly expanded issuance before being rescinded on January 20, 2021.
What now triggers one
The memo works through categories. Some were always there: terminations of conditional residence on Form I-751 and I-829, terminations of refugee status, asylum referrals under 8 CFR 208.14(c), positive credible fear determinations, and NACARA 203 denials are all required by statute or regulation.
Others are new in effect. USCIS will issue an NTA where a person has been arrested, charged with, or convicted of a criminal offense and the benefit request is denied or withdrawn. It will issue one on substantiated fraud or material misrepresentation, including where the case was denied for an unrelated reason such as abandonment, where the petitioner withdrew, or where an approval is revoked. It will issue one after TPS is denied or withdrawn and no other status remains.
Section VI is the part that reaches the most people, and it is a single sentence: USCIS will issue an NTA where, on an unfavorable decision, the person is not lawfully present in the United States.
Denial of a Form I-90 for abandonment of permanent residence is named. So is the expiration or termination of parole. Employment-based petitions are treated narrowly, reaching only a beneficiary who signed the Form I-129 herself, which in practice means owner-beneficiaries in E, H-1B and O-1 cases. Prosecutorial discretion survives in form, exercisable case by case with a supervisor, but the memo says it "should only be exercised in very limited and compelling instances," and every exercise must be logged with a written analysis.
Issuance is not a court case
A denial notice puts nobody in proceedings. Neither, on its own, does the NTA. Jurisdiction vests only when DHS files the charging document with the immigration court under 8 CFR 1003.14(a). The interval between service and filing is not fixed by regulation and can run long.
Once filed, the court sets a master calendar hearing, where the judge reads the allegations in non-technical language, takes pleadings, identifies any applications for relief, and sets deadlines. A hearing generally cannot be scheduled earlier than 10 days after service, to allow time to find counsel.
The blank hearing date
For years DHS issued notices with the time and place listed as "to be determined." In Pereira v. Sessions, 585 U.S. 198 (2018), the government conceded that almost all of them did. The Supreme Court held that such a document is not a notice to appear under the statute and does not trigger the stop-time rule for cancellation of removal. In Niz-Chavez v. Garland, 593 U.S. 155 (2021), the Court held the defect cannot be cured by mailing the missing details later; the statute contemplates a single document.
A defective notice does not end a case. It can defeat the stop-time rule, which matters to anyone accruing continuous physical presence, and it supports a motion attacking the charging document.
What matters most is the address
The NTA is served on the person. The hearing notice comes from the court. If the address is wrong, the notice goes to the wrong place, and INA 240(b)(5) permits an in absentia removal order on proper written notice alone. Under INA 240(b)(7) a person ordered removed in absentia after oral warning is barred for 10 years from cancellation, voluntary departure, adjustment, change of status and registry.
Two separate filings keep the address current, and doing one is not doing the other. Form AR-11 goes to USCIS within 10 days of moving. Form EOIR-33/IC goes to the immigration court within five working days, and can be filed through the Respondent Access portal.
EOIR ended fiscal 2025 with 3,722,776 pending cases and completed more than 722,000 in eleven months, the highest total in its history. Receipts have fallen since 2024 while completions have not. A charging document issued now lands on a docket that is being cleared faster than it is being filled, which is a different kind of pressure than a backlog. This site covers the courts themselves in Immigration Court in 2026.